The Science & Health Benefits of Deliberate Heat Exposure

In every case, regular exposure to sauna, starting at about 2 or 3 times per week all the way up to 7 times per week, greatly improves—meaning, statistically significant improvements—longevity, in the sense that people are less likely to die of cardiovascular events and other things that kill us.

Sauna exposure... has been shown to upregulate levels of FOXO3. FOXO3, in turn, upregulates pathways related to DNA repair and clearing out of these senescent or dead cells, which is known to be important for various aspects of maintaining cognition and other aspects of maintaining health.

Make sure that you drink at least 16 ounces of water for every 10 minutes that you happen to be in the sauna.

Now, how long were people exposing themselves to these hot environments? Anywhere from 5-20 minutes per session ... Very brief periods of just 5 minutes of heat exposure can be a powerful stimulus if the heat exposure is significantly great enough for you. 20 minutes can also be beneficial. But 80 to 100 °C, meaning 176 °F to 212 °F, is the general range that this and most studies use.

People who went into the sauna 2 or 3 times per week were 27% less likely to die of a cardiovascular event than people that went into the sauna just once a week.

The benefits were even greater for people that were going into the sauna 4-7 times per week. Those people were 50% less likely to die of a cardiovascular event compared to people that went into the sauna just once a week.

The use of deliberate heat exposure can be a very powerful way to improve health and longevity.

The more often that people do sauna, the better their health is, and the lower the likelihood they will die from some sort of cardiovascular event.

One way that you can heat up is by cooling down the surface of your body. That's right. If I were to throw a cold towel, ice cold towel, onto your torso right now... Because your brain is acting like a bit of a thermostat, as the surface—the shell of your body—felt cool, it would make sense that that thermostat would activate biological mechanisms that would heat up your core.

If you go into the sauna more frequently, you become a better sweater ... You get better at sweating—at dumping heat through the loss of water.