Infrared sauna (discussed further here) uses light energy to warm the body more directly than heated air alone. The experience can feel gentler while still asking the cardiovascular system, skin, and thermoregulatory pathways to respond.
Full transcript with clickable timestamps linking back to the source video.
hello everyone Dr Stone here with Brian Richards we are here today to talk about the magic of sauna uh I'm sitting in front of my sauna space Photon and Brian is in his Factory which is 100 something degrees because the air conditioning is broken Brian thank you for joining me today I'm so happy to be here cool man your audio's a little bit low can you hear me okay yeah I hear you great okay great awesome so you know the first question I wanted to ask you is how did you get into building saunas yeah my history Leland is is uh all about solving my own personal problems so sauna's face is 10 years old and I went through my initial Health Journey a couple years before that I I had an array of symptoms that I would call adrenal fatigue so I had insomnia and mind racing um I was lethargic kind of low energy and also as a rascible I had sort of an impatience about me a little bit of negativity maybe and I wasn't happy with the situation but I also wasn't happy with what was being recommended to me by conventional medicine I even got uh recommended to take Accutane for for acne I had acne on my torso kind of only on my back where my kidneys were which now makes a lot of sense because those are toxin filters so that was a bit of a shock moment for me I didn't want to take any drugs and Accutane certainly has a lot of side effects so I was thinking what can I do that's more addressing of the root causes of things so I got online dissatisfied and and did my own research trying to figure out my own Health Solution and in that research I came across sauna I kept coming across sauna both from The ancestral perspective every human culture on Earth has some kind of sauna sweat lodge tradition but then also the modern research marries really
well with that ancestral wisdom sauna is used for longevity and reducing Dimension a lot of the things that we'll talk about so but primarily this idea that hey maybe the contributing factor to disease one of the most important ones is toxicity and poisons in the body and through purification of the body will the cells well the organs will the body work better so this intrigued me and then at the end of my research I found Dr Kellogg's electric light bath which every time I think about it gives me a tingle um so the world's first electric sauna is not the standard farm for it's not of the most people are familiar with right it's the electric light bath so incandescent light bulbs were invented in 1887 and then um in 1891 Dr Kellogg so Dr Kellogg is the brother of the guy that invented Kellogg's Corn Flakes which is uh we have to mention that that's an interesting side note so in the early 20th century out of control male libido was considered a societal problem and so Corn Flakes were invented to to address that turntables have turned wow so so his brother had was a a doctor who treated patients out of Sanitarium which is a anachronistic word for a spa or like a clinic in Battle Creek Michigan where you treated people with tuberculosis because tuberculosis was one of the only diseases well only it was one of the major diseases that they had trouble treating historically particularly in the pre-antibiotic era yeah so so he had definitely infectious disease patients but he had really chronic disease patients of all kinds so uh four or five years after light bulbs invented this guy says hey these are really cool let's use them to power a sauna he invents this Victorian style cabinet with an array of incandescent light bulbs in it and he then proceeds
to log over 200 000 sauna sessions with over 50 000 chronically ill patients and he developed a a really amazing array of protocols or an amazing array of outcomes and also some specific protocols and treatment of so many diseases and he wrote a book about this called light Therapeutics published in 1910 you can read this online so I I found this this treaties and I was like whoa this is so interesting and and it's also not a sauna type that you really see so I found a modern doctors rendition of this Built My Own and used it right before bed and guess what I slept well so I was like huh and so I use it again before bed and I slept even better and I consider my insomnia issues to have gone away like that quickly so that gave me the impetus to really use the product with discipline for half a year after which I was able to look back and and realize that oh I had like adrenal fatigue you know when you have brain fog you're not necessarily even aware of it and when you're in the funk you know when you have the negativity or whatever just the bad mood you know I wasn't really self-aware but once I cleaned my clean my car so to speak you could see any mud that you throw on the car so I look back and realized wow not only did my acne and my sleep improve all these other health issues that I had I wasn't even aware of also resolved also got better I had a lot more patience and energy and more positivity and really energy levels like getting through a long day I have you know still a company now 10 years later and it's a lot of work and long days sometimes and at the the electric light bath has really been my salvation in making sure my brain works right my body works right uh each day and and keeping me healthy so that that was the inspiration and because I looked around I noticed that no one else was offering
this this technology wasn't like made available as a commercial product and I found it I basically made a few and this and that and then eventually founded sauna space with a couple hundred bucks and and that was 10 years ago of two or three business loans later and a couple of almost bankruptcies as well you know here we are uh so the the company's larger now I I'm actually in if you look behind me I'm in the factory right now you know it's the the shift's over so nobody's here but this is all handmade in Columbia Missouri and in the beginning of course I was making all of them but I I basically poured my heart and soul and some tears were involved in in an obsession into making one thing perfect and that's uh you know a modern electric light sauna that is such a good story so you know what's funny to me is that you said this product or technology was not available and one of the reasons why I like the sauna space as opposed to some of my other options for not only sauna but light therapy and I'm not saying there's not a place for these other other modalities right because there's lots of frequencies of light but the sauna space is amazing because not only is it a fantastic sauna that will make you sweat bullets um but you're not just getting the infrared you're getting the visible light talk about how you created the bulbs and what your thinking was and is on what frequencies are most important for people to be getting in their light therapy yeah that's a great question Leland so the the model for me is nature and the only um you know the predominant source of light nature is the Sun more than anything and the Sun is an incandescent light source so incandescence is in nature when we heat a material up really hot it emits light naturally in a very in actually a very predictable pattern so
um full spectrum light AKA sunlight is incandescent light where we have a a an emission of all the wavelengths but it's a big bell curve from the Sun that centers on visible light and within that broad spectrum emission um the Suns so if we look at the sun spectrum and you can see this on my website sonic. space under the learn section the sun spectrum is about 43 near for red but be due to the deep deep tissue penetration of near infrared if we look at the photons per second experienced another way to say that is the power of the Sun that we absorb over 70 percent of it is near infrared so that's that's really interesting so our ancestral experience with light is predominantly an experience with near infrared wavelengths also the wavelengths that penetrate deepest into the body also the wavelengths that stimulate mitochondrial response what people more commonly know is red light therapy and then also um because of this deep penetration we have a radiant means of heating the body so yeah there it is if you scroll up a little bit you can see the sun right there so I've highlighted the near infrared band that I'm I'm emphasizing but the sun emits all of those wavelengths in that really broad curve so there's actually way more near infrared than there is UV or blue which is something that a lot of people don't realize yeah there's a lot of emphasis on on vitamin D production from UV from certain types of UV right and that that is a benefit of the body that if you look at uh you know from an uh evolutionary perspective is an evolutionary adaptation but as the sun's killing but but the sun's killing you at the same time it will survive at light because it's ionizing stress but yes what most people don't appreciate is that the vast majority of
the sun's emission is in this healing band called near infrared so as the sun is perhaps damaging you to some degree with ultraviolet it has way more power that's healing you there's way more healing power than there is this ultraviolet and this blue light stuff and and so that's that's Nature's model is an incandescent light model so I worked about four years actually on improving the original incandescent heat lamp that that really Dr Kellogg and and was using and it's a hundred year old 130 year old technology where I I basically tuned the filament to make it run hotter so it shifts that Spectrum make your own filaments yeah we make our own light bulbs uh definitely and the filament is is sort of the magic the rest of the light bulb is just handmade and um and beautiful because it's it's mouth blown in hand rolled and it's stained glass rather than painted glass I didn't even I didn't know that yeah we make our own well we're trying to make this purpose-driven design here so making the best of the best so so after many years of testing I figured out a way to redesign the filament so that this peak of the spectrum you see in front of you on the screen shifts into higher frequency so that the portion highlighted in Orange here near infrared is greater so it our thermolite bulb emits two to four times the light therapy or Radiance of a standard heat lamp and it also emits more in the optimal heat therapy band so more light therapy and more radiant heating power than a regular heat lamp so um so so basically that's that's the idea here is for in terms of what's the right light to use to heat the body and what's the right light to use to provoke all these benefits of red light near infrared light therapy also called photobiomodulation yeah I have to say
um uh I have to warn people you may get addicted to your sauna space you may find yourself in the middle of the afternoon thinking I could be doing something else right now but I really just want to take a sauna yeah it really is and it's that feeling that's different and that the reason that feeling is different is is not just because of the heat because all heat feels good humans love to be warmed up but it's perhaps more so the use of neared Fred light to do the light therapy benefit because when we use near infrared light in the light therapy bracket there were uh if we do that in the brain cells we stimulate a lot of things that make us feel better like dopamine and serotonin release and other things that when our nerve cells in our brain and our central nervous system are nourished and and the internal organs of the body are nourished with near infrared light and there's mitochondrial response there we get an improvement in in the feeling and the experience at all just it's amazing it feels better and if we're talking about penetration only near infrared light penetrates bone tissue so if we're using a red light therapy head cap or something like that it's not penetrating the bone at all it's only stimulating the skin and and the bone itself to get into the brain we have to use near infrared which is what the sun does and what my lamp does so when you sit inside a sauna space you get this deep cellular photobiomodulation that results in a sauna experience that's not so much fatiguing and and uh and draining but more rejuvenating more Zen more wow this feels good this is why I love sitting in front of the fire this is why you know I love being out in the sun it's this feeling absolutely so you mentioned that this was one of this was a game changer for you but did you have to do anything else in order to get your health back on track yes absolutely so I stopped eating most flour type stuff uh still eat some
now that I've corrected but I went to a more natural food diet and avoided any kind of processed foods and I also started doing some Bodywork like yoga uh hanging our yoga actually so I was just kind of assuming that I'm young and I can just kind of do whatever but the combination of body work uh changing to more of a natural diet the sauna and uh slowly not the beginning but slowly but surely a more of a focus on meditative practice and mindfulness practice those things were really like the were my magic sauce to fix myself so you didn't have to take any supplements do any kind of crazy protocols just some basic Elimination Diet sauna that was it yeah in the beginning I didn't take any supplements I was actually opposed to it nowadays I do take some supplements uh definitely some that I'm actually a big fan of now but the the basic change for me of purifying the body and understanding that that we eat light not just for energy but for healing and nourishment was the most powerful changer you know evoke the most powerful change in my health and really it's very interesting humans are designed to get uh there's some argue that humans are designed to get a majority of our energy from the Sun of course very challenging nowadays with the modern you know Occidental lifestyle but it's it really does fuel you so it's food well that's the thing that uh most people are still not up on about how light affects the cell and I mean to me sauna you talk to people about sauna and I had a friend he was going to start a company called third kidney where he wanted to use saunas in order to um treat kidney diseases and kidney failure because if you cause someone to sweat they will actually
excrete all the same toxins through their skin that they would excrete through their kidneys so you they call it in the literature of the third kidney have you ever heard that yeah the the so the skin is not just to cool us down when we sweat it's definitely a purifier it's a detoxifier but it's not operating all the time like the kidneys in the liver it's that's it it's only when we sweat so if we don't routinely sweat and also sweat passively as in a sauna or being still uh we're not doing a whole lot of detoxification we're doing some but that's an important thing to clarify Leland there's a big difference between the toxin concentration of sauna sweat versus exercise sweat and it has to do with the state that the nervous system is in so when we're and overall the the overall concept of exercise so when we're exercising we're engaging in locomotion the body's producing a lot of energy but all of the energy is going to all the blood flow is going to basically the heart and the lungs and the muscles and all the cellular energy is going towards you know promoting Locomotion basically when we're sitting in the sauna can be considered to be like up to 100 kilowatt workout in terms of the energy expended and and generate in the cell but we're not moving so what are the cells doing the cells are understanding wow I can use this extra energy now to heal and to rejuvenate and repair proteins and and of course detoxify so when we look at toxin concentrations of sweat like if you look at the 911 uh the 911 worker sauna studies there's a couple of good ones out there where they those guys are exposed to a lot of toluene and all kinds of chemicals from the The Fallout of that event and they did sauna like once a day for six months and their their levels of xylene toluene and other synthetic
chemicals drop dramatically and the toxin concentration the sweat was really high and in contrast if you look up like there's a National Geographic article I don't know if it's still up there where it was trying to uh poo paw the the value of sauna to detox and they presented the toxin concentration of someone running on a treadmill as the example that there's not much toxin concentration in sweat well there's not when you exercise but when you're in the sauna there is that's why every human culture has been doing this for a long time that's fascinating I actually did not know that they had done those studies what I was going to talk about briefly was uh because this is the biggest thing that I see people not understanding about light is that as you were saying is you eat light that light red and infrared in particular helps to build the Cellular battery in the mitochondria or the water around the mitochondria in your cells and people have this idea that it's just illumination and that they get their energy from food but that's part of why I'm not surprised that you were covered just by using sauna therapy and I'm sure you know all the other things that you mentioned but because and people I think are are very confused by how say you can improve someone's Health without fixing a nutritional deficiency that you know we often see and that's very much talked about in the functional and Integrative Medicine space but what they don't realize is if you improve the Cellular battery and you improve the function of the organism overall you're going to lose fewer nutrients that you're short on and you're going to better excrete toxins that are interfering with and increasing your need for nutrients and then you're going to augment normal processes like sleep you know you take somebody who's not sleeping at all and get them to sleep just six hours a night and you've completely changed their nutrient balance just by changing their stress
levels and their circadian rhythms and you know how their body is functioning so it's it's part of why when people come to me asking for just diet and just supplements or they're very focused on lab work and there's not an engagement with the lifestyle component which includes sauna and there are plenty of people come to me who don't have Asana what they don't seem to I think what they often don't realize is just how valuable the sun is like for a long time I I kicked the can of of having a sauna down the road I had other things I wanted to buy other things I wanted to do but then finally I bought a sauna space part of why I bought it was because it was a small footprint that's what was going to work it was portable I really like that it's very easy to pack this thing up and take it away with you when you move which is very common for for people today I mean Americans have always been a very mobile population but I think now more than ever with the digital nomad thing whatever you want to call that people are like living in airbnbs and things like that so um I finally bought it and I was just amazed by how much better I felt even though I had already before then been spending time outside in the hot Florida Sun uh you know and getting plenty of time outside and breaking a sweat on a regular basis but the amount of sweat that I uh the amount that I sweat in the sauna space just doesn't compare uh it's so much more than I would be losing outside unless I were doing heavy manual labor but you know I don't do heavy manual labor outside and as you just mentioned I didn't know there's a big difference in your sweat concentrations of toxins uh when you're in the sauna versus exercising yeah it's that it's the toxin concentration but it's also the degree of sweating that you mentioned that is really a big difference so when we look
at sauna studies I mentioned that briefly before so sauna extends your health span it extends the years of your life during which you're healthy and it does that by reducing your risk of dying of all things all cause mortality it also reduces your risk of dementia but but like what does that mean in terms of a sauna session how am I achieving that so if you look at the studies this there are two outcomes that can be measured that qual that make a sauna session qualify as a proper session and one is sweat loss so one to two pounds of water lost to sweat was the the bar for um the long-term cohort studies in Finland where they did like 20 25 year studies so that's a kilogram of water so I'm usually going in there for about a pound of water and you can measure yourself on a scale before and after you know that powder water is a fair amount um and uh and and so that's one way to measure it and then the other thing to measure is core temperature increase so if we're sweating a little bit we've had maybe one maybe two degrees core temperature increase but once we hit Three Degree core temperature increase for a period of minutes we substantially activate heat shock protein production in the cell and it's the heat shock proteins that are doing the detox and they're doing the protein repair and protein refolding the Rejuvenation aspect of sauna so we have to sustain uh we have to have sustained heating stimulus for a while and of course these two outcomes can be measured with a scale with a thermometer but when you're hitting those what's happening in the body is we've got a large temperature increase we've got a large substantial heat shock protein response in all the cells of the body and we're achieving the outcome of sauna so we can do that with any sauna and you can do it even with like a hot tub or
other things too it's just with the sauna space approach using Incan using near infrared light predominantly we do that much faster and you know we don't have to like preheat the sauna or or wait a long time the sessions are also shorter how long does it take for that core body temperature to rise I mean I know it must depend on the person but generally speaking uh for me if I use a four bulb sauna space it's I hit about a three degree temperature increase in about 18 minutes maybe how many minutes um I they have these this is you know the there's there's more precise ways to measure it but I'm using those they have these modern infrared thermometers that are instant read and you can measure the forehead you can measure the armpit or other areas I'm usually measuring the armpit or something like that and there's definitely a degree of variance and also when you face the sauna the front of the body is getting heated up first and then when you rotate you know there's a temperature differential of sorts in the body from one side to the other but uh any old uh instant read thermometer will give you an indication and you're just measuring off your Baseline so even though it's not perfectly accurate you can get a sense of it and you can correlate it with your actual feeling which I think is the most important thing and then you also with the sweating you know looking down at yourself you know when have I sweat out about a pound of water and yeah my my litmus test is am I uncomfortably hot almost so uncomfortable that I want to uh get out and then I usually either back away from the lights or I rotate I should mention that I'm glad you brought that up so the other there is one more outcome that was associated with a proper sauna session in the long-term studies so temperature score temperature increase sweating out a pound of water and also reaching a state of subjective
exhaustion which is what you just referred to so that's really funny when you reach that what's happening actually in the body amongst other things is same thing with exercise when you feel really uncomfortable and you're trying to push through to the end you get a large production of dinorphins and the the norfins are these things that make you feel uncomfortable right and the amount of dinorphins you produce is correlated with the amount of endorphins that are produced after the workout or after the sauna so the more you get uncomfortable in there and you can withstand it within the bars of safety the better you feel afterward uh that is fascinating I don't think I knew what are dinorphins uh it's I think it's a molecule that like endorphins it it does the opposite of endorsing so endorphins make you feel give you that that high you know after you've worked out after you've exerted a lot of physical efforts so the dinorphins cause you to feel uncomfortable that's fascinating it's very rare for anyone to use a word like that that I'm not familiar with you're welcome Leland yeah I appreciate it okay um let's see this is an interesting question so Sharon asks is the IR higher dose sauna blanket sufficient I don't think I sweat a pound after an hour in it so one of the things that you know we've seen rolled out in the last few years has been sauna blankets and I have not tried any of these for the record and I'm going to tell people why I looked at the blankets and I thought first of all I cannot imagine being really hot inside of a giant basically bag I don't think I mean I can't think of anything that would be more unpleasant than that and if you're gonna sweat I mean I'm sorry I'm having trouble like getting this thought out because it's so funny to me I mean can
you imagine having a pound of sweat in a bag with you it doesn't sound fun it sounds so disgusting so I never wanted to try them and then I also was thinking to myself for many of my patients the most important organ we're trying to rehabilitate is their head and my head I mean their brain right but maybe they have a headache or they have TMJ or something right so the last thing I want to have poking out of the sauna is their head can you make somebody sweat bullets in another type of sauna or your head pops out or whatever sure you can but the great thing about the sauna space and I looked at the pop-up saunas that come up to about here I have a couple people I know who've had those is that their head would pop out um but I thought you know if you just extend it two or three feet up it's going to encapsulate the whole body why wouldn't you just do that so you know I bought the sauna space and have a look back and there's absolutely no other product that I recommend for this because I just see it working so well why would I recommend anything else and I've tried a lot of saunas I mean I remember going to a sauna showroom with that friend I mentioned earlier and we tried you know infrared this and he had a traditional finish on the the degree to which you can get hot with the traditional finish sauna I really like there's something about the the um experience of putting the water on the rocks and things like that but it's not convenient I mean using a traditional finished sauna is a involved particularly if it's truly traditional and you're actually um starting a fire you have to start the fire and you have to wait for the fire to heat the Rocks then you have to get in you have to put the water on the Rocks then you can get out and you have to maintain the Sun at the same time great thing about my sauna space is I just jump in hit the light bulbs and it is hot Within 60 seconds and I'm sweating in two or three minutes so this question from C Miss lick is interesting in regards to losing one pound of water
as a practitioner how are you assessing what the appropriate amount is for your patients Dr Stillman especially when a patient is in recovery so this is something that I don't actually reach for sauna right away it's not that I don't love it and use it all the time but one of the things I've found is that when you're working with people a lot of people end up assuming that the patient has enough minerals in their body and in their diet in order to be well right and with with sauna you're going to be losing a certain amount of minerals what I found working with lots of people is that I needed to get them eating a mineral dense diet generally speaking right away this means a certain proportion of nuts and seeds things like green leafy vegetables plenty of salt I start people at about a teaspoon of salt so long as they have no issue with that much salt I want people eating a high potassium diet in most cases so once we have all that in place then they're going to have the minerals they need in order to actually deal with the sauna I've seen excessive sauna trigger like fasciculations and muscle twitchiness and irritability and fatigue that's in the extreme cases and it's always in a case where someone's either not eating enough minerals and specifically salt and really the four macro minerals that I look at in my hair tissue mineral analysis I'm going to be having a webinar with Clark Engelbert About Hair tissue mineral analysis he actually emailed me about this Brian and he said but by the way tell Brian that I see enormous heavy metal detoxification in the hair when I am testing the hair he tests hair tissue mineral analysis and he sees huge quantities of heavy metals coming out and people who are using your products it's part of how he knows they work really well yeah and so um you got to get people eating a mineral dense diet otherwise they're not going to do well uh and there's a couple ways I look at that so for example if someone's urine specific gravity is low that's a sign that they may be demineralized I look at their their
fluid balance it's funny the old recommendation to people is eight eight ounce glasses of water a day the reality is I see people doing well on anywhere from one to three ounces per inch of height and I dose it based on height and you'll find people who are way under that you'll find people who are over that yeah I can see you doing the math over there so it's somewhere between like 60 70 ounces for the average person and something like 200 or 210 for somebody who's fairly tall and that obviously depends on what your your sweat losses are so yeah I would just add to that as far as like a precautionary caveat with the sauna space sauna you can turn the light bulbs down because when the switch is off and reduce the stimulation on the body you can also shorten your duration so some people who have thermal regulatory symptoms like people with autoimmune issues will typically start with less bulbs and less time and titrate up to a situation where they're losing a pound of water out and that may take many many months so you can be safe and slow and steady and still you know obviously I'm not the healthcare practitioner but introduce the sauna you know when you can and just understand that it's a slow process you know you're especially you have the issue with detox reactions so you have healing reactions or retracing that Reactions where you're experiencing the symptoms of a toxin that you detox and so we want to minimize those by doing things slowly and safely and sometimes less is more you know the turtle kind of wins the race and then also you absolutely are you losing minerals and salt when you do sauna so I personally take electrolytes to replace that and other things as well uh in the diet I'm sorry what's your favorite electrolyte combo for poster pre-sana so right now I switched uh I'm using
this brand called Peak that has a really nice electrolyte that has ceramides and hyaluronic acid in it as well and it's not too salty so I really like that one the best and then I take a uh I don't do this all the time but sometimes I use uh crochet Dr Shades Quicksilver scientific push catch binder approach so he has the liver sauce Kidney Care that you take to promote detox and then you hit the sauna and then afterwards you take his uh charcoal silica binder and I think it's important to mention that too it's very helpful to take a binder after the sauna session to facilitate the body's elimination of toxins and and there's a lot of different binders you can take that's just my preferred one do you hear that from people consistently hear what exactly uh that they they feel better when they use the binder after sauna uh some people yeah some people do swear by it religiously um I don't know how I don't have a numbers on like how consistently people do that but I imagine a lot of people less people do it than more but I've found a benefit to using it personally right yeah it's it's really very anecdotal my experience with and I've heard more than one person say that um and it's part part of what I ask is that I think a lot of people I think they get stuck in thinking if I'm not doing it perfectly I might as well not even play or show up and I think you know let's just make this as simple as possible and that's why I asked you about your electrolyte regimen do you have like a standard go-to okay I'm going to sauna and then it is a part of your daily routine and then if it is what's your pre and post sauna routine yeah I I I'm sauna in the morning so I like to start my day with that early so I'm not doing anything before unless I might take the the liver sauce if I wanted to but I'm taking the binder afterward and then an electrolyte glass
of water afterwards and I also take more electrolytes if I need to depending on what I do in the day say if I'm doing a pmf therapy of some kind or some other thing that would Advocate the drinking of more water uh and I do drink more water Leland than I used to not drink as much as I find I benefit more you said 60 to 70. I'm probably yeah maybe even north of that right here thinking about it now yeah I love that you're thinking about it we have a form at the practice that I created a series of forms because I needed my health coaches to be able to get data from people without me having to sit there and interview them and then me be able to review it because I wasn't you know a lot of it's just standard stock questions that I ask people and the hydration and libation survey is where I realized I needed that question and so I know exactly what people are drinking and I know you know how much and I know when it really makes my job a lot easier we show people those in our annual plans if people want to know more about those they're in my link tree we help people fine-tune their health we do group coaching is where I do a lot of my talking about sauna by the way Brian where you know people are coming on they have questions about this that and the other thing they want to you know improve this and that and whatever and so song is something that I cover with pretty much everybody because they all need to hear about it for the exactly the reasons we've been chatting about so um Dr B good asks uh she's curious how the infrared Works within um this is an interesting question so yeah it is I can see it um so I wanted to clarify this so this is the photon yeah this is the the bowl the powers are sauna the technology that powers our son is a very large 250 watt incandescent heat lamp so if you don't have this in your sauna it's not a Sonic space sauna if you're talking about a bag sauna it's most likely a farm for red emitter sauna that that has little farm
for red heating elements inside of it and it's usually the kind that you describe or your head sticks out of it so that's if it's a sauna space on I don't know if you can bring it up on the website but our saunas come it looks more like a you know a fortune teller is tent or something it's a or like a Bedouin tent I consider doing this interview from my sauna space Jim Jim prevailed upon me to not do that but anyway uh yeah so I think what's important about what you just said did you say it was they're mostly far infrared yeah most of the saunas on the market uh are using farm for it tubular ceramic emitters or they're using Farm Fred carbon elements and they're all farm for red so farm for red oh great you bought you brought it up so 3 000 and greater nanometers with a very low energy in infrared it's called fir far infrared and you see how there's not much in the sauna space bulb if you scroll up to the the sun Spectrum you'll see there's even less in the sun Spectrum there's like like less than three percent is in the sun Spectrum so we don't have much experience with farm for red light ancestrally and farm for it doesn't have deep tissue penetration because of water's absorption so water absorbs light differently according to the wavelength the water absorption Spectrum starts at 980 nanometers I have that somewhere on my website elsewhere but essentially near infrared light is not well absorbed by water which is the primary chromophore in our body so nearford light therefore penetrates the deepest of all Infrareds I don't know where it is Leland it might be I don't know if it's somewhere on there but suffice it to say you can look it up online and so so uh water so there's an optical window to the human body and in the ultraviolet in the visible light spectrum it's melanin and hemoglobin and and their absorption reduces as you get into red near infrared and and then water absorption
begins at 980 nanometers so from about 600 nanometers to 1200 nanometers you have the optical window of the human body the wavelengths that penetrate the deepest and the deepest of those is near infrared at like 930 nanometers so the nearford light from the sun the majority of the sun's emission the majority of our experience it's penetrating the deepest it's heating you up radiantly farm for its songs which power most of the saunas on the market are are probably the least efficient infrared wavelength to use to heat the body they're much better to heat the air and they work great uh for like outdoor patios when you're trying to heat the air with a farm for a minute and they're energy efficient but if we're looking at heating of biological tissue it's near infrared that works better so it's a misunderstanding in the market but um Farm infrared is heating the body but just really not very efficiently and yet it's still uh is you know a product the predominant product out there and and the Technologies are really different so for that the the Doctor Who asked the question you can tell if it's a sauna space it's got a big huge red incandescent bulb in it they're very distinctive I like the design um but it's very important what Brian just said to really unpack that and make sure people understand it so it's not about heating your body if it was just about heating your body I could just you know I could you know just tell you all to drink a lot of tea and keep your thermostat on really high and a lot of other things that would heat your body in fact paradoxically many of the frequencies that we use to most improve cellular bioenergetics are not actually as Brian was saying the best frequencies for heating the body and this really is very um counterintuitive for people because your your natural tendency you know for whatever reason is basically the more intense the experience the better it must be for me so a great counter example of this would be you know I have
a uh EMR Tech Inferno or rather Firestorm right here and this is a red light therapy lamp that isn't hot it's very bright but it doesn't heat my body but the energies in that are optimized to the human cell and so people need to realize it's not just about heat it's about the frequency and so when I am vetting products and testing them I actually get my my meters out and I look at the actual frequencies that I'm seeing in the product to determine whether or not it's actually the the stated frequency and I can't stress how important that is because it's not it doesn't just come down to am I sweating it's also is this frequency charging my Cellular battery so that it will do what it's supposed to do whether or not that's activating my sweat glands and that actually uh is a good segue into this comment or question so Sharon asks uh my head does sweat in the blanket so again Sharon the point is actually more so that you're getting the light on your head because the light penetrating through the skull end of the brain most people are not aware that the brain is set up to funnel infrared light into its deepest uh Corners do you know that paper where they talk about that I think it's called melatonin and the Optics of the human body yes yes a fantastic it's so the really paper yeah the near infrared light is not just stimulating mitochondrial response light therapy it also provokes cellular melatonin production actually like I think it's like 94 of the body's melatonin is produced cellularly not by the pineal gland and it's it's meant to be produced right there next to the mitochondrial membrane where all the free radicals are being produced through energy production and so the Sun's light with with mostly near infrared penetrate into the skull getting into the deep brain tissue and the Deep organs of the body is is refilling the body cellular
antioxidant reserves melatonin's like the number one antioxidant uh and you're not doing that to your brain if you're using red light by the way it needs to be near infrared so that that penetration through bone is only with near infrared which the skull is our thickest bone and this again is why I want my sauna to encase my entire body rather than just be a blanket I would also say real quick to Sharon again if you sweat out a pound of water and you raise core temperatures three degrees you're technically achieving the desired outcome of a sauna session and you can do that in a sauna blanket uh it'll just you know maybe take longer and maybe some disadvantages based on what you said Leland in terms of experience [Music] and then you know one of the things I find interesting about the sauna space is that the obvious uh the obvious products you have on your website uh it's a little cramped for two people it's perfect for one but you do have options for people to create Asana using your your bulbs what do you recommend to people when they're looking to create a one to two or three to four person sauna yeah absolutely I'm glad you brought it up so you can buy our tungsten sauna panel on its own we have three and four bold versions essentially you want the air to be just to be able to maintain an air temperature of just above body temperature and that way the air doesn't cool you down so instead of just using the tungsten panel inside your living room you're enclosing some kind of space where the air can be kept hot enough to not cool you down so if it can maintain 100 degrees then it's going to be an amazing do-it - yourself sauna space and the larger the volume the more panels you need with our product the the four and the three together are under 15 amps they'll work together on one in a 15 amp circuit and two four bolt panels require one 20 amp circuit so if you had two four bolt panels a total of eight
bulbs you could power uh a sauna for like three or four people if the height was low yeah so here's the product right here so um so you can purchase this on its own and and a lot of people do that who want a custom built-in sauna in their home or League land if they already have a farm for it sauna they already have that cabinet and they're like darn I wish I could sweat faster I wish this would work better they can buy just this and literally set it on the bench inside and and plug it in and use this as the replacement heater and then add in their stacking their light therapy as well one of the other really clever things that you did that I really appreciate is this idea of a sauna shower conversion kit because it's an obvious place to put a sauna obviously don't use the shower while you're saunaing um but it makes a super simple conversion rather than having to build out a whole new room in your house and you can do that it looks like I mean or I would think anyway with anything from like a closet to a shower to a spare bedroom yeah absolutely so air bedroom would be a little big a spare bedroom is going to be a little big but yeah a little closet a lot of people are doing that um really any small closet space you can buy our tungsten pedestal that that the panel will sit on and our stool as well if you want to go below more full sauna space or you can buy just the panel and it can hang on the wall by its hook and you can sit on any chair of your choosing and the key is to sort of drop the ceiling or make the volume of the area small enough that the the sauna space panel itself is enough to keep the air warm as it's heating the body so Kathleen asks can you use infrared bulbs in a wooden box and for its sauna and the answer is yes just as we really just literally been talking about yeah yeah so
um what's the name of that electrolytes solution that you used by the way it's the peak brand pi q-u - e oh I would have thought p-e - a-k but anyway all right I think we've got all right this is another good question how often should we sauna So my answer to that is I start people at you know 10 to 20 minutes three times a week and then if they tolerate that and feel better we'll go up in intensity and duration and sometimes you know I I'm limited on one of those you know they can't spend enough time or they have to do longer sessions fewer times a week that's generally where I start people do you have a standard recommendation that you make well we should mention the the like the Lao Canon study was the main 20 or sauna study following two thousand Finnish males published in 2015 and in that we saw an interesting conclusion so the guys that did sauna one day a week versus those that didn't do sauna had like 30 to 50 percent reduced all-cause mortality and they were looking at heart disease and heart attacks but what was interesting was that the guys that did sauna a few days a week versus the guys that did someone one day a week had an additional like 30 or more percent reduction in all cause mortality so the conclusion was that at least even doing sauna one day a week will have a big impact on your health span and your health in general but ideally it's going to be better to do it as you recommended Leland three times a week and what's really cool about that study is they published a follow-up six years later it was like 2021 I believe where they looked at dementia outcomes and guess what they found out the same thing one day of sauna a week reduces your your risk of dementia dramatically and then if you're doing sauna three days a week you have even uh a proportionally increase or excuse me decreased risk of dementia so the more sun is better but balancing
that with not doing too much I would say seven days a week is too much uh you know um I think it's well I think it's the mineral loss in the electrolyte loss I would say there are some Sonic cancer protocols where they're doing Tucson as a day now that's a whole other kettle of fish yeah and you know maybe that's something we don't talk about but I know there's I know there there's like uh There's Hope for cure and there's a couple different uh Baja base medical clinics were there in Mexico yeah their protocol is is twice a day for for a certain number of weeks I'm glad you mentioned it because it's one of the things that I one of the reasons why I love Sonic therapy is that if you look at the literature you'll because Brian just mentioned this obliquely albeit that it reduces your risk of death right well one of the top causes of death I think it's number two now behind heart disease but I would say it's catching up pretty quickly is cancer and we know from the literature that the more fevers you have over a certain period of time the lower your risk of many cancers like melanoma and we first understood this uh this affiliation or rather Association when there were some case reports in the early 1900s of patients whose severe metastatic cancers resolved after a febrile illness which really surprised their doctors this actually prompted Physicians to isolate the bacterial cell wall components that induce a fever I believe it's endotoxin and lipopolysaccharides and they would then having isolated these from the bacteria they would actually inject them into cancer patients this was known as collie's toxin it was legal and used widely in the United States up through I think the middle of the 20th century don't quote me on that the longer story on that is in Tom Cowan's book which I'm not going to say the title of
for fear of getting smacked by the censorship stick but it's his his book on the changing face of childhood illness and that gives you enough information to Google it and find the answer so sauna is like a mini fever and it was even the ancient Greeks noticed noted this I think it was permanentes who said Give me a drug that will produce a fever and I will cure any disease which is really a very over-the - top promise it's not quite that simple but I also want to point out one of the things that we see a lot of today is autoimmunity and Allergic Disease and one of the things you'll see is number one those diseases have gone up massively in prevalence and severity since we removed ourselves from the near-infrared rich sunlight that is supposed to fine-tune your immune system and vitamin D is another part of that story it's one reason why I have a vitamin D lamp in the background I use that just about every day and I just retested my vitamin D levels they were 47 because I'm kind of inconsistent on this and even though I live in Florida and get maybe an hour or two of of intense UV light at least several times a week but my hope is that long term and my beliefs that long-term use of sauna will actually mitigate risk of of cancer among other illnesses although I don't think anyone studied that specifically and then I'll throw in autoimmune and Allergy as well because of how it affects cellular bioenergetics and helps you eliminate the toxins that are then associated with all of those illnesses so anything else you want to talk about today or add quickly before I close this out uh if we just talk about the mitochondria I think a little bit these batteries in the cells so when we do light therapy it has a lot of different names most people are more familiar with red light therapy that's LED based like the panel behind you so that is not just for the skin it's for every cell of the body except red blood cells has mitochondria in it
and the definition of light therapy is the use of red and ear infrared light to heal damaged and degenerate cells and to re-optimize function or improve optimize function of healthy cells so the way it's you know there's many ways that it's doing it some of it's you know producing melatonin but in terms of photobiomodulation and light therapy where we're activating the mitochondria which is not just a battery it's not just an energy producer it's really a cellular actor you know it has its own DNA it has its own systems when we stimulate it with near infrared light it goes to work repairing the cell and fixing everything around it it promotes inflammation reduction and regenerative effects there's also immune modulation effects because of the nitric oxide release out of the cell it's another immune agent and overall it increases blood circulation and tissue oxygenation so uh beyond all of those things and those are the reasons why red light therapy in general and near fertilized therapy is is going more into the mainstream now is that it actually improves the function of the mitochondria itself and that's important I think in the previous topic we just talked about you know like the is it the beard Theory Leland of of cancer where or I think we're basically then the cancerous cell the mitochondria are broken and they're stuck in fermentation you're talking about the Warburg hypothesis the Warburg effect so there's certainly uh there's certainly something interesting in about how the mitochondria is a marker for health and and good functioning mitochondria um you know leads to I think the prevention of disease and also
amelioration of disease in general is getting those mitochondria to work better so I just wanted to emphasize that that the light therapy is not just fixing the cell it's fixing the most important part of your cell arguably maybe beside the nucleus is this thing that produces energy and this built-in cellular actor that constantly can repair everything in all the cells of the body when we look at the body as this collection of cells you know we fix from the ground up we fix the cells the tissues work better the organs work better and then the body works better we we actually get whole holistic effects from you know fixing that foundation in the mitochondria are really at the center of it absolutely I agree with everything you just said most of what I focus on in helping people you know in my medical practice and then in my coaching practice directly or indirectly affects mitochondrial health and I don't talk about mitochondria as much as a lot of people are today but you know there's something that I spent years looking at and studying and at the end of the day it's what I find most important and what I'm most focused on and what I talk about is how are we actually going to you know get the patient or the you know client if it's a coaching program the result they want and getting them to actually engage with the therapy is what really matters whether or not they understand all the subcellular biomechanics although I do find the subcellular biomechanics fascinating and mitochondria they know they do on they do emit red and infrared light if you look at the byproducts of our metabolic um uh the metabolic pathways we depend upon most glycolysis to break down glucose and then beta oxidation and the Krebs cycle in the mitochondria they're releasing red and infrared light and that's why we are warm-blooded we're warm-blooded because our bodies are producing light one of the things you'll see as people age that their their body temperature drops and this is sort of a chicken or the egg process are they getting colder
because they're sicker or are they getting sicker because they're colder and you know the bottom line is you got to nourish them properly and then you and that doesn't just mean the food that they're eating it means the light that their body is taking in because we've never lived in a world where we didn't have an abundance of red and infrared light even when we've moved out of the tropics as a species we've brought the light with us with fire and as you mentioned just at the beginning we've created uh traditions of sauna and sweat lodge and other things like that yeah beautiful yeah I mean if you certainly if we step out of the weeds of all that for a second and I find it's refreshingly I think it's encouraging refreshingly simple that you can sit on your lazy butt in a sauna you're not really do anything and yet accomplished so much for yourself I have to tell you that on that right on that note it is one of the most uh simple and restful practices I now have in my life I mean I didn't I totally underestimated how much I would enjoy it I thought it was going to be another thing I was going to have to do for my health and now I am always looking forward to it and trying to squeeze it into my day even when there's other things I should be doing um and I really think that people will you know I think a lot of people look at this the the price tag on a sauna and they think well you know I could do this and I could do that and I could buy this I could buy that but I look at what people spend their money on in general and I think you're much much better off going ahead and putting the money into the sauna than you are putting it into any of the other things that people often often buy it's pound for pound probably the best some of the best money you could spend on your health and well-being and I'm trying to find things that really compete with it particularly long term because you know your saunas are very robust they're not going to break down and what's your what's the length or
lifespan on the bulb the bulbs last 5 000 hours so it's many years of use how many years well if we look at the some people use the photon therapy light which I was showing here you know if you use that 10 hours a day or whatever that'd be a couple years of use maybe but the saunas their sauna session is only usually a half an hour it's less than an hour so right again a decade I guess 10 000 sessions if it's 30 minutes and 5 000 hours right correct that's that's okay that's a lot that would be about if there's 365 days and let's say 330 days of sauna um that's three years if you saw it almost every single day yeah and I I again most people don't have the time for that I um but it's also it's comforting Leland that you can replace the bulbs too after yes and everything else still works and stays the same that's right okay so I'm just going to share the screen and show people where they can um let's find you do you want to tell everyone where they can find you want the best place to look you up is yeah on our website sauna. space we have everything there all of our products uh you can go to the learn section learn about the Spectra we talked about and and other types of sciency stuff and you can see it from Real reviews they have a phenomenal sale going on right now oh yeah I think there's a July July sale going on right now so yeah all the product information is on there it comes with a nice long trial period and free shipping in the US and Canada and there's more content too if you want to watch more content on our YouTube and our Instagram and and Facebook and Twitter we're at sauna space and we have a lot of great stuff on there too that you can check us out on but all the heart of everything is in sonic. space and we have we're completely vertically integrated in-house so if you want to talk to someone that's on a
space you can call us at the contact number in the footer and a real okay redeem will answer you a real life human being in the United States even correct right here at the store and my affiliate discount code is stillman5 uh so use that to get an extra discount I want to let people know that I've got a webinar coming up at the end of the month with Clark Engelbert we're going to be talking about mineral balancing it's going to be very germane to the topic of sauna and detoxification because if you don't keep your minerals balanced you're not going to feel well and keeping your minerals balanced when you sauna as critical as we've talked about today I actually just put out a video yesterday on heavy metal toxicity where I get into a little bit more of how I use the sauna space in these cases and why it's important to use sauna as well as other aspects of heavy metal toxicity that's over at my sub stack all of this is in my link tree for the record and then I coach people how to use sauna to get well in my annual plans in my practice again that's in my link tree and Jim and I coach people into this in our coaching programs for annual programs that my practice are available in New York and Florida but my coaching practice we coach people all over the world and you can find out the five biggest Health mistakes which actually have not really got anything to do with well they indirectly have to do with sauna but not saunting is not one of our five biggest Health mistakes but sign up for that and you can find out more about that program so thanks everyone for watching Brian thank you for joining me any closing thoughts now thank you for having me Leland yeah I I guess my closing thought is is it was kind of what we started with and that's the feeling you know I don't like doing things for my health just because they're therapeutic I like to do things that are fun and feel good and that's the difference you get with the sauna space sauna and the sauna space experiences it it really feels good in there it really feels like you're doing something happy and healthy for your body it's not just another chore to do for your health it's it has so many benefits including engaging in some some
Stillness and some mindfulness on top of the the detox and and the grounding therapy and all these other things that uh you'll be blown away and if you're maybe dissuaded from the use of sauna due to it not being a fun experience you should try it again the sauna space way I absolutely agree I've used lots of different saunas this is the only one I use and recommend now thank you all right great thanks everyone for watching have a great day go get in your sauna get some heat
Transcript auto-generated by YouTube. Verbatim — duplicates intentionally preserved.
Heat widens blood vessels and moves blood toward the skin. Sweat follows. In plain language, the body is practicing cooling, circulation, and fluid movement while you remain still. That is why a sauna session can feel both passive and deeply active.
The discussion reaches beyond heat into light exposure, cellular stress, and the design of a repeatable environment. None of these details matter without consistency. The sanctuary works when the protocol is simple enough to return to.
Infrared sauna should leave the body clearer, not depleted. Hydration, cooling, timing, and medical context shape the practice. The aim is restoration with enough stimulus to invite adaptation.
A sauna is not only a hot room. Used well, it is a designed recovery signal.
Begin with a conservative session length and build only when recovery feels stable.
Pair heat with hydration and an unhurried cooldown.
Notice sleep, mood, soreness, and energy the next day; those are the signals that matter.
