Justin Langer: Health benefits of brutal sauna are reminder of how being uncomfortable pushes you to be better

Sweat puddles on the floor.

Your brain whimpers and then screams: “Quit, walk out, find the cool, retreat, escape from this torture.”

Every part of you wants out.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Breathe.

That is the only way to describe the back half of an Aufguss session at Vesla studios in Jolimont.

If you haven’t experienced one, Aufguss is a guided sauna ceremony, where Phen the sauna master goes to work with the heat, essential oils, and a fanning system with a towel, that makes your skin prickle, your heart thump, as wave after wave of heat rolls over you with nowhere to hide.

The ritual runs as three 13-minute sessions with a recovery break in between.

By the midpoint, your mind is no longer asking politely. It is screaming. Get out. Get to the cold plunge. This is madness.

And that is exactly the moment the whole thing becomes worthwhile.

Because in the middle of that chaos, when your mind is telling you to quit, you have a choice.

You can bolt for the door, nobody would blame you, or you can do the only other thing available, drop your shoulders, close your eyes, and breathe. Slow the exhale. Soften the panic. Tell yourself what I have told myself a thousand times in a thousand harder places than a sauna: “Relax, breathe, get through this.”

And you do.

After our last session, a former athlete in the group, Courtney, posted about her experience the next day.

Courtney is an ex-boxer who owns New Culture Movement in Scarborough. Tough as she is, she was honest about how brutal it had been. There were moments of real anxiety, she said. Moments she felt like she was going to explode. But she stayed. She breathed. She got through it.

But it was what she said next that prompted this column. She described feeling a deep, settled calm for the next 24 hours.

“It is the calmest I have felt for some time,” she said. “Perhaps there is a method to the madness?”

The deal Vesla, Phen and the sauna offers you isn’t working through the discomfort, where serenity awaits you on the other side, but my experience is that’s exactly what it does.

The physical benefits of a sauna are among the best-researched in preventative health.

A landmark Finnish study followed more than 2300 men for more than 20 years and found that those who used a sauna four to seven times a week had around half the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease compared with once-a-week users. And a 40 per cent lower risk of death from any cause.

The same research group found regular sauna use was associated with a roughly 65 per cent reduced risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

The mechanics make sense. Sitting in that heat pushes your heart rate up like a brisk walk, improves blood vessel function, lowers blood pressure over time and triggers protective heat-shock proteins that help repair the body at a cellular level.

The Finns were not just relaxing. They were training.

But it is the psychological dividend that fascinates me most. Researchers are now running clinical trials on heat exposure as a treatment for depression, with studies showing that raising core body temperature can lift mood for weeks afterwards.

Heat releases endorphins and activates the same serotonin pathways targeted by antidepressants, and scientists studying resilience believe that deliberately exposing yourself to controlled stress, intense heat, then intense cold, teaches your nervous system to handle stress of every kind.

In other words, that 15 minutes of chaos in the sauna is a workout for the body and a gym session for the mind — and it is the second of those that may change your life.

It’s no wonder saunas are becoming so popular.

Most mornings I am down at City Beach for a coffee and the sauna on the sand — down there is like a conveyor belt of people going from the heat to the ocean.

There must be a reason for it. People don’t tend to do things they don’t enjoy or feel they will not benefit from.

When I was fighting the urge to escape from the heat last Sunday night, it made me think about the concept of comfort.

Think about the last time you planned a morning run. The alarm goes off, it’s dark, the bed is warm, and a voice starts up, ‘stay here, you deserve it, you need the rest, go tomorrow’.

The hardest part of the run is not the road. It is the 30 seconds between the alarm and the shoes. Win that battle and the rest takes care of itself.

Of course, when you do hit the road, the same voice will test your will to continue _ ‘why are you doing this?’, ‘it’s time to walk’, you’re going to hurt yourself’, ‘no one else is doing this’. Blah, blah, blah.

Mental toughness is never giving into this little voice of catastrophe and dread.

Truth is, most of us crave comfort everywhere. In our work, where we put off the difficult conversation. In our diets, where the easy option always tastes better tonight, even though we tend to regret it tomorrow. In our friendships, where we avoid saying the thing that needs to be said. In our decision-making, where sitting on the fence feels safer than committing.

Comfort whispers to us constantly, and every time we give in to it, we get a little weaker at resisting it.

I am often asked about mental toughness, about performing under pressure.

My answer is always the same, unless you deliberately put yourself in uncomfortable situations in the small things, you have no hope of managing the truly chaotic times. Toughness and resilience are not something we are born with. They are banked, deposit by deposit, in the little moments when you don’t give in to yourself.

Cricket taught me this long before any sauna did. Batting in the nets against genuinely fast bowling is one of the most uncomfortable experiences in sport. There is nowhere to hide in that narrow corridor of netting. Every instinct says back away.

But this uncomfortable pressure is necessary. If you don’t get uncomfortable in training, how on earth do you manage the real pressure out in the middle, when the world is watching, when there are results on the line, when a series or a career hangs on the next ball?

The nets were never about technique alone. They were a rehearsal for chaos. The batsmen I admired most were the ones who sought out the fastest bowlers on the greenest practice wickets.

Sure, there was an element of risk — risk is everywhere — but through facing the challenge, the best of the best was always prepared and ready.

They were also the ones I trusted the most out in the middle. Their character shone through in the toughest of circumstances.

Steve Waugh assumed the leadership of Australian cricket in 1995 when he stood up to Curtly Ambrose in Trinidad.

Most thought he was crazy, but we who knew him, weren’t surprised because we had seen him relish challenges over and over again.

Today, a high majority of batsman choose not to face fast bowlers in the nets, opting rather for spinners or ‘throw downs’ from the coaches.

This makes no sense to me, especially when the player says I don’t feel comfortable facing the bowlers.

That’s exactly the point. Endure the hardest training and it will make the battle in the middle a lot easier.

The SAS have a saying for it: “Train hard, fight easy.”

In war, the ultimate consequence is the loss of life, and that is precisely why special forces soldiers put themselves through such extraordinary hardship in training, so that nothing surprises them on the battlefield.

They cannot control what the enemy does. They can only control how prepared they are when reality strikes. The hardship is the preparation.

When you can master your own mind, when you have practised finding a way through stress, repeatedly, in saunas and nets and dark early mornings, something shifts. You stop being at the mercy of pressure and start meeting it on your own terms.

That resilience isn’t bravado. It is earned, deposit by deposit, in every small moment you refused to give in to yourself.

Saunas aren’t for everyone, but if they’re part of your routine it might be worth checking out Vesla where Erzhena Tsydenova and Lucas Wood have built something special.

If heat is not your thing, it might be the run or gym session you keep postponing, the conversation you keep dodging or that hard thing you keep rationalising away.

My advice, for what it’s worth, is to walk into the heat, breathe through the chaos and notice, on the other side, the calm that nobody can take from you.

Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Your future self will thank you for it.