I admit it. I am team “sauna” now. I recently purchased a small one at the recommendation of my doctor to help with blood pressure management. Where have saunas been all of my life? Because I am also an atmospheric scientist, my periods of relaxation in the sauna are routinely interrupted by curiosity and thoughts of meteorological analogies. Here’s the science behind why saunas make us sweat.
Benefits Of Saunas
Saunas help relieve stress, comfort stiff joints or sore muscles, and provide some cardiovascular health benefits according to medical experts. There may also be benefits related to skin care, respiratory illness, sleep deprivation and even dementia. While in my little steam sauna recently, I kept thinking about why saunas cause us to sweat, and it’s honestly quite simple. They raise our body temperatures. I’ll deeper into the science behind that shortly so keep reading.
“Saunas have been a traditional part of many cultures for centuries, from Turkish baths and Native American sweat lodges to Russian banyas,” wrote Nicole Andonian, MD on the GoodRx website. “In Finland, where saunas are a regular activity, there are 2 million saunas for the 5 million people who live there,” she went on to say. People clearly have understood the benefits of elevating body temperature for some time now.
These days saunas come in many different styles such as wooden-crafted steam rooms, portable steam canopies, or infrared light mechanisms. However, they all have the same goal. Thermoregulation is a process by which our bodies attempt to maintain a core body temperature near roughly 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The process balances heat generation with heat loss.
Why Saunas Make Us Sweat
As the sauna warms our body, our natural thermostat system is prompted to generate perspiration. As your body starts to produce sweat, it evaporates. If you think back to a high school physics or college meteorology class, when the sweat changes from liquid to gas, the latent heat exchange cools the skin. “The basic concept is that in order for matter to change state, it must either receive or lose energy,” noted the GeeksforGeeks.org website. “When matter molecules shift phases from liquid to gas, they require energy to overcome their potential energy through kinetic energy. As a result, the liquid absorbs energy from its surroundings,” the website went on to say.
As a meteorologist, I watch this process play out in many instances. During my scholarly career, for example, I have studied something called the urban heat island. Cities tend to be warmer than surrounding rural areas because of increased asphalt surfaces, waste heat, and lack of trees or water bodies. Trees and water bodies, through evapotranspiration or evaporation, help cool cities.
By the way, I probably should not be turning my sauna into a science lab, but I “may or may not :)” have taken my forward-looking infrared camera in it one day to demonstrate the concept (picture below) of heat rising. Ok that’s enough writing for today. Guess where I am headed?