On this World Mental Health Day 10 October, it makes sense to stop and take a moment to look at how to improve mental health.
Mental health awareness is an issue that has been pushed to the forefront of our attention in recent years, and for good reason. The stresses and strains of modern living are causing an increase in anxiety levels in many people – whether it is through increases in costs of living, undue extra stress from our work environments or one of the other many pressures that seem to be ever-increasing.
World Mental Health Day on October 10th is used to highlight these facts – and also to remind us all that it is not just a particular few who suffer from mental health issues – but we can all be subject to them from time to time. It is also about helping us to find different ways that we can deal with our mental health issues – finding ways to reduce stress and anxiety in our lives and showing us various ways how to improve mental health.
At Banya No.1 Chiswick, we fully support World Mental Health Day and the efforts to raise mental health awareness. We also have some suggestions for how you can improve your mood and concentration, attend to your emotional wellbeing, help with burnout and even how to improve sleep. These are all aspects of mental health and many of us need help from time to time, even though many of us do not recognise it.
Mental Health Awareness – Spotting the Signs
While there are many potential signs for mental health issues which are beyond the scope of this article, there are nevertheless some common traits that can often be used to help identify potential signs of stress and anxiety, even if we don’t feel immediately that we are perhaps suffering.
These include:
- Feeling depressed, down in the dumps for no reason, or even unduly sad
- A reduced ability to concentrate – confused thoughts
- Mood swings between high and low
- Withdrawing from activities and socialising with friends
- Feeling guilt, or excessing worries or fears
- Low energy, lethargy, significant tiredness or problems with sleeping
These issues can then in turn lead to other ailments, including digestive problems, high blood pressure, a weakened immune system and even weight gain.
Whilst these signs can be caused by many issues, they can often be a sign of mental health problems which we can suffer from even if we consider ourselves, for example, “fine, but just having a difficult week”.
Rather than brush off these feelings, it is worth taking a moment to stop and think about yourself, and whether some of the signs have perhaps been persistent a little longer than we would like to admit.
If you feel you are suffering from any of the above, however seemingly insignificant it seems, it is important to always seek professional help at the earliest opportunity.
Mental Health – How We Can Improve It
There are many therapies that can assist in improving our mental health, and to some extent, these can be as individual as we are. But there are a number of therapies that work on us all, that are accessible to all of us and can be quite easily built into our daily or weekly routine.
Exercise is one such activity that benefits us mentally and not just physically. Physical exercise has long been shown to improve mood and concentration and generally can reduce stress and anxiety. This is largely due to the way exercise boosts the endorphins in your body, which is a great “mental workout” and leaves us in an enhanced mood.
It has also long since been demonstrated that the use of saunas and banyas has the same effect – and in fact, can benefit us mentally in many ways. A recent study even suggests that regular use of sauna bathing was associated with lowered risks of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease!
And while there is more research needed to address that particular topic, there are many general mental healthbenefits to using a banya that we will explore below.
Improve Mood and Concentration
As mentioned already, if you find ways to boost your endorphins, then this can have an amazing positive effect on your mental health.
Endorphins are what some people refer to as the “Happy Hormone” as a rush of these will improve mood and leave you feeling very up on a natural high for hours, or even longer.
The heat from a sauna or steam room raises both your body temperature and heart rate, very similar to the effects of some medium to higher exercise routines. And the body responds in the same way – releasing endorphins into your body and raising your mood.
Banya can also help with burnout for the same reasons – a lack of endorphins in the body can lead to stress, fatigue and other classic burnout symptoms. Any method that will boost your endorphins is also a help with burnoutsymptoms.
Additionally, however, another benefit of temperature treatment is that it opens up your blood vessels and improves your circulation, delivering extra blood (and therefore oxygen) to your vital organs. As well as being extremely beneficial physically, the extra oxygen delivery to your brain can also improve your mood, as well as up your concentration levels and focus.
Heat treatments also stimulate the production of myelin in the brain – a fatty layer essential to brain function and repair – and a great boost to improving cognitive function.
At the same time, the treatment also helps you to physically relax, reducing tension and stress in the body and also elevating your mental health.
Banya – How to Improve Sleep
A session in a banya or sauna will help you to sleep better – and is also a great way how to increase deep sleepespecially.
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Sleep is so important to our mental health, and lacking sleep can mean many existing issues become exacerbated – such as depression or a lack of cognitive function.
As you probably know, there are different levels of sleep – lighter, REM sleep and deep sleep – and all these are important for our mental wellbeing. Deep sleep patterns can often be interrupted by issues with our mental health, and the key to combatting this is to be totally relaxed mentally and physically for the night. With anxiety and other stresses, this can be easier said than done, but again, a session in a banya can have a real impact on our relaxation and ability to get a good night’s sleep.
How to increase deep sleep and how to improve sleep all around? Have a banya session! The contrast between the steam room and then the cold plunge pool helps the body to really relax and unwind and can significantly improve your sleep that night.
Waking the next day after such a refreshing sleep also sets you up for a much better day to follow, too!
Treating Depression
Researchers this year have published a paper which indicates that those people living with depression have a higher body temperature than those who do not.
This suggests that finding ways to reduce body temperature may be one of a number of ways of treating depression, as when these people later recover from this mental health issue, their body temperature became better regulated.
A session in a steam room or sauna encourages your body to try and lower its temperature, for example, by sweating. This workout session for your body’s temperature regulation appears that it may actually then have an ongoing effect both physically and mentally.
One such study demonstrated that a decrease in the subject’s body temperature after such a heat treatment, correlated with a decrease in their depression symptoms.
Pain Relief and Mental Health
In the same way that mental health issues can affect our physical being – the reverse is also true. Many people who suffer from physical pain also have mental health issues as a result – the constant wearing down from continuous daily pain can itself lead to depression, mood swings and a lack of sleep.
Banya treatments are well-known for helping to combat physical pain and offers a variety of possibilities for pain relief.
Heat treatment and a resultant increase in circulation not only relieves muscle and joint pain, but additionally reduces inflammation, therefore offering relief from any number of physical issues the body can suffer from.
Many of those suffering from a range of inflammatory illnesses have found pain relief in banya treatments – including rheumatoid arthritis among others.
Although not a cure, regular sessions in a banya can be effectively used as a part of other ongoing treatments for these illnesses, and as the pain relief aspect goes to work on the body, so too can the mental health of the patient improve – as any physical improvement brings with it mental relief from the stresses of constant pain.
This in turn can be reflected in improved sleep, which can then assist the body in further physical healing – and so on.
Your Perfect Spa Experience – Aiding Mental Health
As suggested above, the mind and body are not separate entities – they are uniquely entwined in ways that we still fail to comprehend in many ways. One of the potential issues with modern medicine is that it sees different parts of the body as separate entities – i.e. if your knee is in pain, it looks to treat the knee, not the body as a whole.
In the past, where many sauna and banya traditions have come from, the approach to health was more holistic, and it does appear that modern treatments are slowly coming back to this approach.
Banya is beneficial for the mind and the body, and as one is improved, then so is the other, as they are connected; they are not separate elements within the whole.
Your perfect spa experience then, will always benefit both, and whilst we often focus on the many physical benefits of a visit to a banya, today – especially on World Mental Health Day 10 October, let us remember that a banya session is also an excellent treatment for our mental health and emotional wellbeing.
