Bill Gifford
speaker
328 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 22 Mar
Bill Gifford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And they're still kind of figuring out what causes it, but it's a fairly consistent effect.
Well, just from the get-go, you know, we're kind of told that heat is dangerous always and will kill us.
And while that's true in certain contexts...
There's also a flip side to that equation, which is that heat can be healing.
But I think the biggest, and so to me as not a heat guy originally, that was a surprise, but the biggest surprise was finding, as I kind of went down these wormholes, finding that there's pretty solid evidence for a mental health benefit to targeted heat exposure.
And originally, I stumbled on this crazy study.
I did hot yoga, tried out hot yoga.
And I stumbled across a study that found that people who went to hot yoga for eight weeks...
had their depression symptoms basically chopped in half or chopped in by a third, which is a pretty big effect.
And it turns out there's all this research about basically whole body hyperthermia, which is a fancy way of saying heating somebody up till they have the equivalent of a light fever, and that that appears to have an effect on symptoms of severe depression.
fascinating have they ever done an mri i guess would be kind of impossible to do i'm thinking out loud like an mri of someone's brain while they're in a sauna oh god can you imagine a heat a heated mri i mean so that's it's an interesting there's there's a lot of stuff that we can't possibly know right
But what they have found through animal experiments is that – so in these – there was this old study where they heated up these rats –
to the same level, like a fever level.
And then they looked at their brains and they found that a certain brain region started cranking out serotonin at this high temperature.
And so one possible explanation for this benefit of whole body hyperthermia, this anti-depressive effect that's been seen, is that, that it's doing the same thing as an SSRI drug.
And if you think about going back to the origins of sauna or where sauna took hold and has remained culturally...
Finland, Russia, you know, Baltic countries, it's frigging dark there.
Like in Helsinki, the sun is up, you know, Christmas time, it's up for like six hours a day.
It's rising and then it's setting, boom, and it's dark.
It's a tough environment, right?
Showing 261–280 of 328 · page 14 of 17
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