Saunas are revered worldwide for their relaxation and health benefits, providing a serene escape for our often busy lives. Yet, for some, the peaceful retreat can occasionally be interrupted by a post-sauna headache.
What is the cause, and more importantly, how can you avoid it while still reaping the sauna’s numerous health benefits? In this article, I aim to help you diagnose and prevent this from happening.
Sweat Induced Dehydration
You probably know that you get many of sauna’s benefits from sweating. When you’re in such a hot environment, you sweat a lot.
Sweating is a vital part of the sauna experience, and it’s the source of many of the most crucial benefits.
However, when you sweat a lot, you lose a lot of water. This can cause you to become dehydrated, which can quickly give you a headache.
How to Prevent It
It’s important to sweat in the sauna, but it’s equally if not more important to be drinking water.
If these lost fluids aren’t adequately replenished, you could find yourself in the throes of dehydration, a common culprit behind post-sauna headaches.
Prevention begins before you even step into the sauna. By drinking at least one or two glasses of water ahead of your sauna session, you pre-hydrate your body, preparing it for the impending fluid loss.
During your sauna session, it’s wise to keep a water bottle handy and take regular sips, helping to maintain hydration levels and keep body temperature in check.
Once you’ve concluded your session, immediately drink more water.
Electrolyte Imbalance
As I just mentioned, when in a sauna, your body sweats to cool itself down, expelling not only water but also crucial minerals and salts—collectively known as electrolytes.
These electrolytes, including sodium, potassium, and calcium, play an essential role in numerous bodily functions, including muscle function and maintaining water balance.
How to Prevent It
Sometimes just drinking water isn’t enough. Water alone doesn’t contain electrolytes, so it’s important to replenish these through other means as well.
Instead of just water, opt for a sports drink or coconut water—both of which contain the vital electrolytes your body craves.
Blood Pressure Fluctuation
Another physiological response to the high temperatures of a sauna is the dilation of blood vessels. This dilation is the body’s attempt to cool itself down, but it also leads to a drop in blood pressure.
If the body isn’t accustomed to these rapid shifts, it might react by manifesting a headache.
This phenomenon is more commonly observed in individuals who have pre-existing blood pressure conditions or cardiovascular disorders.
How to Prevent It
One thing you can do to help with this is bring a cool washcloth into the sauna with you. This will keep your head cool, and reduce the sauna’s effect on your blood pressure in your head.
It also works well for the next problem, which is right below!
Overheating in the Sauna
While our bodies are designed to cope with a wide range of temperatures, excessive heat can lead to a condition known as hyperthermia, or overheating.
If sauna sessions are too prolonged, or the body isn’t given adequate time to cool down, the rise in core body temperature can trigger a headache, often coupled with other symptoms like dizziness or nausea.
How to Prevent It
Knowing when to leave the sauna is just as important as knowing when to enter it. Most health experts recommend a maximum of 15-20 minutes in a sauna per session.
It’s crucial to listen to your body during this time—if you start feeling dizzy, nauseous, or excessively hot, it’s time to leave.
Taking a break in between sessions, allowing your body to cool down and restore its normal temperature, can also be beneficial.
Rapid Temperature Fluctuation
For some people, the jolt of going from room temperature to a hot sauna can be too much shock to the body, and induce a nasty headache.
Especially if you’ve been out in the cold, it can be too much change to handle.
The main reason is the same as blood pressure fluctuation, but instead this is specifically caused by heating up too fast.
How to Prevent It
Rather than diving straight into high temperatures, it’s advisable to gradually acclimate your body to the heat.
This can be achieved by starting with shorter sessions at lower temperatures and slowly increasing the duration and temperature over time.
If you have been out in the cold, make sure you warm up inside for a while before getting in.
Additionally, you can take a warm shower to slowly heat your body up prior to jumping into the sauna.
This way, your body has the chance to adapt to the fluctuations in heat and blood pressure, reducing the risk of headaches.
Coffee and Energy Drink Diuretics
Coffee and energy drinks both contain caffeine, which is a powerful diuretic. This means that it will increase your production of urine.
Combined with the sweat you’re already losing in the sauna, this saps your body of even more of your precious water stores, which can greatly increase your risk of becoming dehydrated and developing a headache.
How to Prevent It
This one is easy: just don’t drink coffee or energy drinks before you use the sauna!
Although, if you use the sauna after the gym and you take preworkout, this is an obvious conflict. It’s not that you can’t drink an energy drink before the sauna, just that it opens the door for headaches.
Chances are, it’s fine for you! As with all of these, just make sure you drink enough water.
Alcohol Consumption
Alcohol is one of the most notorious dehydrators – and causes of headaches.
This occurs due to alcohol’s diuretic properties, which increases urine production and subsequently lead to a loss of fluids in the body.
Alcohol inhibits the secretion of the hormone vasopressin, causing the kidneys to excrete more water than they reabsorb. This results in increased urination and a higher risk of dehydration.
When the body is dehydrated, the brain can temporarily shrink due to the lack of sufficient water.
This shrinkage causes the brain to pull away from the skull, triggering pain receptors that result in a headache on its own, even if you aren’t using a sauna.
When combined with sauna related dehydration, this can make headaches even worse.
How to Prevent It
Even if you aren’t getting drunk the day before you use a sauna, a bit of alcohol can still give some nasty side effects if you allow yourself to become dehydrated.
I won’t tell you to never drink alcohol, but try not to have too much the same day or the day before you use a sauna. Even if you do, be sure to drink plenty of water and electrolytes, or you risk developing a bad headache.
Empty Stomach in the Sauna
As you probably know, when you’re not eating, your bood sugar levels slowly drop. For most people, this is normal, but for diabetics, it can get dangerous.
Combining this with sauna usage can drop your blood sugar even faster. Even for healthy people, this can be enough to cause headaches.
How to Prevent It
This one’s pretty easy to prevent as well; don’t use the sauna on a completely empty stomach.
Sure, you probably don’t want to use it right after a large meal. That said, try to use the sauna within a few hours of eating a meal so you can avoid negative side effects, when the sauna is supposed to feel good!
Carbon Monoxide/Smoke Leak
I put this one last because it’s least likely to be causing a headache, but the potential is there.
For people that have wood burning saunas, it’s possible that there’s a leak in your stove system that’s causing you to breathe in smoke and carbon dioxide.
This can be pretty dangerous, but it’s also relatively easy to diagnose, which I’ll cover next!
How to Prevent It
You probably know that inhaling smoke isn’t good for you, and can cause many side effects and even death.
When it comes to fires, you should be able to tell right away if your sauna is filling up with smoke. However, even a small bit of smoke leaking from your stove can be enough to give you a headache if you’re in there for long enough.
Next time you’re in the sauna, be extra aware of the smell of smoke. Even if you don’t smell any, but you’re still worried about it, you can get a pretty cheap carbon monoxide detector on the internet.