Why We Almost Always Recommend Sauna

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. This show is for men and women who are exhausted, inflamed, living with brain fog, gut or skin issues, and who won't settle for answers like your labs are normal or just take this pill. Here we focus on the root causes of disease and on what I call repair deficit, the gap between what your body needs for optimal health and performance and what it's actually getting. This podcast is not personal medical advice. It is education to help you ask better questions so you can make better decisions about your health. Thank you for joining us and welcome to today's episode. Dr. Stillman here, back again for another exciting episode of Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing. Today I am joined by my friend Brian Richards, founder of SaunaSpace. He's an inventor, father, lover, husband. Did I miss anything? Son, enthusiastic dolphin and manatee watcher. We were just talking about his, his enjoying Florida these days. And I wanted to bring him on because one thing that we see in practice very consistently is that sauna is indispensable for healing. And the mechanisms that I share with patients are numerous, but for the most part, they boil down to you eliminate toxins in your sweat. This is very well described in the literature. And these are toxins that are going to wear you down. Destroy your health long-term, no matter what illness we're talking about. They're linked to heart disease, dementia, cancer, stroke, autoimmunity, allergy, everything and anything. So they're going to make you sick and ill and even, dare I say, dead before your time. So you should get them out. And then on top of that, sauna has got all these other benefits where it's helping to condition your cardiovascular system. And there's all kinds of research on things like heat stress and cellular longevity and vitality and things like that. And those are the main two things that I share with patients. And Brian's got a great story, which is how he ended up creating SaunaSpace. And I wanted him to tell it so people can really hear what's possible with sauna. Because when I tell people, I think sauna's important for you, I've found that sometimes it doesn't carry the weight that I wish it did. And I want people to really hear, this is what sauna can do for you. So Brian, thank you for joining me.

Yeah. Thank you for having me, Leland Stillman. Thank you for the tee-off. I'm really grateful to be here. My story is an amazing story. And it's really only one of so many stories of people healing themselves with sauna. Sauna does help extend your healthspan, you know, the years of your life you're healthy, but the way it's doing that is it's reducing your risk of developing and dealing with disease. So it's like wherever you're at, your story's gonna be different from mine when you use the sauna, but it works for everybody.

When did you get sick?

Well, When did you first fall sick? Sick, sick per se. I was just non-optimal. So I had a lot of, this was, this was 15 years ago, maybe now.

Yeah.

I, I was just low energy, Leland. I was low energy and I had acne on my back and I didn't sleep well. I had insomnia. I would, an allopathic diagnosis would probably be like adrenal fatigue or something like that.

Tell me how severe was the fatigue?

Well, you know, so I'm 42 now. I was, you know, late 20s and I would wake wake up in the morning and it would take some effort to like get up and go and get out of bed. And I'd get into a rhythm. I have a really good work ethic. And I would get into the day and get working. But it was like in the beginning it was hard to get going. And then at the end of the day, it was, it was like after I, at that time I was in rental real estate, so a lot of manual labor.

Mm-hmm.

And at the end of the day, I would just be tired. My brain was tired, my mind was tired, my body was tired.

And I was like, you said you were in rental real estate and you're doing manual labor. Was this outside or is it inside?

It was inside and outside. You know, it was remodeling of homes.

Were you breaking a sweat a lot of the time in your occupational work?

Yeah. Yeah. Quite a bit in the crawl space, dealing with a lot of toxic materials, honestly, too.

Well, you were. Yeah. So I, that, it was interesting to me cuz I, you know, people will sometimes say to me, well, can I take a walk and break a sweat? And I'm always hesitant to say that that replaces sauna because the volume of sweat is not the same. And the intensity of the heat is by no means the same.

Well, and the, and the state of the nervous system.

Yes.

Mostly. You know, if you're, if all your energy's going to your arms and legs, you're not healing, you know, you're, you're sweating to cool off mostly. We'll get into that.

So tell me about the insomnia then, or the difficulty sleeping, if you want to call it that.

Yeah. So I would, I would then go to bed and, and try to fall asleep and it would take like an hour, sometimes more to fall asleep. And then when I would wake up, I, I wouldn't feel so rested. So the sleep quality wasn't that great and it took a long time to fall asleep.

Did you ever wake up in the middle of the night?

Sometimes, not all the time, not the majority of the time, but I would wake up, you know, feeling groggy, tired, and I wouldn't be going to bed late. You know, I'd be trying to go to bed before 10:00 PM.

Would you ever struggle to stay awake during the day?

No, it's not like I was falling asleep. It was just, just more fatigue, low energy, like, and some moodiness. I'll admit as well, some irascible, you know, some irascibility, like just quick, you know, like quick to anger, quick to react, you know, quick to, you know, kind of like interesting, not centered, not really grounded.

If you had to rate your energy on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being bedridden, bedridden, and 10 being the energy of an 18-year-old who's healthy, where would you say you were?

Yeah, I was definitely right in the middle, you know, 5, maybe 4 or 5.

A lot of our patients are there. Okay. So then what happened?

Yeah. And, and, and yet I was young and if you met me and you didn't see like the acne on my back, you would maybe be baffled. Well, what's your problem, Brian? Like, You look great. You look fine. But internally I wasn't. And for all the reasons stated, it was frustrating. I got recommended to take, you know, some, some drugs for the acne and there's all kinds of, if you want to find sleep solutions, there's all kinds of weird things in the medical realm you can take for sleep. I was actually exploring some other natural ways like valerian root I had heard about. And, but, but basically I told my mom that the trigger for me was I told my mom. My mom's a naturopathic physician, so she's an MD, but she has a natural focus. Yeah. Yeah. She'd been my silent inspiration this whole time. I called her up and I was like, what do you think about my situation? And she said, she said, Brian, you're probably just toxic. You probably just need to detox and you should get a sauna. So that was the start of it. And she, that was it. Okay. Okay, mom. But I went online and researched and found what I do, the electric incandescent light bath. So the world's first electric sauna, it's a sauna powered by incandescent light bulbs. And the use of it dates back over 130 years. It's very, it was kind of like forgotten in time kind of thing.

Yeah. It was J. Harvey Kellogg who came up with that, right?

Yeah. So right after light bulbs were invented, John Harvey Kellogg basically took light bulbs and created this big wooden Victorian cabinet that lined with light bulbs and you would walk in and stand inside and they close the door and you would stay there and sweat. And he had some just tremendous results. You could read about it in a book called Light Therapeutics. Publicly available online. He, he tested it on like 50,000 chronically ill patients and he, you know, everything from chronic illness to acute snakebite victims.

Really?

And he, and he just had these tremendous healing stories. It was just like phenomenal. You can read the book. It's really impressive. And he also, he didn't, they didn't know about mitochondria, right? They hadn't even identified DNA at that point. But he knew that he said there's something special about the quality of the light. It has It's heating the body more effectively than a Turkish bath, and there's some particular healing quality to the light itself. That's as far as he took it. And so I saw this concept, I was like, whoa, that's really cool. I want to do that. And I built my own. So I built my own light bulb sauna.

Why did you decide to build your own instead of buying something off the shelf?

Yeah, well, it's, you know, once you get to know me, I like to tinker with things. And at that point I was motivated and I was also built in sort of building stuff anyway at that point. I was like, yeah, I'll build my own. So I used it right before bed. And I slept like a baby. And then the same thing happened the next day.

Just right away, right away, immediately.

Right away. Like I went to, I was like, wow, I feel tired. Went to sleep and then woke up. I was like, hey, I actually feel pretty good. Did the same thing the next time.

That's great.

So the insomnia was gone and the quality of my sleep was like immediately better.

Did you break a sweat each time?

Oh yeah.

Yeah. How long were you, were you saunaing for then?

Probably like 35, 40 minutes. And so there were 4 250-watt bulbs. This is before SaunaSpace and before our Firelight bulb and before all of our sort of more all the stuff we've been doing. But I waited till I sweated profusely, which is what you see in the, in the sauna literature. You want to be sweating a pound of water out. You want to raise core temperature 3 degrees. So a pound of water means like you've got drops dripping down your arm. You know, it's not a light sweat. It's a strong sweat.

So let me ask you something. Does that mean that you've, by the time you've got these drops dripping down your arm, you've given up a pound, or does it mean that you get there and you keep going for a while?

For me, it's when I see not just like some dripping, but I see sort of rivulets of sweat running down my arms and there's a lot, and it's almost like the whole upper arm gets covered by a sheen of sweat instead of droplets. That's when I know personally. Yeah. That's my, my point. And I've measured this personally with infrared thermometers and stuff, measuring core body temperature increase back when I was more left brain about all this, but it's just a feeling thing.

How did you talk to us about the thermometers you used?

Yeah, you can use one of those instant read infrared thermometers.

We talking about like the little laser ones?

It's got like a, yeah, it's got like a little thing that you just, you can put it here, you can put it in your arm, but it reads in like 2 seconds. It's not the old school thermometer that you stick in your mouth. And it's all back of the hand. You know, you're attempting to measure a core temperature, sort of like you're trying to infer that. But if you do it over many sauna sessions and you measure different areas, you'll see what does a 3-degree more or less temperature increase look like? And, and how much am I sweating? What does that feel like? So you can do that. You can also weigh yourself. So the sweat, you take a digital scale, weigh yourself before and after. That's how much you sweated out. It's how much you lost, right?

So long as you've got a good scale, which there can be a lot of noise in there, but yeah.

Yeah. But you know, you eventually get like a baseline. Another goal of, in the clinical research for saunas is to reach a state of subjective exhaustion. So you kind of feel like. Uncomfortable for a little bit. Yes. And you, you start to be like, ah, I want to get outta here. If you can stay in just a few more minutes, you get a huge production of dynorphins, which leads to more endorphins afterward, which means you feel really, just like when you're working out, like, you know, you want to quit.

Yeah. You, you always seem so pleasant, Brian. You always seem like you're, you just had an endorphin rush from your sauna.

I endeavor to be authentically myself. And yeah, there's a lot of joy in that. A lot of unconditional, unconditional love as best I can most of the time. Sometimes my subconscious programming still pops up.

Sure.

And reminds me and teaches me, oh, we got something else here to, to work on.

So let me recap that again, because I really think this is important. And I think it's easy for people to kind of, you know, either mishear or forget if they're just listening in the car, on the go, folding laundry, whatever. Mm-hmm. 3-degree rise in temperature, 1 pound of sweat looks like very significant sheen is the word you used of sweat on the upper arm. And then if you get to a point of subjective exhaustion where you feel tired and like your body wants to leave, if you then stick it out for a few more minutes, that's when you get a really big improvement or increase in dynorphins, which I want to mention something here for people. One thing we're very curious about in the practice is something called LDN, low-dose naltrexone, and low-dose naltrexone modulates the immune system through cells in the brain at very, very, very low doses. And it's a big deal now in autoimmunity. And I believe people are looking at it for cancer, but don't quote me on that. And if they are, I'm not sure where the literature is, but it's really interesting that people are having these really big improvements in health and some really remarkable outcomes in autoimmunity in particular with low-dose naltrexone. What does that to do with sauna. What that drug is modulating is the neurotransmitters we're talking about being released post-sauna. These are not just feel-good happy chemicals, which is kind of how they get billed in like the popular science and health literature. They are very complex immune modulating and behavior changing chemicals. So, you know, I kind of joke with Brian, oh, you always seem so like pleasant and affable. But the simple reality of it is living in a modern artificially lit climate-controlled world, you know, I don't know how else to put it. People take on this kind of brittle, kind of like negative and kind of bland personality, I almost want to say. And I really believe that when we step into sunlight, when we step into sauna, when we're exposing ourselves to the frequencies that really help our bodies to be optimal, I genuinely believe they're having these very complex effects on our behavior and our personalities and our— and not just our physical bodies in terms of like autoimmunity, allergy, cancer diagnoses, right? And I really am fascinated by this, as you may be able to tell. And it's one of the things I'm most curious about with sauna because I think one thing about it is that it's such a powerful tool. The, the thing about powerful tools like sauna or ozone, or I could go on and on, is the deep— you can go so deep on the literature. Like you can have a whole textbook on mechanisms and biology and case studies and experiments. It just affects your body in so many positive ways, it almost sort of defies investigation or description. And this is just one of those little tie-ins that I, I can't help but remark on in what you're regarding, what you've been saying about the dynorphins.

That's, yeah, it's, it's great to zoom in on that one example, but it's also important, like you just said, to zoom out. We're spirit beings in physical bodies. These are, these are vessels that hold something much greater than that, which is seen and physical. And so there are temples.

Yeah.

And so we have to take care of our temple and we're spirit beings. We're also light You know, we have physical systems fundamentally that are governed by light and electromagnetism and frequency and the firelight and the sunlight and heat coming from light as it is in my sauna, as it is from the sun. It reminds us of who we are. And that we're infinite beings, we're infinite spirit beings. And this is, this is our norm. Our norm is not the junk LED light and the EMFs and all the stress and the automation, you know, the automaton, the robot mode. We're actually unlimited beings possible of anything. We're the architects of our own reality and we're reflections of God here on Earth. And our mission is to be our authentic selves and like find our gifts, be of service to the world around us. And to get there though, we have to take care of the vessel. Just light, heat, grounding, and sweating in a passive state is all about cleansing. You know, this is like the refiner's fire is to cleanse oneself, to temper oneself, to bring yourself back to yourself, but with a new awareness and a new clairvoyance or clarity about yourself and about reality. And with what we're faced with in the modern world, we need to take this seriously, like cleansing and like supporting the body's self-healing tools are essential to, you know, being in a state of joy and happiness and oneness, I dare say.

Yeah, I agree. And I think it's really interesting. There's lots of different places where people over the centuries have alluded to all of that. Many of them Well, I guess I'll just mention, like, I think about these a lot. I think it's in Matthew, Jesus says something like— first he says you're salt, then he says you're light. And you know what he doesn't mention is water, because at the time water on planet Earth was effectively all— it hadn't been corrupted the way we've been— we've corrupted it. But he makes this point of saying you're salt and you're light. And I mean, I would say that implicit in that is knit together by water. And it is somewhat shocking to me how careless people are with the light and the salt that they're made of. And I think there's this conceit that our brains are sort of beyond the touch of, you know, it's just a piece of chocolate cake. It's just some processed food. It's just a soda. It's just a, this is just a that. It's not. And it's, I'm not trying to freak people out. And, you know, I mean, I have the occasional cheat day too, but you've got to really focus on this because it doesn't just determine your health and your longevity. We're not just talking about another 10 years of life. We're talking about being the fullest, most authentic, most creative, inspirational version of you. And how can you not pursue that, chase that intensely, I think anyway. So yeah, I say that because I think a lot of people end up thinking sauna, it's a chore. It is, it cannot be a chore. It has to be an opportunity for you to program your body with the frequencies of light that are going to help you to not only experience and realize the best health possible, but to become ultimately the best version of yourself. And that sounds like, I don't know, it sounds to me, if I didn't know what I know about sauna, it would sound a bit over the top. But I'm telling you, and the reason I wanted to do it, I feel like we had to chase you down for this because you're a busy guy. I wanted to make a point of doing this because I see sauna. It is a very consistent finding in the practice. Patients who take the supplements, minerals specifically, we recommend do the saunas, particularly with the SaunaSpace, and then make the diet and lifestyle changes we recommend, which have to do with salt, light, all kinds of things. They're the ones who have the biggest eliminations of heavy metals on their hair testing. They're the ones who have the biggest shifts in their physiology, which is ultimately what everyone is coming to us for. They want their physiology to shift. In a positive direction. So well said. I couldn't agree more with what you just mentioned there. Yeah.

And that's okay. It's okay to just start out with the physical. I mean, the physical is important. This, you know, we are these infinite beings in physical bodies, so it's okay. Let's start out with the physical, cleanse the physical, nurture and nourish the physical, and know that that path leads to awakening of the mind and clarity, and then generally will eventually lead to some sort of like renewal in your spirituality and your sense of self and like, what is my goal in life? What am I passionate about? What are my gifts? What do I love? What do I not like? You know, what's not aligned with me.

So I want to get back to your story. You started saunaing, you saw your sleep immediately improve. What happened next?

Yeah, I was just really inspired to continue to use it. So I did so over 6 months, 4 or 5 times a week. And I was living life, you know, I was in the business, this rental real estate, starting a family and things like that. And I noticed though, uh, it sort of hit me after maybe 4 or 5 months. No, maybe like, yeah, 5 or 6 months as I was waking up in the morning, I realized, whoa, my cognitive function has improved. My mind is super clear and sharp. My recall, my decision-making, my patience with my mother, you name it. It was all like—

Can you give us any specific example?

Well, the one I just gave was, for me, it was the most impactful. Like, just more patient, even with my mother, with everyone, just more compassionate, more patient, more connected. As you know, I was more connected to myself. I was able to better connect with others around me without like the judgment or the need to like correct or anything like that. Just be able to be. There was a sense of resilience and emotional resilience, I suppose, that, that was new and I was, it was fresh and I was like, wow, this is amazing. And then on top of that, my skin looked amazing. Like way, like all the acne and stuff was gone. Energy levels were amazing. And my sleep, you know, I really like had no issues with sleep. And nowadays still, the only time I have issues, I don't have like the best sleep is if I eat something heavy after like 6 or 7 PM, you know, kind of a late night thing. I don't quite sleep as well, but otherwise super dialed in. And so I'm like, I just sat there in the sauna, otherwise living my life, living pretty cleanly. You know, I don't eat, I'm not eating out much, you know, probably an 80/20 rule of home cooked good foods, clean water. And, and so this was the only thing that I was really like, the big thing that I did differently was using the sauna. 4 or 5 days a week. This all started in Columbia, Missouri, where SaunaSpace is based, our factories in Columbia, Missouri.

Yeah. And I want to point that out because it's the reality is sauna originated. I think of it as having originated in very northerly cold places, you know, Scandinavia, Russia is where it's most, I would say, well-known and widely studied. Would you agree?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would say the more well-known cultural traditions are from there, but you really see sauna everywhere in the world. You have sweat lodges. Yes. You have little caves in Ireland. You, they go in and then put coals in there and Japanese hot pools and Turkish baths. It's really everywhere in the world. They have some kind of sit quietly under a lot of heat and sweat tradition.

That's exactly right. And I make that point because, you know, the interesting thing about humanity is that all the other mammals are bounded in their geographic distribution by what they've got on their back. If they've got fur, if that fur is not, you know, tundra built, they're not going to go there. And if they've got fur that's tundra built, you're not going to find them in equatorial Africa. And the reason that's important is humans can go everywhere because we do weird things. And what I find really interesting is that the further we've moved away from the location where we can survive without protective equipment, you know, clothing, that is, we've brought the heat of that equatorial zone or tropical zone or subtropical zone with us. And if you actually really think about it, the zone where we can live without protective equipment, shall we say, is very narrow. It's like the tropics. Even in the tropics, you can get some cold temperatures that would, would freeze someone to death overnight. We've carried light with us in various ways as we've moved out of the tropics. And like you've said, the colder it gets, the more ingrained in the social traditions it becomes because it's more important. People found it to be more impactful. Like the Finnish, I think, have a saying, you probably know it better than I do, that like, if you can't cure it with, I think it's like vodka and sauna, it must be like deadly. Like you're not going to recover, which is, you know, I'm not endorsing that for the record, but it's a saying I'm told in Finland. And so, you know, it doesn't surprise me that you experienced this in Missouri, which is not a very cold, dark place, but particularly with our modern environments and our— and when I say environments, I mean buildings. We've made our buildings very dark. You know, they're not brightly lit oftentimes. Usually that's been sacrificed on the altar of energy efficiency. We are going to have an energy-efficient home. And so even if you live in Florida, you're going to have these tiny windows and your house is actually going to be kind of dark, which I think is really a tragedy because it turns into people with diseases of what I would call light deficiency when they live in a very well-lit place. In places like Columbia, Missouri, you have that on top of the cold gray winters where you don't get a lot of sunlight. And so the further north that a patient is, or the less light they get in their environment, like I have patients who are, you know, working in an office where maybe it's a north-facing office, maybe it's in a northerly place like Chicago, maybe it's got a, I mean, like in big cities, sometimes somebody will have a window and there's like a wall. They just look at a, you know, blank wall of brick, which is, I think is very sad. Those people, the more light you don't get,— the less light you get, I suppose I should say— the more I care about you having a sauna, because until we've fixed what I view as the light deficit, I don't know or can't rule out that that is not the thing holding you back from healing. Anything you want to add to that, Brian? Quick pause. If you're listening to this and thinking, he's talking about me, I'm tired, foggy, inflamed, and it feels like no one can figure out why, then your next step is not another random protocol. It's a structured assessment. With myself or a member of my team. Go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call. Pick a time that works for you and add it to your calendar. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care and it's not a promise of cure. It's a calm, structured way to stop guessing and see whether our approach is right for you. We have We have a limited number of these appointments each month. This conversation is hitting close to home. Visit stillmanmd.com now and book a call with myself or a member of my team. Thank you for listening. Now back to the episode.

Yeah, for sure. Like the sun can satisfy over two-thirds of our caloric needs, the sun. And it's the near-infrared light in the sun that's doing this because it's going in deep and stimulating mitochondrial response. You know, it's like delivering energy, photons of light from the sun or our firelight bulb in the sauna space are converted into electrons in the body. That these wavelengths of, of light, particularly near infrared, cuz it's what goes in deepest into the body, stimulates melatonin and glutathione production. So that your antioxidant reserves of the body are, whoop, are, are refilled.

Yes.

It also, there's this thing called redox potential, which I don't want to get too much into the weeds, but basically we're supposed to have this, all of our cells are supposed to have this charge that's built up and it's supposed to be negative 4 millivolts of negative electrical potential, like capacity. To do stuff, cellular signaling, move stuff around, do things. And the near-infrared light from the sun, or, you know, or from firelights on them, it goes in and it, and it corrects and reestablishes this thing called redox potential in the cells. And when that is optimal, everything that happens in the cell is working. Like if a cell has negative 4 millivolts, it doesn't have any inflammation. It doesn't have any like signs of disease. It basically works perfectly. Water is structured.

Yes.

Cellular signaling is vroom, vroom, vroom, really fast. And as we, we're in the modern environment, lots of blue light, lots of EMF, lots of stress. We don't have any sunlight. That voltage drops and our, this battery pack that we have, our, our capacity of our cell to do things drops. So that's a huge thing that light does. It's not just all these other things, it just, it like restores optimal electrical function of the cell each time you get out into it.

I totally agree.

And so what we do at SaunaSpace is we said, hey, let's mimic the sun. Let's make an incandescent light source, which produces heat from light and sort of the longer wavelength infrared, but it also produces what's called red light therapy to where we have light receptors in our mitochondria, in our little power plants in our cells that absorb these wavelengths of light and they produce a tremendous array of, of healing effects.

I want to mention a couple quick things before we jump into the bulb. So everything you said, I agree with, and I, I want people to understand it the way that I view it anyway, as a clinician is, you know, you can't think about your body in the reductionistic way or the mechanistic way of it's a bunch of hoses and tubes and struts and pulleys and levers. This isn't how the world or the body work. The truth is that your cells have all these receptors in them, and it's much more important to think about your body as something that needs to be tuned just as much as it needs to be nourished. So like, you don't just put gas in your car, you make sure that the engine has the right amount of gas flow to the engine to combust, and if too much or too little, it doesn't work. So what what I see happening often is that people have heard, I need to take glutathione, or I need to take melatonin. And we'll use these things judiciously because people can have material deficiencies. But the problem is that with how wired your metabolism is into light, how can you possibly just approach it from— I just had an interesting conversation. It's funny this is happening today. Just had an interesting conversation with a woman whose labs and history somewhat puzzle me because she says she's eating 120 grams of protein a day, which is a fair amount for height and build, but she's got the lowest, some of the lowest protein markers in the practice, which either makes me think she's overhydrated or she's not assimilating and then managing and like, and absorbing the protein well. And we'll figure it out. But, you know, I said to her, you know, you seem to need more input. And then I start to wonder about if we've got, and this is one of the first things we do with patients, we figure out what the input needs to be. You're low in this, you're deficient in that. But just as much as we need to figure that out, we need to figure out what frequencies do you need for your your body to kick in and take that raw material that you just put in and turn it into what you need to have this physiologic effect. And so like, that's why, for example, like I have an interesting story in the practice recently of a woman who came off thyroid hormone and then using red infrared light therapy, she was able to stay off thyroid hormone with better free T3 levels, thyroid hormone levels, than when she'd been on it. I've got another case, he mitigated EMF and he said, this worked better for me than taking a thyroid hormone supplement. It's real. This energetic stuff is real. You can't maybe touch it, feel it, see it the way you might like. I think there's a psychological thing here. I'd actually be kind of curious your take on this, Brian. I think people are like very satisfied by buying bottles and boxes and bags of like things, including pills. And I think there's something about, it's like, there's like a, the brain doesn't necessarily have the same attachment to like a sauna session when it should. Right. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah, totally. I think there's a couple of things going on there, you know, even in, in natural wellness, there's this emphasis on a transactional approach to health. Like you're missing A, B, and C. You need to do X, Y, and Z. You need this bottle, this thing, this, this test. And so for, for that, number one, people are not thinking of light as food. Light is the ultimate nutrient. Light is actually food. And there's, so there's junk light, just like McDonald's light. And then there's, you know, there's like organic biodynamic light and there's natural light. That's incandescent light, light from the sun, light from the firelight bulb, from the fireplace, incandescent light bulbs. This is all the highest quality light. And this is the light that we're biologically programmed, divinely engineered to, to get this, this form of light. So, so light's a food. And when we're under the blue lights, we're eating junk light and it's terrible. It's poisoning us. But we have good light, it's nourishing for us and healing for us. So that's like number one. But number two, I think you touched on it and I feel it's a very challenging and yet important topic to at least mention. All physiological disease has a root in the emotional subtle body. So you don't develop anything physiological. Unless you first have an emotional, spiritual, subtle body disease. You have some incoherence where you've absorbed emotional energy or you've held onto some emotional energy that then will begin to manifest in that organ or in that tissue on a physical level, you know, that it has its roots in the emotion. So we can go in, you know, guns a-blazing and do sauna and dose like all kinds of supplements and we can resolve the physiological ailment, right? We can restore health to the physical system, but the disease will just come back if the emotional body is unaddressed. And the challenge with that is there's not nearly as much financial incentive to work on ourselves psychologically. Like, what is our subconscious programming and where are we hating ourselves or not loving ourselves or feeling guilty or shameful or judgmental towards ourselves? And how do we work on that? There's so many amazing, effective tools out there, but there's not nearly as much money or financial incentive as there is for products, supplements, and then in the medical world, you know, surgery and all the other crazy stuff that they recommend. That's, you know, it's, but sitting down and looking at yourself in the mirror and telling yourself, I love you, you know, doing mirror work like that and looking at ways that you're judging yourself and saying to your— telling yourself, I forgive myself. You know, I'm a child of God. It's okay. Everything's okay. There's nowhere to go. We're here now in this moment, the present, which is all that matters. And it's, we're going to start taking care of ourselves now. These types of things, they're not like, they're messy and they're challenging.

They're hard.

It's much easier to say, okay, doc, I got those 3 bottles and I'm taking them. Now what?

Yeah. What's also, now that I've thought about it in this conversation, I think it's easier to take a couple pills or a handful of pills than it is for many people anyway, to like strip down, jump in the sauna with a towel, sit there for 30, 40 minutes and then get out. I just think one of the main reasons I wanted to do this podcast with you was just to communicate the fact that we cannot replace this with a pill and we really can't replace it with anything. And, you know, I see this so often, someone's 50, 60, 70. They've got a significant toxic burden in their testing. I can see it. It is evident. It is undeniable. I know it's the tip of the iceberg, and I know that the more serious they are about chipping away at the iceberg and not just the tip, the better the results they're going to get long-term, no matter what else they do, right? No matter how many rounds of supplementation we do, how many rounds of lab testing or what advanced protocols we do, I know that's going to be be one of the highest leverage things for them to do to move the needle from where they are to where they want to be. And I honor your point to this of, you know, you do need— and, but I think it's this fascinating interplay between, you know, what you're calling, I think you said the spiritual body or however you want to put it, the spirit, the soul. It is a fascinating interplay within the vessel because I will have patients saying things like, you know, the minerals and the light therapy we've chosen for them. Sauna or other various modalities or products, like, has had this effect on them processing emotions, which for me is very gratifying because it tells me we're helping them along a much more profound journey than just, hey, you know, I got this fatigue, what can you do for me, right? So I want to make sure we cover how you went from, okay, I've had this great outcome with my own homemade light cabinet, to engineering the bulbs, because the bulbs are important. And I want your thoughts on how you came up with the build, why it matters, why the frequencies matter, and why they have a greater impact on health and physiology than just something you could buy off the shelf like you did.

Yeah. Yeah. It's so in the beginning I just bought something off the shelf and that's what I used for my own healing. And it was tremendous. It was amazing. However, in the journey of SaunaSpace, I began to explore what could be better, how could it be improved? And so I ended up spending like over 4 years, more than that now, quite a bit I've said this story a few times now, so, but it's been probably 8 or 9 years now where I continue to tweak it. And I started out saying, how can we emit more light therapy? So more near-infrared light, more of what's in, in literature is called photobiomodulation. So the use of red and near-infrared light to heal tissue. These are wavelengths that are 600 to about 1,000, a little bit more, 1,000 nanometers or so. So it's a pretty narrow band. Most of that band is is in the invisible. There's a little bit in visible red light, and these are the wavelengths that are absorbed by the mitochondria's cytochrome c. It's the mitochondria's light receptor enzyme. And to do that, I began redesigning the filament to basically allow it to run hotter at a higher Kelvin, which shifted the spectrum into a higher frequency. So there, there was more wattage, more irradiance, more milliwatts per centimeter squared coming out in that wavelength band. It's a broad spectrum light source that still includes towards all of the infrared past that band, which is where the infrared light starts to heat you at about 1,000 nanometers and then greater. And there's some mid-infrared and there's some far infrared too in this, in the bulb I developed. But most of the output is in the near-infrared. That's number one, giving you these light therapy responses in the mitochondria. And number two is heating you radiantly. So the light penetrates many inches in the body and heats you from within. This is the way the sun heats you. You. So when you feel that sort of inner warmth when you go out in the sun, that's because it's the light itself that heats you. So I set out to make this bulb and eventually did it. It uses a very special color of red stained glass, so it's not dyed or sprayed or coated. It's sort of a, it's a boutique bulb and it's also force tested with water. So it's turned on and splashed with water for 20 seconds to ensure it's like a really high quality bulb because is we started increasing the temperature of the filament, it starts to reduce the lifespan of the bulb. So it's trying to find that magic sweet spot. So the bulb, the Firelight bulb that I've developed is it, it lasts for like 5,000 hours. So it's many years of use typically, you know, some can fail before that, but that's the, the average rating. And yet it still is emitting quite a bit more light therapy than a standard heat lamp. So that was the start of the journey. And all of that led to the development of all the products. Or the, the, the sauna and our portable Glow Light, we were doing that while we were developing this, this bulb. So this bulb took many, many years to develop. But what I love about what we do as it pertains to what you just said about, hey, I just don't have the time to take 40 minutes to do the sauna. And the SaunaSpace sauna, especially the Super Sauna, has 7 bulbs. You don't have to preheat it and you get inside and your sauna session is 15 minutes, maybe 20 max.

Wow.

So it's this experience of raising the core temperature 3 degrees, sweating out at least a pound of water, having that proper sauna session is now reduced to like 15 or 20 minutes. So, and when you're in there, it also, I think people see saunas that are like these torture, these like hot torture chambers that you go into. This is a different experience. This is fun. You know, you put some, you put some meditation music on, put some, you can put a prayer on, you put some healing frequencies on and you get in there and you just hang out. You know, listen to a good podcast or whatever, just make sure it's on airplane mode and yeah, but you get in there and you tell yourself, I'm here enjoying myself. You don't go in there and like start like worrying about what you're going to do afterwards. You know, you want to just be present and you can feel the light reminding your body that it can heal itself. The light is this powerful natural input. That's food. It's new. It's a nutrient. And, and so the experience is different. It's not like a regular sauna that you have to preheat it an hour. It takes an hour. It's the air heating you in a regular sauna. So it's just, it can be fun, you know, and, and in social communal environments, sometimes it can be fun. But what we do at SaunaSpace is like very zen. It's very nourishing, very grounding, you know, has the grounding mat too. So it's, you get out and you feel revitalized and better than you did going in, like way more.

Let's mention specifically that, cause I don't know if you mentioned this specifically, but just so people know, you created a sauna covering that is a Faraday cage.

Yeah. Yeah. There's an upgrade to the sauna called the Silver Lining, and it's a 35% silver organic cotton material that is grounded to the grounding mat and the, and the light panel. So when you close the curtain, the whole thing is a grounded Faraday cage. So you don't, that's why if you're taking your phone in there, you want to put it on full airplane mode so it's not transmitting anymore.

For sure.

Because it's not, you know, it's creating this, this EMF-free haven. So you go inside, there's no Bluetooth, there's no Wi-Fi or cellular. It's extremely calming to the nervous system. And, you know, I, it's just, I only have anecdotal reports on it, but you feel it. You feel you, you'll sweat faster and your experience is more, it's more profound. It's very quiet to the senses. It's, it's, and all, all the saunas have a grounding mat and all the sauna light panels are EMF shielded. So there's no electric or magnetic field leakage that, that stresses the SaunaSpace user. And, and you can get that full Silver Lining upgrade if you, if you want that full, full, full wireless protection.

So I want to give people some, I want to walk people kind of through how I think about how I do this. And I'm curious what you think. I strip down, get in. I find the sauna space to be very comfortable. I really like getting in and sitting there on the stool. It's a very comfortable stool. I guess as stools go, I have my towel on the stool and then extending in front of me, in front of my feet so that I can sit and have all the sweat drop onto the towel because I want to be able to pull all that stuff out and not get it all over the floor mat, which you can do. I just don't know what happens after 100 hours of that. Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, we actually have our own floor towels and and stool towels now. It's called the Pure Layer Tile System. I have to hook you up with that, Leland Stillman.

Oh, great. Yeah, we would love that.

End of last year. So yeah, it's a, it's a floor towel that matches the floor and then there's a stool towel with many layers that cinches over the top of the stool. So you sweat on that and then as you said, you remove the towel. Yeah. When you're done and everything stays really nice.

So I usually start sitting on the stool facing the light. I've got my, my elbows on my knees. And so I'm sort of leaning forward into the light. I like to get my face and my head nice and hot. I hear different people saying like, you shouldn't do that. You should do that. I don't worry about it. I just do what feels good. And then as I heat up, I start to back off from the, from the lights and eventually I'll turn around. So I'm getting both sides, my back and my front. And sometimes if I particularly like, am I, if I'm feeling like moving, I'll like stand up and, and bend over the stool or just like move a little bit to get different parts of my body with the sun.

Sauna.

Any other tips, thoughts on how to use it?

Yeah, you want to drink some clean structured water before you get in.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and then you just get in, flick the lights on, you're naked. Like, like, like you described, most people start facing the light, and you can rotate just a quarter turn so you can face this way and then go like that, and then continue to rotate a quarter turn if you want instead of just front to back to get like that maximum exposure to the light. And also, as you heat up the front, then you get hot, gets intense, you rotate so you're not overheating any part of your body in of like a comfortability standpoint, the blood that was here starts to flow to the side or to the back. And you actually get like a contrast therapy of sorts. Cause like the front that's facing the light is really hot. And then back here, it's actually cooler. And then, so all of this is just like, just really like shunting blood throughout the torso really effectively. And you just rotate it as many times as you want. If you have the Supersonic with more light, lights, you'll rotate more quickly because it's quite intense. And you're just going for that, that end of, you know, that, those endpoints we've described. And when you, when you get done, you get out, you pull your stool towel out with you. Most people like to go rinse off in the shower. And I alternate. Sometimes I use an exfoliating brush when I rinse off in the shower over my whole body. Some people will say, no, that's heresy. You need to use the, it's a dry brushing, which you need to do at the very beginning of the sauna session or even before. You can play around with both. Both the brush and the sauna both activate your lymphatic drainage, your lymphatic system, and the vigorous scrubbing does even more so. And then when I'm done with all that and I'm, I'm, I've dried off from the shower, I drink another glass of structured water and I'm always usually adding some type of natural electrolyte to it, like sea salt. Sometimes I'm taking humic and fulvic acid, which is pretty much the safest binder you can take out there. It's, and a lot of people actually recommend that too. There's, there's a lot of great binders out there, but taking a binder either right before the sauna session or right after is highly recommended cuz some of the toxins are not sweated out. Some kind of go to your, your bowels. And when you have the, you've consumed that binder, you're just helping the body to continue to eliminate.

Yeah. So we, one thing I'll note, if you're a patient at the practice or you're in our community online, we have a lot of resources for you in terms of minerals, hydration that we use to figure out how much water or mineral content to give someone. As a general rule, I just want people to know that if you're going to sweat out, you know, you said a pound of, of water or sweat, really sweat, a pound of sweat being approximately the same density as water. What is that? 16 ounces in a pound, 16 ounces of water, right? So this immediately increases your daily hydration need by a significant margin, almost invariably. So be aware of that. I have an electrolyte and mineral replacement solution document on my Substack, drstillmanuncensored.com. If you just put in electrolyte solutions, you'll find it. And I cover what we use post-sauna there. But as a general rule, people just need to be aware if you're feeling— and I haven't run into this in clinical practice, I must say— if you're feeling worse or tired or wiped out, and some people particularly would say like POTS, low blood pressure, will struggle to tolerate the sauna. My answer is more minerals, not necessarily more water, but you want to get those inputs right so that you can tolerate the sauna and then also have enough water to really excrete the toxins in the first place. And know that it does change your fluid requirements over the course of day.

So yeah, the electrolytes are really important and I'm sure you have some great recommendations. I personally just like to stay really natural with it and not have like cheap powdered electrolytes. It's basically like lab, you know, table salt. It's not like, I try to stay away from that stuff. There's some different forms of sea salt and other stuff.

We have DIY versions with like sea salt.

Yeah. There, and there's even forms of like dried sea salt that are droppers that are easy to use. And, and, and like you said, you know, you don't necessarily need a whole lot more water, but you can, you can really increase temporarily the amount of electrolytes you're taking. You know, the brain dehydrates faster than any other tissue of the body really. So like if you have a headache, the quickest way to get rid of it is just put a ton of sea salt and a little bit of water and drink it. And your, your headache will like re— get reduced like that. It's usually the brain is just lacking in electrolytes. So it's like simple stuff, but definitely something that's important to monitor when you're using the sauna.

Yeah. Anything else you wanna share with people?

Wow. We covered a lot. You know, we're— SaunaSpace is, is based in the US and and it's all handmade with love. And it's definitely a different experience. You have to try it out. That's why it comes with the trial, but it is a fundamental aspect of, it's, it's a very high frequency healing technology that supports your wellbeing wherever you're at, whatever age or stage or lifestyle you have, you will feel better and have, you know, you'll extend your health span and basically reduce your risk of brain-related issues when you use sauna frequently. And we're all, we all need more light. So this, this, our delivers both in ample heaping portions. And yeah, our other products too. We didn't talk much about the Glow, but the Glow, I have it next to me. I see one behind you there hiding behind you.

It's right.

It's a cool product. You can use it all day long. It's bringing that natural biologically coherent spectrum indoors to your indoor space. So it cancels out blue light and flickering light. So for screen fatigue, screen work, but also just to have nice light indoors. It's not LED. Especially after dark. It's, uh, it's kind of like having your own little fireplace buddy next to you all day long. And of course it's used therapeutically on the body and, and targeted applications.

Yeah. So we love the SaunaSpace, strongly recommended to patients. We've got an affiliate link and a code to get you a discount, which will be in the description of this episode, wherever you are listening to it. Brian, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you, Leland. Appreciate you. Thank you for having me. Yeah.

Thanks everyone for joining us. We'll see you next time. Next time. Thank you for listening to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. If this conversation felt uncomfortably familiar and you're ready for someone to take your story seriously, your next step is to book a call with myself or a member of my team. Go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call. Choose a time that works for you and confirm it. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care and it's not a guarantee of results. It's a calm, structured assessment where we'll create a plan to help you achieve your health goals. We have a limited number of calls available each month. So if you see a time that fits your schedule, book it right away. Again, the link is stillmanmd.com. If you find this podcast helpful, subscribe, leave a review, or share this episode with a friend or family member who needs help getting their health back. I'm Dr. Leland Stillman. Thank you for listening. And until next time, be well.