How saunas saved my life
From a bad place to a good one- saved by saunas
Maybe they could save yours too.. For me saunas and the way it has changed my life cannot be understated. In 2018, I was the antithesis of health smoking a pack a day, drinking 4 bottles of soju and beer a night, only eating the ultra large Chicken Bucket Challenge they had on offer at the Mcdonald’s store attached to my student accommodation and sitting in my room for 10 hours a day playing an online child’s card game Hearthstone.
By contrast now in 2026 I’ve lost about 40 lbs, eat mostly whole foods, drink once a week and have completed 2 ultra marathons and 1 marathon in the last 3 years creating a total health obsession; I believe saunas and contrast therapy were the key to turning it all around. That is why I want to share it with the world and with you, maybe it can help you find the right path forward mentally or physically and help get you where you want to be.
How did this happen?
In 2018 I was studying Chinese in Beijing as part of the 3rd year of my degree, this would now be the 8th year of studying Chinese something that was supposed to be my life long passion and skill which everyone I knew admired me for. ‘Wow how do you know Chinese you must be so clever’ ‘It’s the most difficult language in the world I could never do that!’ ‘you must have some kind of special brain’- In reality by year 6 (my first year at Uni, 2016) I was completely burnt out of education and especially Chinese. I thought (completely idiotically) University was a place to party, discover yourself and then some time 2 or 3 years in you’d have to maybe do a bit of work, get a piece of paper and enter the work force where the real work began. It would be a light vacation compared to the hell of Chinese for A-levels (considered possibly the hardest secondary school subject to take known as ‘Chinese Cambridge Pre-U’) and all the torture that came with being at Secondary school. In reality, you had one to two terms to party before the hard work kicked in. I was about as equipped to deal with this as a one armed man try to paddle a canoe upstream with a broken stick. I somehow scraped past 2 years of lacklustre attempts to study and a total disinterest in my degree before hopping on a plane to China where I would spend a year in a Chinese University in Beijing.
Once again, I had whimsically believed this would be more of the same, a simple language in the morning followed by hanging out in the day and drinking by night. The year was pass/ fail, with attendance making up a huge chunk of the grade, how hard could it be? Turns out, hard. I arrived, 2 weeks late due to retakes delaying my schedule, to a Rwandan room mate Wisdom. Initially he seemed pleasant, intelligent and an easy to get on with character. Quickly it seemed this was not the case. Classes in Beijing started at 8am and he insisted on keeping hours the same as in Rwanda in order to chat to friends and family there whilst he worked. Rwandan time was 8pm to 7am.. Suffice to say no sleep was had in the first term. After getting as much sleep as a child who’s just watched 3 renditions of the conjuring, I turn up to my first day of class. Not a single person I know, or even a single person from my university. The class is entirely made up of Korean Students and 2 Soas students. Ok, I’m sure I’ll make new friends. Well, not quite; it turns out almost all the of the Korean students had a cult like high school social circle. They kept to themselves and mostly had no interest in making new foreign friends that would fly away at the end of the year. To top all this off, due to 2 years of slacking (already in classes I could barely keep up in) I was now in a class which was way beyond my level.
This all resulted in probably the worst year of regression and darkness of my life. I felt I could not show up to class as not only did I not know anyone, I could not understand 90% of what was happening. Combine this with a near inability to finish the homework (which if you failed to complete you were publicly humiliated with being forced to dance or sing for the class). In my head, I could not quit as this would be giving up my identity, the thing that made me special and gave me respect from my friends and family; plus it was a once in a life time opportunity I was squandering.
How did it get better? A focus on health powered by saunas.
In some ways Covid came at the just the right time. I got out of China, out of University and had over a year to reflect and consider what I wanted to do next and how I wanted to approach my life. I had gained around 30lbs to 50lbs at University, I had no clue what I wanted to do for a career; all I knew is that I wanted nothing to do with China again. Eventually, as restrictions began lifting gyms and saunas became available and I had become focused on getting my health back to a place I deemed respectable, if I had no clue what else to do at least I could be healthy doing it. I quit smoking, quit drinking, walked every day and when they reopened went to the gym 5 days a week. This is where my dear friend the sauna enters the story. In the past I had tried to get fitter, but never enjoyed the process, I never caught that bug in the way people described. But this time was different. For the first time my local gym had a sauna. It completely revolutionised my routine and motivation to go to the gym. Now everyday I looked forward to going to work out so I could go to the sauna, it was a space where I could re order my mind and reduce the chaos and self created attacks that had been stewing every day cooped up in my room in China. It set my mind and body free. A year on I had lost 40 lbs, my mental health had turned over a completely new chapter and I began to consider what life I might lead having had not the most ideal University experience.
At the end of the day that’s why I wanted to create Relaxation Station. I want to give that same life line to a different version of me struggling to find a path forward. Saunas were the good in my life that took me from a dark place, where I could not see what to do next, to getting obsessed with my own personal journey of improvement.
