Dr. Taz Bhatia is making an argument that goes deeper than most sauna content. It's not just "sauna is relaxing." She's tracing a specific hormonal chain reaction: chronic stress elevates cortisol, elevated cortisol suppresses sex hormones — testosterone in men, estrogen and progesterone in women — and that suppression creates a cascade of downstream problems. Fatigue. Weight gain. Mood disruption. The whole picture.
What I find compelling here is the mechanism, not just the correlation. Infrared saunas heat the body from the inside out rather than heating the surrounding air first. That distinction matters because you can tolerate longer sessions at lower temperatures, which is exactly what you need when the goal is nervous system regulation rather than acute heat stress. You're not trying to shock your body. You're trying to shift it.
We have a 2023 paper in the knowledge base on post-exercise infrared sauna sessions that adds important nuance here. The researchers found that growth hormone increased following traditional sauna after resistance exercise, and testosterone was elevated 24 hours after the session — but hormonal changes appeared at different time points depending on the protocol. The takeaway: timing matters enormously. The hormonal response to heat isn't instantaneous. It unfolds over hours and days.
This aligns with what Rhonda Patrick's work shows on Finnish traditional sauna data — the benefits compound over consistent, repeated sessions. Not one heroic sweat. A sustainable ritual, three to four times a week, accumulated over months.
There's broad consensus that sauna reduces cortisol and inflammatory markers. That part is well-established. The disagreement lives in the mechanism for infrared specifically versus traditional. Some researchers argue that the lower temperatures in infrared saunas produce weaker cardiovascular adaptation than 80 to 90 degrees Celsius Finnish-style sessions. Others, including Dr. Bhatia, point to the mitochondrial and detoxification benefits that infrared's deeper tissue penetration provides — benefits that don't require the same intensity threshold.
Both can be true. Different protocols, different primary benefits. Traditional sauna may win on cardiovascular adaptation and growth hormone spikes. Infrared may win on accessibility, tolerability, and sustained nervous system regulation for people who are hormonally depleted and can't handle aggressive heat stress yet.
If your cortisol is chronically elevated — you feel wired but tired, sleep is disrupted, you're carrying weight you can't shift despite eating well — then infrared sauna three to four times a week is genuinely worth adding before you reach for supplements or medications. Start with 20 to 25 minutes at moderate temperature. Evening sessions work well here, because the post-session temperature drop supports sleep onset. That's your circadian biology working with you, not against you.
Here's the insight that doesn't get enough attention: Dr. Bhatia frames sauna through the lens of Eastern medicine's emphasis on warming the body and supporting energy flow. That framing isn't just philosophical. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the kidney meridian governs hormonal function, and cold is considered depleting to that system. Warming practices — and infrared sauna is perhaps the most precise modern expression of this — are prescribed specifically for hormonal depletion patterns.
We've built an entire knowledge base around cold exposure, and for good reason. Cold has its place. But if you're a person with depleted cortisol reserves, disrupted sex hormones, and chronic fatigue, aggressive cold exposure may be exactly the wrong intervention. Heat first. Rebuild the foundation. Then introduce cold as a graduated stressor once your system has the reserves to adapt. That sequencing is something the contrast therapy space doesn't discuss enough — and it's where integrative medicine perspectives like Dr. Bhatia's genuinely advance the conversation.