May 21, 2025
A Sauna So Good You Could Sing About It:
The Surprising Relationship Between Mental Health and Body Temperature
“Bara Bada Bastu,” sing KAJ, in the title of their Eurovision-featured song. Translating roughly to, “just take a sauna,” KAJ represented Sweden in this year’s Eurovision contest—but the three members of the band hail from Finland, a nation where there are an astonishing number of saunas (3.3 million) for a relatively small population (5.5 million).
“It’s a thing I really endorse,” says Jakob Norrgård (AKA the “J” in KAJ). “It’s good for people. It is good for me, for both my mental and physical health, and (it’s) also a very social event.”
Jakob may not be a scientist but he is definitely onto something about the health benefits of steam and heat. According to Ashley Mason, Associate Professor In Residence at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, there is a strong correlation between body temperature and mental health.
Since people with depression tend to have higher resting body temperatures, Mason believes that “one of the ways we think that heat treatments might be working, is that they might be helping people cool down, and that might be important to mental health.”
It is a bit counterintuitive to think of a sauna as a way to cool the body, but that is what it does.
“The important thing to know is after you heat your body up a whole lot, your body temperature actually drops … When you go into one of these heating elements, what do you do? You start sweating a lot. That’s your body’s way of cooling itself down. So it’s turning on this thermoregulatory system and giving it a workout, so to speak,” said Mason earlier this month at the Healthy Aging 2025 Conference at Stanford University.
She went on to underscore how our dependence on temperature-controlled environments (think: air conditioners set to 72 Fahrenheit) might actually be negatively affecting our body’s ability to fight back against depressive symptoms. According to Mason, editing “thermal stress” out of our lives actually creates an increase in temperature dysregulation for those suffering from depression.
Even though it was a pre-contest betting favorite (Austrian singer JJ won a nail-biter), KAJ didn’t take home the win. But we hope that all of Europe is now singing about saunas—and that KAJ will continue to sing the praises of what a warm, steamy environment can do for your health.
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May 19, 2025
MYTHBUSTER:
Blue light from phones doesn’t interfere with sleep
If you want to get a good night's rest, beware the blue light from your phones and other communications devices. Any type of light can throw off your circadian rhythm but “blue is the worst.” That’s been the conventional wisdom, passed around the Internet for at least the last decade, and has even spawned an entire mini-industry built around blue light filters for phones.
But save your money: more recent research has shown that blue light from phones, iPads and other screens are not a risk to your sleep. That’s likely because these devices throw off a quantity of light that is trivial compared to natural outdoor light and not likely disruptive of sleep patterns.
Here is Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of Sleep Medicine at Stanford:
So does that mean it’s safe to curl up in bed with your best iPhone and doom scroll to your heart's content? Sadly no. It’s not the light. It’s the content. Many apps are now engineered to be both addictive and stressful, two things that are decidedly not conducive to sleep. The best advice is still to chill out before bedtime – yoga, meditation, whatever relieves the stress of the day for you – and to leave that phone behind.
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