Dr Heather Massey

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25 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Dr Heather Massey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Science Weekly · Revisited: Saunas and cold plunges, where does the evidence stand? · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

This is The Guardian.

Cold shock response is that response you get when you initially go into the water.

So you start to experience a gasp, rapid breathing and also a big increase in your heart rate and blood pressure.

There's a big increase in stress hormone responses as well.

So that's your adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol responses too.

All of this research has looked more at observational data and mostly in men.

And they found some signal towards those individuals that sauna more regularly.

They may live longer or they may be healthier towards the end of the study than those that saunered less or didn't sauna at all.

That includes things like coronary heart disease, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension.

Some of them take into account lifestyle factors such as the amount of exercise they do, their food intake, smoking, alcohol consumption, and others haven't at this stage.

So there's a real mixed bag of evidence there.

There is some research looking at inflammatory markers and some changes in those inflammatory and immune markers.

But what we need to know is, does that actually change our health profile?

Some people look at the cross-adaptive effects, where if you are able to adapt to one stressor, and I would suggest that cold water immersion is definitely a stressor, there may be physiological adaptations which are general, which allow you to adapt to other forms of stressors.

What I would really caution about is particularly we're going between the two environments.

You keep yourself well hydrated because going into a sauna and also into the cold water will dehydrate you.

Move slowly when you are moving in and out of the cold water and make sure that you're doing it to the point where you are happy doing it and not overextend your stay in either the warm or the cold environment.

Individuals, if they repeatedly immerse themselves in cold water, they can reduce their cold shock response.

So that's the breathing and the changes in heart rate by about 50% with only four or five immersions.

And individuals are able to maintain that reduction in cold shock response for about seven months.

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