The scientific benefits of hot water and sauna bathing include:
Elevating mood and diminishing feelings of depression and/or pessimism
Helps to reduce insomnia by instigating the production of melatonin
Relieves muscle pain and can help improve circulation
Reduces blood pressure
Detoxifying
The scientific benefits of cold-water bathing include:
Increases alertness as our oxygen intake and heart rate increases due to shock of cold
Increases mental resilience
Improves blood circulation, and ultimately a healthy body
Stimulates the immune system
Reduces muscle inflammation
Extreme and rapid temperature changes:
One of the oldest and simplest ways of de-stressing and improving mood, self-confidence and physical health is exposing your body to extreme and rapid temperature changes. Nowadays it is call ‘contrasting’, but it is a thousand-year-old tradition in many Nordic cultures.
Getting hot in a sauna or a hot bath followed by quick immersion into cold water, repeated several times, releases endorphins (the happiness hormones). This is why you feel so great from doing so. It is also a great ‘exercise’ for our skin, vessels and lymphatic system. In warm water they relax and become wider, and then the cold water causes contraction. This alternating between contraction and relaxation is effectively a ‘pump’ to help move the fluids efficiently throughout the body.
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