Back pain is one of the most common ailments. Whether it’s genetic or environmental, almost everyone has suffered from a stiff back or tweaked muscle. Using a sauna may be your answer to treating and reducing back pain while reducing future risk. Read on for more information on what may be causing back pain, tips on reducing pain, and how an infrared sauna can help.

What Causes Back Pain?

Back pain comes in many varieties, but the most pervasive one is probably low back pain. The Low Back Pain Fact Sheet from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders states “About 80 percent of adults experience low back pain at some point in their lifetimes. It is the most common cause of job-related disability and a leading contributor to missed work days. In a large survey, more than a quarter of adults reported experiencing low back pain during the past 3 months.”

Unfortunately, back pain often hangs around longer than it should and can be described as a vicious cycle. When the body perceives pain, it responds with “guarding reactions,” including muscle tension, restricted movement, anxiety, and even fear of movement. The tension, restrictions, and fear lead to muscle spasm, adrenaline, and nerve sensitivity, all of which promote intensification of the pain, which increases the guarding reactions. Lather, rinse, repeat. Pretty soon, you’re calling in sick.

How to Reduce Back Pain

Sleep: Poor sleeping form and not enough sleep can exaggerate back pain. Be sure to get plenty of rest to let your body heal and set up your bed to have proper back support when sleeping.

Posture: Chances are, you naturally don’t sit or stand with perfect posture all day. Stay aware of how you are holding your body, as constant slouching can make back pain worse.

Physical Therapy: If your back pain is interfering with your everyday life, it might be time to seek professional help from a physical therapist to teach you stretches and exercises to help with better posture and core strength.

Medications: Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and acetaminophen help reduce the inflammation that aggravates back pain. Always speak to your doctor before introducing new medications.

Massage: A recent study found that one weekly massage over a 10-week period improved pain and functioning for people with chronic back pain. Massage helps increase blood flow and relax sore muscles.

Hot & Cold Therapies: Regular applications of ice to the painful areas on your back may help reduce pain and inflammation while heat helps relax your muscles and increase blood flow to the affected area.

Activity: While it might sound counterintuitive, getting active helps your back pain heal faster. Don’t do any rigorous activities, but be sure to move a little each day with low-impact activities like walking and yoga.

Using an Infrared Sauna for Back Pain Relief

“For acute back pain,” according to the Mayo Clinic, “over-the-counter pain relievers and the use of heat might be all you need. Bed rest isn’t recommended.” If pain relievers and heat don’t work, you may need to move on to muscle relaxers, topical pain relievers, narcotics, antidepressants, or cortisone injections. If those things sound off-putting, there may be another option for breaking your pain cycle: infrared sauna.

Individuals with acute and chronic back pain can relieve much of the pain associated with these types of conditions with the use of an infrared sauna. The radiant heat from the infrared sauna reaches down several inches below the surface of the skin to soothe the muscles. Infrared heat helps open the blood vessels, feeding nutrients to the muscles and ligaments while the warming action also makes muscles and ligaments more pliable and less stiff.

Infrared saunas have been clinically proven to reduce low back pain. It has also been shown to be very low risk. The heat of the sauna has an effect similar to that of muscle relaxers, which are step two in the pain relief process after over-the-counter medications. The relaxation of the muscles interrupts the back pain cycle. Sauna, then, gives you the benefit of muscle relaxation without drugs. Furthermore, it doesn’t just relax your muscles. It relaxes you.

Sauna for Back Pain Research

A University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey study led by a doctor specializing in sports medicine found that low-level heat therapies were more effective than over-the-counter oral medications1, such as acetaminophen, Tylenol®, and others. After your time in the infrared sauna, do some light stretches to work the muscles and ligaments in the affected areas. Researchers have found that stretching after an infrared sauna session actual increases flexibility for long-term results — something your back muscles and ligaments greatly need.

Several projects by Japanese researchers have clinically proved the effectiveness of Waon therapy in relieving pain. In Waon therapy, the patient spends 15 minutes in an infrared sauna and then spends 30 minutes resting in a room at slightly above room temperature wrapped in a blanket up to the neck. In the study, treatments were given 2-5 times per week, and the researchers found that patients lost about half their pain after the first treatment, and their pain continued to lessen until it stabilized at 10 treatments.

October is Emotional Wellness Month, and learning about your own emotional wellness is an important factor in your overall wellness. Just like mental health, emotional wellness impacts many aspects of your life, from physical health to social life. When your emotional intelligence is in a healthy space, you will be able to properly navigate life in a level-headed and self-confident manner. Learn how to boost your emotional awareness and improve your mental health.

What is Emotional Wellness?

How you feel can affect your ability to carry out everyday activities, your relationships, and your overall mental health. How you react to your experiences and feelings can change over time. Emotional wellness is the ability to successfully handle life’s stresses and adapt to change and difficult times.

Emotional vs Mental Health

Mental health involves cognitive thinking and harnessing one’s attention to stay focused, which includes processing information, storing it in memory, and understanding this new information. Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. Mental health also includes appropriately exercising reason and processing any learned information.

Emotional health is the state of positive psychological functioning and involves expressing one’s emotions appropriately for one’s age. Emotional health includes our thoughts, feelings, and behavior internally and externally. It requires managing emotional actions and gauging the appropriate reactions to situations, preventing unnecessary and unhealthy stress, which if severe enough can lead to depression. Maintaining positive emotional health is an active process.

Benefits of Emotional Intelligence

Emotional wellness inspires self-care, relaxation, stress reduction, and the development of inner strength. It is important to be attentive to both positive and negative feelings and be able to understand how to handle these emotions. Emotional wellness also includes the ability to learn and grow from experiences.

Once you accept your feelings, you can begin to understand why you are feeling that way, and decide how you would like to act in response to those feelings. Being emotionally well grants you the power to express feelings without any constraints. Emotional well-being encourages autonomy and proper decision making skills. It is an important part of overall wellness.

How to Improve Emotional Health

In order to begin the route to emotional wellness you must always remember to be optimistic. Optimism allows you to greet all emotions—both positive and negative—with a confident attitude that allows you to learn from your mistakes. Once you have mastered emotional wellness, you will experience life a little differently. Your life will be more balanced and you will develop a deep sense of awareness. Below are some strategies for you to practice in order to boost your emotional wellness.

Use an Infrared Sauna

Using an infrared sauna will help you feel relaxed, rejuvenated, and renewed, which in turn benefits your mental state. Sauna use is a great way to get away and release any built-up tension and stress, and have been shown to affect the autonomic nervous system putting you in the parasympathetic (rest and digest) state allowing your body to heal.

Not only does infrared sauna heat help with physical ailments, which in turn improves mental health, it also helps your mind learn how to better cope with stress and emotions. Studies show that short periods of hyperthermia, like those experienced in a sauna, potentially ease depression because short “hits” of stress can stimulate and benefit brain tissue by teaching the brain how to be better-equipped to handle other forms of stress.

Strengthen Social Connections

Social connections might help protect health and lengthen life. Scientists are finding that our links to others can have powerful effects on our health—both emotionally and physically. Whether with romantic partners, family, friends, neighbors, or others, social connections can influence our biology and well-being.

Seek Support

If you are feeling overwhelmed by emotions, know you are not alone and that there are plenty of available resources to help discuss solutions. Whether your support comes from family, friends, or professionals, reach out to those why can help. As mentioned above, our social connections play a large role in our overall health, especially emotional wellness

Reduce Stress

Everyone feels stressed from time to time. Stress can give you a rush of energy when it’s needed most. But if stress lasts a long time—a condition known as chronic stress—those “high-alert” changes become harmful rather than helpful. Learning healthy ways to cope with stress can also boost your resilience.

Practice Mindfulness

The concept of mindfulness is simple. This ancient practice is about being completely aware of what’s happening in the present—of all that’s going on inside and all that’s happening around you. It means not living your life on “autopilot.” Becoming a more mindful person requires commitment and practice.

Learn Coping Skills

When your world changes, even if just a little bit, it is easy to feel out of touch with your emotions. Although change can feel overwhelming, most people can make it through the coping process with the support of family and friends. Learn healthy ways to help you through difficult times, such as focusing on activities that bring you joy and reduce stress.

Invest Time in Yourself

When not making time for yourself, it is easier to become stressed and lose yourself. Stress can lead to depression, lack of motivation, insomnia, headaches, and tension. The importance of self care is avoiding those symptoms of stress and focusing on bettering yourself from within. Treat your mind to things that make you happy, from classes to spa days.

Get Ample Sleep

To fit in everything we want to do in our day, we often sacrifice sleep. But sleep affects both mental and physical health. It’s vital to your well-being. When you’re tired, you can’t function at your best. Sleep helps you think more clearly, have quicker reflexes and focus better. Take steps to make sure you regularly get a good night’s sleep.

Brighten Your Outlook

People who are emotionally well, experts say, have fewer negative emotions and are able to bounce back from difficulties faster. This quality is called resilience. Another sign of emotional wellness is being able to hold onto positive emotions longer and appreciate the good times.

Your skin is one of the most important parts of your body, so keeping it healthy should be a priority in your health care routine. The skin is the most exposed of our organs, making it susceptible to the effects of external forces like weather, injury, and products we put on it. All of these factors play a role in how quickly our skin shows signs of age, but there are many natural anti-aging practices you can incorporate into your regular skin care routine to reduce the signs of wear.

To keep your skin looking young and radiant, read below to learn how an infrared sauna and other natural anti-aging techniques can help.

Sauna for Skin Care: Infrared Sauna Skin Benefits

There are many well-known infrared sauna health benefits such as detoxification, reduced inflammation, and muscle recovery. But is the sauna good for your skin, too? Absolutely! In fact, the detoxification, inflammation reduction, and recovery are all things that impact the health of your skin.

Infrared sauna skin benefits include rejuvenation and detoxification. The infrared heat penetrates deeply into the skin to accelerate cellular activity and increase circulation to bring more nutrients to the skin and aid in rejuvenation. Through this process, the infrared heat causes sweating, which detoxifies the pores. Sweat is one of the top natural anti-aging remedies as it helps purge dirt, debris, and toxins from your skin. Unclogged pores means less breakouts and a smoother, younger-looking complexion.

When using a sauna for skin care, it is important to remember aftercare as well. The heat from the sauna helps open pores, which is great for detoxification, but can cause pores to clog again if sweat is not washed away immediately. Rinse off with cold water to wash away toxins and close the pores again. Then apply a moisturizer to your skin and be sure to drink plenty of water to rehydrate after sweating.

Natural Anti-Aging Tips

Essential Anti-Aging Products

Eye Cream: The skin around your eyes is delicate and requires extra care. Natural eye cream has anti-aging properties such as the reduction of dark circles and fine lines. Apply eye cream every night before bed.

Exfoliant: Using a natural exfoliant on a semi-regular basis helps skin look younger by removing dead skin cells and revealing a brighter complexion. Read your product’s recommendations for frequency, and don’t over-exfoliate.

Gentle Cleanser: Whether you wash your face once or twice a day, using the right cleanser is crucial. A gentle cleanser will reduce irritation and will ensure you aren’t washing away any healthy oils on your face.

Moisturizer: The biggest of the anti-aging tips and the key to younger skin is moisturizing. From your legs to your face, invest in high-quality moisturizers for different areas of your body to maintain elasticity and reduce wrinkles.

Retinol: Some prescription retinoid products have a bad reputation for being too strong, but retinol for gentle and natural anti-aging exists. Retinol is a form of Vitamin A and helps fight acne, reduce wrinkles, and stimulate collagen.

Sunscreen: Sun damage is one of the most aging and harmful effects on the skin. It can cause burns and wrinkles, and in more extreme cases, skin cancer. Daily sunscreen of at least SPF 15 will help protect from regular sun exposure.

Vitamin C: Ascorbic acid, or Vitamin C, is an extremely antioxidant-rich product with anti-aging properties. This vitamin can be applied as a serum to help even skin tone, protect from UV damage, and brighten complexion.

Top Anti-Aging Tools

Cleansing Brush: Using your hands to apply cleanser can suffice, but cleansing brushes clean more thoroughly. With vibrations and bristles, cleanser can penetrate more deeply to remove dirt, oil, and debris from your skin.

Dermaplaning Tool: Dermaplaning is sometimes referred to “shaving” your skin. Really, it’s a deeper form of exfoliation, and it works by lightly removing the top layer of dead skin cells to reveal skin that is radiant and younger-looking.

Gua Massage Tool: Gua sha is an ancient Chinese healing technique that uses a tool to massage the skin with mild pressure. When scraping your skin with this tool, circulation is improved to reduce inflammation and reveal healthier skin.

Facial Roller: Similar to the gua massage tool, facial rollers help reduce inflammation. This approach uses gentle strokes to increase circulation, improve lymphatic flow, and distribute products over skin for even coverage.

Infrared Sauna: As mentioned above, using an infrared sauna for skin care is one of the top natural anti-aging tools. Infrared waves penetrate deeper into the skin to increase circulation, detoxify, improve complexion, and reduce wrinkles.

Red Light Therapy Tool: Practicing anti-aging skin care at home can be as easy as wearing a mask or holding a wand. LED therapy uses light waves to impact skin on a cellular level. Light therapy can help with wrinkles, inflammation, acne, and more.

Microneedling Roller: At-home microneedling tools are designed for gentler use than professional applications. They use small needles to lightly puncture the skin to allow for better product absorption, skin exfoliation, and blood circulation.

Best Anti-Aging Skin Care Routines

Drink Water to Hydrate: While you might not see a visual change (use moisturizer for that), staying hydrated allows the body to purge toxins and keeps it functioning properly. A healthy body results in healthy skin.

Get Plenty of Sleep: Sleep allows your body to rest and reset, which is an important step in any skin care routine. It is recommended to put products on before bed to allow skin to fully absorb them without interruptions.

Layer Products Properly: When applying products to your skin, layer from thinnest to thickest so products can absorb into the skin more easily and effectively. Wait 1-2 minutes between products for ultimate absorption.

Protect Your Skin from Trauma: Whether it’s by applying sunscreen to protect from burns or avoiding picking at blemishes, preventing trauma to your skin can help avoid scarring and preserve it for years to come.

Remove Makeup Before Bed: If you wear makeup, removing it before bed is crucial to keep your skin looking healthy and young. Sleeping with makeup means more opportunities for clogged pores and breakouts.

Stick to a Regular Skin Care Schedule: Switching on and off from a skin care routine can’t guarantee any lasting results, which is why it’s important to find a routine that works for you and stick to it. Experts say to be consistent for 4-6 months to see results.

Visit a Dermatologist: Anti-aging skin care routines at home are nice, but having a professional exam with a dermatologist helps identify changes in your skin and ensures you are on the right track for healthy skin.

Taking care of your skin should be one of your top priorities when it comes to your health. Once you have found the products, tools, and routines that fit your skin type and lifestyle, you will be on your way to healthy, glowing skin. Practicing natural anti-aging techniques like applying natural products and using an infrared sauna for skin care will ensure a bright and young complexion for years to come!