Cole Mlan isn't a researcher. He's not citing p-values or invoking Finnish mortality data. He's a man who built a wood-fired sauna on a bay in Jersey and watched something happen that he didn't fully expect: people started connecting. That's the core claim here, quietly embedded beneath the conversation about heat shock proteins and detoxification. The sauna isn't just a recovery tool. It's a social technology. And that framing changes everything.
The physiological benefits Cole describes — improved cardiovascular function, detoxification, heat shock protein activation — are well-documented. Rhonda Patrick has spent years translating the Finnish longitudinal data for a general audience: four to seven sauna sessions per week correlates with a 50 percent reduction in cardiovascular mortality, a 66 percent reduction in Alzheimer's risk. The mechanisms are real. The heart rate elevation mimicking moderate aerobic exercise, the cellular housekeeping from heat shock proteins, the anti-inflammatory cascade — all of it checks out.
But Cole adds something the epidemiological studies don't capture: the social dimension. You can't randomize loneliness. You can't control for belonging. Yet the research on isolation and mortality is just as striking as the sauna data. Social disconnection is associated with a 26 to 29 percent increased risk of early death. These two findings — the sauna data and the loneliness data — have been sitting in parallel tracks, rarely discussed together.
There's broad consensus on the cardiovascular and recovery benefits of regular sauna use. The hormesis principle Cole invokes — small doses of stress building resilience — is foundational to cold exposure, heat therapy, and even intermittent fasting. The disagreement tends to surface around detoxification claims. Sweating does eliminate some heavy metals, but the liver and kidneys carry the primary detox load. Sauna supports that system; it doesn't replace it. Worth keeping that in perspective.
If you have access to a sauna, go with someone. Not to work through an agenda. Not to listen to a podcast. Go with another person, leave the phones outside, and sit in the heat together. Three sessions per week is enough to move the needle on the cardiovascular and recovery markers. But the community piece requires intentionality. The sauna only works as a social technology if you treat it as one.
Cole mentions a WhatsApp group of 20 sauna operators. That's a small but telling detail. The people building these spaces aren't just selling wellness services — they're curating environments where presence is structurally enforced. You cannot scroll in a sauna. The heat makes distraction uncomfortable. What Cole has built at St. Katherine Bay is, in a very literal sense, an attention sanctuary. And attention, increasingly, is the thing we're most deficient in. Not minerals. Not mitochondria. Attention. The sauna might be solving a problem we haven't fully named yet.