Dr. Ashley Mason is doing something quietly radical. She's taking what most people think of as a spa amenity — heat, sweating, sitting still — and asking whether it can do what antidepressants often can't: work fast, last long, and come without a prescription.
Her research on whole-body hyperthermia is not casual sauna use. We're talking about carefully controlled heat exposure that raises core body temperature to around 38.5 degrees Celsius, while keeping the head cool enough to stay hydrated and lucid. The results from the 2016 study are striking: a single session produced measurable reductions in depression scores that persisted for up to six weeks. Six weeks. From one treatment.
This doesn't surprise me. We have a 2023 paper in our knowledge base showing that men using sauna four to seven times per week show a 66% reduction in lifetime risk of dementia — and the proposed mechanism is heat shock proteins. These molecular chaperones clear misfolded proteins before they accumulate into the plaques associated with neurodegeneration. The same mechanism likely underpins what Mason is observing in mood disorders: heat isn't just relaxing the nervous system, it's performing cellular maintenance on it.
Rhonda Patrick's work on brain health and longevity draws the same throughline. Cardiovascular benefits, neurological protection, mood regulation — they all converge on the same biological pathway. Heat exposure appears to be one of the most cost-effective interventions we have for whole-brain resilience, and the Finnish cohort studies back this up with decades of population-level data.
Mason is careful to distinguish whole-body hyperthermia from a casual sauna session, and that distinction matters. The dose creates the effect. A 20-minute sit in a gym sauna is pleasant. A controlled hyperthermia protocol is not a spa day — it's a clinical intervention. The research isn't saying "use the sauna when you feel sad." It's pointing toward a specific physiological threshold that needs to be crossed to produce the therapeutic response.
The inflammation angle is also worth taking seriously. We know that elevated inflammatory markers correlate strongly with depressive episodes. Heat exposure reduces C-reactive protein and shifts the cytokine profile toward anti-inflammatory states. This gives us a second mechanism — distinct from the thermoregulatory hypothesis — that explains why the mood effects persist so far beyond the session itself.
If you're struggling with low mood and conventional approaches aren't moving the needle, regular sauna use is worth serious consideration. The accessible version — four to seven sessions per week, 20 minutes at high heat — won't replicate Mason's clinical protocol exactly, but it engages the same biological pathways. Start there. Be consistent. Track how you feel across two to three weeks, not just the day after.
Here's what most people miss: depression dysregulates body temperature. People with depression often run warmer than healthy controls, and as their symptoms improve, their core temperature normalizes. Mason is essentially using heat to shock the thermoregulatory system back into calibration — not suppressing a symptom, but correcting an underlying imbalance. The heat isn't the medicine. The body's response to it is. That's a fundamentally different way of thinking about what healing looks like.