stop bringing your phone to the sauna
I love the sauna, especially in the winter time—it’s a nice little boost of warmth with plenty of health benefits (see Peter Attia’s research / reviews).
But why does everyone take their phone in? I wonder every time I see someone on their phone in the sauna if it’s safe for electronics to be exposed to that kind of heat. The average American sauna is 170 - 200 degrees F, and most of us spend anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes or even longer in there. Here’s what I found:
Apple says iPhones are designed for use between 32 and 95 degrees, and using your iPhone in overly hot conditions can permanently shorten its battery life. Even sauna manufacturers recommend not bringing your phone into the sauna.(1) Lutsauna, a Nordic sauna manufacturer, points to the risk of fire, battery swelling, chip failure, and problems charging your smartphone as reasons to leave your phone behind while you’re in the sauna.(2)
Heat damage to a phone is intuitive—most of us have experienced a phone shutting down due to conditions that are too hot or too cold. So why do so many of us persist in bringing it in to the sauna?
One easy hypothesis is that the prospect of 20 minutes of nothing, particularly in a physically uncomfortable environment, is overwhelming. That’s a solid block of time that you could spend catching up on Instagram or reading on your phone. Some people even use sauna time to be productive. A woman came in to the sauna I was using today to have a business call. I left after just a few minutes—it’s always painful to listen to someone else’s work call, especially in such a small space.
It may be daunting, but I wish more of us used the sauna without our phones. We’ve fallen out of the practice of sitting with boredom and discomfort; our phones are always available to rescue us from even one errant minute without content. But humans have been sitting in uncomfortably hot little rooms together for 10,000 years by some estimates—sweat lodges and saunas have been found in the UK, Mexico, the United States, Japan, and parts of the Islamic world. Many of these cultures used saunas for cleansing and healing purposes; ancient Finns associated it with the element of fire and its associated deities, for example.(3)
Last year, I saw a woman reading a book in the sauna. We struck up a conversation, and I met a friendly face and received a book recommendation (The Body Keeps The Score, in case you were wondering). A few weeks ago, some of the women who weren’t on their phones started chatting. One of them had just opened a florist nearby, and I’ll definitely give her a call the next time I need to send flowers.
I’m certainly not suggesting that the sauna is the new office water cooler, though it is a decent place to chat with new people. But it’s perhaps not the worst idea to think the sauna more closely to the way our ancestors did—as a place to cleanse and heal from the fast, content-based lifestyle most of us are constantly and forcibly exposed to through our phones.
And if you’re going to use your phone, at least do it quietly.
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