I weighed up what I wanted to strip away
Blowing Hot and Cold Part 7: Using sauna to get back to the essentials...and binning Instagram for good
Blowing Hot and Cold is a slow memoir, told through weekly posts, about saunas, cold water, and how these things come together to boost my own mental health. It’s meant to be a year-long journey, but we’ll get up to Christmas and see what happens after that.
From midsummer nights in Finland to horsebox saunas on English beaches, from community gardens to embassy basements, each piece explores what happens when heat and cold strip life back to its essentials.
This is part seven, exploring the link between sauna and stoicism and how it led me to finally delete Instagram for good
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I gave myself a mandatory hose down, shook off my new driving shoes onto a coconut mat and clambered into the metal bath, which was almost full to the brim. It was punishingly cold, and got more so as I gingerly lowered myself in, forcing myself to put my shoulders under while gripping the sides. Once the initial shock subsided and my hands loosened a touch, I was able to find just enough time to peer through the bare branches, the sky a deep icy blue behind them, before my legs began to tingle and my mind gave out. I padded back into the light, where Bella had laid out a blanket in the sun for me.
‘I meant to say the water had been left in there overnight,’ she said as I spread myself out, the weak sunlight warming my skin ever so slightly. The temperature had got down to around -5ºC, so the water would have frozen in the early hours and only recently thawed. It made the extremes of hot and cold even further apart, all the better for hitting the sweet spot.
My skin singing, I returned to my corner and, with the others’ permission, ladled on three more loads of water. I was transported back to Lonna and the ear-singing heat which Leonard had revelled in the previous summer. I sat with this feeling for what seemed like an eternity. There was nothing else to this moment other than now, a sense of what the heat and the cold could do as they pushed their way deeper and deeper into my heart and soul. When I finally opened my eyes, there were just three of us left and Evie was entering bearing more wood for the fire. I couldn’t bring myself to leave.
Once I did decide it was time, it was impossible to move quickly. Every action felt considered, deliberate, purposely slow. The pulling open of the glass door. The walk to the bench. Drying off. Pulling on clothes. It was a period of enforced mindfulness, a steady state over which my mind appeared to have no control.
I gathered my things and made for my car, waving goodbye to fellow sauna goers, to Evie, and to Bella, who walked with me, while I explained my plans for my grand trip and telling her I was hoping to use it as a way of easing off of my medication as the year passed.
‘Wonderful,’ she said.
‘Also, did you know I have a mobile sauna now? It’s a tent we can literally pop up anywhere with enough space. We can even do it on the beach. Let’s do it for your mental health and my lols.’ It turns out that Bella was my new spirit guide.
With that in mind, I headed off into the brightness of the January day, clear headed and ready to strike out across the country.
In the days that followed my trip to Stanmer, I couldn’t shake the idea of how sauna and the power of alternating between hot and cold has the ability to strip away layers, to reveal something truer, clearer, than that that went before. When I emerge from the heat and then the plunge, I feel as if I am seeing myself in my rawest state, all sweat, few thoughts and much less ego.
In The Everyday Stoic, William Mulligan writes, “[if] you hack away at all those things you really don’t have control over…you are left with the essential; the true core of life.” Mulligan’s book had become something of a totem for me. Alongside sauna, his writings about Stoicism and how it could help strip away the frivolous by sticking to the four virtues of Wisdom, Justice, Courage and Moderation, while also having a ripple effect that helps others thanks to showing kindness in your immediate circle, had given me a strong new perspective on life and the world.
I weighed up what I wanted to strip away. My antidepressants, eventually, although at this point I felt they provided a clear window onto my soul. Perhaps even the weekly therapy sessions I had been having for five years but that were now more like chatting with a friend than picking apart issues around anxiety and anger which in many ways I had learned to tackle thanks to their help. Yet that, too, wasn’t something I wanted to rush into.
There was something, though. Something huge. Instagram. I had binned off the horrors of Facebook in my early 30s, tired of the pernicious way it stole my time and tried to make me ‘friend’ people I went to school with who I didn’t like then and had no time for now. Twitter had become a cesspit which I had long since logged out of. Instagram, though, with its visually arresting style and ability to deliver dopamine hits every time I posted a picture of a swim, hike or sauna session, or a foreign holiday, had a hold on me. There was a voyeuristic aspect to it - the way in which I could so easily see and compare my lives with others made it horrifyingly addictive. There was an almost physical urge to keep pulling my thumb across the screen, wishing I was better, making myself anxious about how I was falling short.
In the past, I had told myself it was essential for work as a writer. For ‘getting my name out there’. In truth, it had no bearing on my work. It was a time sink and one that I knew needed to go.
And so, the last vestige of warmth from Bella’s sauna still tickling my core, I made the decision. I didn’t deactivate my account knowing I could come back another time. I went the whole hog and deleted the lot. I immediately felt as if I had peeled back towards a more authentic, truer self.
In the days that followed I exchanged emails and texts with friends I had only had passing contact with on Instagram. I wrote in my journal. I read voraciously. And I thought non stop about where my sauna journey could take me, how it might make me feel, and whether it would allow for me to further reveal a life that could be lived in the moment and, as the Stoic philosopher Seneca said, whether it would make me ‘live immediately’. I was desperate to find out.
This is a slow memoir, told week by week, about sauna, cold water, and the messy business of mental health.
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