My husband is a spendaholic. I sometimes joke, slightly tensely, as I manage our finances, that if he were a billionaire, there would be no recession. So when he announced that he wanted to build a sauna at our house in Oxfordshire, I thought he’d finally lost the plot. I grew up with the idea that saunas were best-forgotten hangovers from the Seventies, along with avocado bathroom suites and an unacceptable abundance of body hair; slightly icky hotbeds of bacteria and questionable sexual mores.
Yet a new study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst has found that a daily sauna can alter the body’s response to fat and prevent menopausal weight gain. There have been other well publicised health benefits (suggestions that the heat wards off Alzheimer’s and heart disease), so perhaps it comes as no surprise that a sauna is the must-have house accessory for this year. Google searches for “home sauna” were 84 per cent higher between January and March 2024 than in the same period in 2020.
Ben’s idea was not a sweaty sauna hidden away in a basement, of course, but a wood-fired beauty made of reclaimed wood, with glass doors opening out onto wild woodland. He wasn’t taking no for an answer, and so in the spring of 2021 we took delivery of a Heartwood sauna, craned on to four small plinths, a moveable structure that required no planning permission and that we could take with us if we moved house.
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My disapproval was not abated by the beauty of our sauna. I was still sceptical about how much we’d use the thing. Our lives are busy, taken up with horses and dogs and gardening and jobs and the school run. When on earth would we find the time to languish in something as decadent as a sauna?
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But (and I don’t often admit this to my husband) I was completely wrong. Ben soon found that the ritual of lighting the stove, nurturing it into a roar so that it heated our little sauna to about 90C, was meditative and mindful in itself. He’d fill the cold plunge that sat beside the glass doors with the hose and I’d find myself returning from a wet horse ride to the smell of wood smoke and that thrill of knowing I had a treat in store.
We’ll use the sauna three or four times a week sometimes. I find it’s particularly good in winter, when I’m usually shivering from the walk from the house to the sauna, wearing only a towel, and that burst of warm, dry, pine-scented air hits my cold body like a hug. I lie on the wooden bench, letting the warmth flood through me, breathing the hot dry air in deeply and revelling in its embrace. Sometimes I’ll close my eyes and imagine I’m lying on a sun-drenched beach, warmth thawing my chilly body.
We sauna (yes, it is now a verb) for about an hour. You get in and the first ten minutes is bliss as you revel in that heat. Then things start getting a bit hot, but the key is to stick at it. By the time sweat is running off me in rivulets and I’m really quite hot, I’ll sit up and try to do another few minutes, breathing deeply, really pushing myself to endure the heat, so that by the time I break, the plunge into the cold is a glorious respite.
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Ben now cools our plunge pool, bringing the temperature down to about 3C, which very soon gets very cold. Again the trick is to push yourself in the cold. I try to slow my breathing, so that by the time I get out I’m shivering great big convulsions, my very bones chilled, so that again the searing heat of the sauna is a merciful respite. A couple of rounds of this and you emerge a new person.
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As tranquil as the whole experience is, Ben and I often get competitive, surreptitiously trying to outdo each other when it comes to enduring both the heat and the cold. Ben tends to be better in the heat, whereas I can endure the cold plunge for longer than he can.
But what’s surprised me most about the sauna is its benefit for our marriage. Being alone together with nothing to do apart from sit gives us a much-needed chance to talk. Ben is away filming for about nine months of the year and when he returns, life and children and dogs and house stuff take over and we find we don’t often have time to really catch up. An hour in the sauna gives us the chance to have proper chats, the kind that are the backbone of a relationship. We talk about things we didn’t think we really needed to, about thoughts and ideas and worries and problems that busy life often suppresses, until they become divorces, affairs or mental health problems. Sometimes I’ll sauna alone, and that is where I’ll come up with ideas for businesses, solutions to tricky conversations, or I’ll simply revel in the world outside those big glass doors — the foxgloves that have suddenly appeared, the nest of red kites or the deer that’s just wandered past, oblivious to my presence.
Whether our sauna ritual is silently protecting us against all manner of ill health, I don’t yet know. But what I am sure of is the sheer joy and wellbeing that we get from the whole ritual of our woodland sauna. Even the bitter taste of admitting that my husband was right and I was wrong about this is worth enduring.
