Episode 086: Sauna Therapy for Detoxification and Healing with Brian Richards, SaunaSpace
In this episode, I’m joined by Brian Richards, the founder and Lead Product Developer of SaunaSpace, makers of Near Infrared ( NIr) Saunas.
You’ll hear Brian share his personal health struggles with toxic-related acne, adrenal fatigue, brain fog, insomnia and the role that saunas played in restoring his health. He shares how his journey inspired him to create SaunaSpace to help others discover how saunas are a simple the pathway to general health and natural healing.
We also discuss:
What are Near Infrared saunas and why they are more effective than other saunas
How saunas resculpt, rebuild and restore the body against the toxic exposures of the modern world
Why they are so effective for detoxification
Sunlight and the effects that the different kinds of rays have on the body, EMFs and even the sympathetic vs parasympathetic nervous systems
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Read the Episode Transcript...
Naomi Nakamura: Hi there and welcome back to the Live FAB Life podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura and on today's show I'm joined by Brian Richards, who is the founder and the lead product developer of a company called SaunaSpace. And they're a company that makes near infrared saunas that are used and healing therapies.
Now I am super excited for this interview because for a little over the past eight months or so, I have been using saunas in my own healing journey and I have been wanting to learn so much more about it, and so I'm real excited that Brian was able to join us and to share his knowledge on this.
So in this episode you will hear Brian share his own personal health struggles with toxic related acne and adrenal fatigue, and things like brain fog and insomnia. And long time listeners are well aware these are topics that we talk about often here on this show. And he shares the role that saunas played in restoring his health. He also shares how his journey inspired him to create SaunaSpace as a way to help others discover the pathway to natural healing, which now includes the world's first faraday cage sauna.
So some of the things you'll also hear us get really in depth about are what are near infrared saunas and why they are more effective than other saunas.
We'll talk about how they help to rebuild and restore the body against toxic exposures of the modern world, and why they are so effective for detoxification. We'll talk about how saunas re-sculpt and make every aspect of the body function better. And we even talk about sunlight and the effects that the different kinds of rays have on the body and we also get into EMFs. And even the parasympathetic versus sympathetic nervous system.
So there's a lot of things we talk about in this episode. It's jam packed with so much information.
But before we get to the episode I want to let you know that there is a gift that Brian and the SaunaSpace team has generally offered all of your listeners, and that's a discount for their products that be used on their website. And to get the code as well as to check out any of the things we talk about in this episode, as always go to the show notes over at www.livefablife.com/086 for Episode 086. Now with that, let's get to the show.
Hi Brian, welcome to the show.
Brian Richards: Hi Naomi.
Naomi Nakamura: So you are the founder of a company called SaunaSpace. Can you share with us what exactly is SaunaSpace and what are some of the things that your company does?
Brian Richards: Yeah. SaunaSpace is a manufacturer of incandescent saunas and we're based in Columbia, Missouri.
So we make a kind of an unusual form of a sauna. Our sauna utilizes 250 watt red incandescent heat bulbs as the heat source. So it's kind of a different looking sauna as well beyond it just being different technology.
It looks like a traveling bedouin tent of sorts. So it's not like a big box that people are accustomed to. It's more of a lightweight portable type of sauna. It has a curtain on the front and you open the curtain and you get inside and there are four lamps on the electrical fixture opposite you and you sit in front of them and you do a sauna session like any other.
The goal is to sweat. But while you're inside, because the nature of our technology is incandescent we also benefit from what's called red light therapy or mitochondrial stimulation while you're doing sauna.
So we're kind of a better way to do sauna and our footprint and our format is portable and more convenient than what people are accustomed to as far as saunas go.
Naomi Nakamura: I think it's so interesting. What's the story behind this and what led you to create SaunaSpace?
Brian Richards: Well it starts from personal health problems. I had what I understand now is adrenal fatigue and insomnia, and other symptoms related to that. Acne, and brain fog, and kind of low energy even though I consider myself to be kind of a peppy guy.
I've always like science and math, I've always been athletic. I used to play soccer very intensely and tons of other sports as well.
Growing up in Montana, so always outside. But at the end of my college career I had sort of an array of nebulous symptoms that ... And this is all self diagnosed.
But I didn't want to take things like Accutane and other very toxic pharmacological approaches. And so I did my research online like everybody does nowadays and I kept coming back to sauna.
So every human culture has a sauna. And saunas I understood are great for cleansing the body and for detoxification. The time honored sort of approach to detox. And the in the course of that research I stumbled across the incandescent sauna. It actually dates back to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his sanitariums. And he invented the electric incandescent bath in 1891 and wrote a book on phototherapeutics, on light therapy in 1910. So this is actually the original electric sauna.
And nowadays it's popularized by a doctor named Dr. Lawrence Wilson. He wrote a book called Sauna Therapy for Detoxification and Healing and that's the book I read.
And so I said hey, well If I'm going to do sauna, this is the approach I'm going to take. I'm going to do this incandescent sauna which you couldn't buy anywhere. It was something that you had to kind of do on your own.
So I build my own. I'm kind of a tinker type of person. And the most dramatic immediate improvement was with the insomnia. I used my incandescent sauna about two sessions or so before bed one night and then the next night, and boom I slept really wonderfully and thereafter I just didn't have any of the mind racing kind of insomnia issues where I just lay in bed unable to calm my mind. And I understand now that has to do with parasympathetic relaxation. Which both the sauna is great for and also the light therapy addresses as well, the near infrared light therapy.
So that was the start and then I continued to use it for six months very intensely. 45 minutes a day, maybe four or five days a week.
And that's when I realized at the end that what I had was adrenal fatigue. I just didn't feel very good but after six months I had just a qualitative improvement in my health. I was more energetic, more focused, more clear headed, less irascible, more able to concentrate on things, more able to work longer hours more intensely, and just my attitude towards other people just improved dramatically. It was kind of night and day.
And that's when I realized that hey, there were things that were wrong with me I didn't even recognize. And what a simple way to approach all these issues and just overall and general health, is just to sit there and sweat passively and soak in this healing light at the same time. So it was wonderful for me and I ended up making a few here and there for friends and family and then one thing led to another and I eventually got a business loan, a small business loan, and started SaunaSpace and I kind of bootstrapped this dream into what it is today. We're doing really well.
We got a few pretty big press mentions lately. One of them was in the New York Times so that was really exciting. And yeah, I have 23 employees now and working really hard to scale demand. And throughout the last six years my team and I have obsessed over trying to do one thing right and make this perfect sauna experience, this perfect light therapy experience.
So we have a lot of really unique design innovations that are unique to our technology, unique to us, including now we offer this Faraday sauna. And it features basically an electromagnetic blocking liner system. So inside you're in this perfect ancestral space where you're completely free. A complete and total escape finally from all this modern environmental stresses. Including microwave electromagnetic stress nowadays. So it started very humbly but now I think we're kind of accepted now as just a better approach to sauna and SaunaSpace in general, our quality and our design speak for themselves.
Naomi Nakamura: That's amazing. I think listeners of this show after hearing your story will kind of start to understand now why I'm so excited to have you as a guest. Because my own story is so rooted, very similar to yours, in adrenal fatigue and acne and insomnia and all of these things where a lot of times we may not every realize that we're in it. And we don't even realize that we can feel better until we get there. I started discovering infrared saunas last year because my body doesn't detox as easily as a typical person does. And that's one of the biggest benefits of sauna. Can you talk more about that and how that helps the body to detox?
Brian Richards: Yeah. So sauna is in effect heating the body up in a passive state. So you're not working out at the gym, you're not using all of your cellular energy for responding to environmental stress, which is what you're doing at the gym. You're in a sympathetic dominant state. You're kind of responding to the bear in the room. All of your blood and your energy is going to your heart and your muscles and lungs basically for locomotion and to escape.
In sauna when you sweat it's very different. The body is not responding to environmental stress. It has all of the cellular energy and all this heat shock protein response that's geared towards restoration, regeneration, rejuvenation, and elimination.
So sauna first of all is definitely the most efficient way to detoxify really anything. The more we study sauna sweat, we see that you can even sweat out mercury for example which the conventional mindset was that you couldn't do that. It would have to be excreted by the stool. So we see that the best way to really eliminate petrochemicals, plastics, and heavy metals, is actually through passive sweating in the sauna.
The way it does it really primarily at the cell level is this heat shock protein response. So basically these are little cellular workmen that are dormant at a resting body temperature, but if we heat up the body we can activate them and they start getting produced by the cell and they do two things.
First of all they help cell detox be more efficient, they support cell detox. And then secondarily they do this other role that's perhaps more interesting and that's called protein refolding. And so the proteins in your body are kind of like the line workers of the body. They're doing all of the work inside and outside of the cell. They're kind of the fundamental, the atomistic worker in the cell. So most people have 20 or 30% of the proteins in their body don't function right. If you've ever seen a protein model on a computer it's like a wadded up piece of tissue paper with a bunch of ribbons coming out of it. It's a very complex structure. And one or two incorrect folds can actually make it not work right, or not work well or not work at all.
So the heat shock proteins go and they refold these proteins so that the body doesn't have to make new proteins but also it improves the protein's functioning. For example the insulin receptor tail on the outside of a cell, it has little proteins on it and the insulin comes and supposed to bind to it. If those proteins are misfolded you have insulin resistance.
And so sauna therapy's been shown to reduce insulin resistance and this is the primary vehicle that this is the way it's happening, is the heat shock proteins are going out and refolding those proteins and making them work better. So it's really a fascinating that, again, such a simple practice of sitting there and sweating passively is, it's not just doing detox, it's literally re-sculpting the body from the cells up and then making every aspect work better. The sheer stress is also rebuilding the vascular system and the blood flow is all about getting nutrients in and getting waste out of the cell. So you can rebuild that system through repeated heat therapy.
It's definitely the best way to do detox but again it has all these other benefits due to the protein refolding that lead to improved cognitive functioning, has immunal protective effects.
That's why in general we have all of these amazing longevity studies with sauna. It's not just cleaning you up and cleansing you, it's also rebuilding you and restoring and rejuvenating you.
But to kind of speak directly to what you asked, what about infrared sauna and how does it maybe make you sweat better than a regular sauna or other forms of heat therapy?
What we do here with incandescent sauna is we're delivering primarily near infrared wavelengths. We're quite a bit different than other infrared saunas. Because we use near infrared, it's a wavelength that penetrates much deeper in addition to doing this light therapy stuff that we'll talk about maybe in little bit. But because it has a penetrating radiant heat, we don't need a hot sauna.
A near infrared sauna, a SaunaSpace sauna, only operates at about 105 degrees. And even though it has a lower air temperature than a far infrared sauna at 150 degrees, or a wet sauna at like 180 or 200 degrees, our SaunaSpace sauna actually heats you up better using that radiant heating effect.
So you will sweat faster at a lower air temperature in an incandescent SaunaSpace sauna than you would in a regular far infrared sauna. And that just has to do with heating the tissues more efficiently due to the wavelength that we're delivering. We're delivering near infrared.
So people associate well if I really want to sweat its got to be hot inside right? But due to the physics properties of water and how water absorbs wavelengths of light differently, and since our bodies are 70% water, water controls how light heats our body up and near infrared has actually been shown to penetrate the deepest.
In fact the only wavelengths that have been shown to significantly penetrate bone tissue are near infrared. And so we see that over 50% of the sun's spectrum I believe, or at least 43% is near infrared. And the wavelengths that penetrate the body the deepest, what's called the optical window of the human body, is also in that near infrared band. And furthermore, the only wavelengths that have been shown to stimulate mitochondrial function, stimulate these mitochondrial healing systems that we call red light therapy effects or mitochondrial stimulation affects, are again near infrared. So it's not a coincidence.
You see kind of an evolutionary track here. The mitochondria is a very old entity in the cell and if we look back a billion years to the incorporation of it into the single cell organism and creating the first eucaryotic animal cell, we see that that receptor system that's in the mitochondria dates back to that.
And so there's a long history of all animals and definitely all of humanity's history of getting lots of near infrared light from the sun as we kind of were outside naked in the equatorial region, and we also did a lot of passive sweating. So the ancient humans knew for many thousands of years that hey, if we sit there and sweat it cleanses the body, it brings mental clarity, it restores our functioning. And so it's just a ...
It's perhaps the most effective way to do maintenance for your health that addresses all things. Since it's aspecific, all of our tissues respond to this heat shock system and almost every cell in the body has mitochondria in it. So the light therapy and the heat therapy are ... You're doing both of those in an incandescent sauna, are two just really fundamental ways to restore cell functioning and then we see in the studies there's real systemic effects and the whole organism seems to get better.
And you see that too, if you go to saunaspace.com and read some of our customer reviews, our customers are not like primarily athletes actually, even though there's definitely performance enhancement discussion to be had here about these therapies. It's primarily people dealing with pretty serious illness. And you can read about some incredible impacts on people's health and incredible recoveries that people are having by doing this simple practice of sweating under near infrared light.
Naomi Nakamura: Now I can see you on video even though our listener can't. And I see that you have some light on right now. And you mentioned in the beginning that you started with 45 minutes a day, four to five times a week. Can you have your light on in your office all day? Is that what you do?
Brian Richards: Yeah. So this is kind of a wellness optimization tool in the office. So I use my sauna really every morning. I used it this morning of course. And that's the cornerstone of one's health. That's like the daily practice that has the full body effects and really the global improvement in health.
But what do we do outside of the sauna? Our modern environments are really toxic, they're really artificial, especially at work. We have a lot of flickering fluorescent light above us, that's blue only light. Those are nervous stressors, they stress out the body in different ways. We stare into computer screens like I'm doing right now, all day long. We have wifi and cellphone stress, electromagnetic stress. Not to mention that work in general, modern work is really stressful.
So we also have a single light product called the photon, where it's basically one light. I use it at work to counteract the flicker stress so it cancels out flickering photons. And it also has the same healing effect that you have in the sauna. The light therapy has a rejuvenative effect. It counteracts the blue light stress. It has like a protective effect. It's the same thing you get from sunlight. It's the near infrared portion that is healing and regenerating you and repairing the damage due to the ultraviolet and the blue light.
That's because near infrared and red are regenerative and blue and ultraviolet are really high energy. They cause for radical formation or ultraviolets ionizing. So it's directly mutagenic. It causes mutations to the DNA.
And so I have a single light that I basically use for spot therapy, which is one of the primary uses of it. It's used on a local area of the body for a period of maybe 10 minutes or 20 minutes, many times a day for spot therapy. But it's also used for environmental therapy. So if I don't have it directly on me and I just have it kind of pointing up on my desk at the office, I leave it on all day. And it makes computer work and it makes the office environment much more enjoyable and much less stressful. And so it's being used here in the office. Also people use it in their homes as kind of a source of blue light free lighting after dark that doesn't have flicker effects like LED and fluorescent light does.
It's almost like a fireplace. It has the same concept and that's part of why the bonfire and fireplace feels so lovely. It's not just the heat. There's actually a light therapy benefit to it, where the light is stimulating beneficial things in the cells. And so this, it's kind of a modern fireplace. You just plug it in and you get all that mood lighting and kind of environmental effect that you would get normally from a fireplace.
Naomi Nakamura: I really like that comparison to a fireplace. I still struggle with sleep every now and then, and so what I have done that has really helped me is as the days end and sunlight goes down, I try to turn off lights in my home to try and sync up to my natural circadian rhythm. Especially during the winter time you don't want to be just sitting there in the dark. So I really like that idea of having a light like that to just kind of ... As you're turning off all of the fluorescent lighting and everything else in your home, you still have a healing source of light.
Brian Richards: Right. You know we want to be able to hang out after dark. And ancient humans did this too. We made fires after dark and that's okay. It's just human biology ...
We have all this modern technology that's brought us all this amazing convenience and increases in quality of life. But biologically we need what we needed a hundred and a thousand and a hundred thousand years ago.
Biologically we need the same ancestral environment. So the trick is, hey how can we use modern technology for good? How can we trick the body into thinking oh it's in its ancestral environment and it feels good and it feels better?
And so incandescent light is the light of nature. When you heat up an iron rod really hot it begins to glow red right? That's incandescence. And so the sun is the ultimate incandescent source but if we're going to leverage that understanding, we can also use the incandescent light bulb as like the same concept. So there's nothing wrong with having lighting after dark but it needs to be non-flickering incandescent light where you have basically a broad spectrum emission that's primarily near infrared. You have a little bit of visible light, but primarily near infrared. So you're mimicking sunlight as much as possible.
But what's interesting here as is with the fireplace and the bonfire, the incandescent lamp is cooler than sunlight so that basically red shifts it. So it shifts it into the near infrared spectrum more so there's actually no ultraviolet or blue light emitted by our lamps. Only kind of the full regenerative complement of red and near infrared. So the light and the heat that's good for us and not ...
Because sunlight is kind of a double edged sword. And people assume hey, I'm not getting enough sunlight, I'm not getting enough vitamin D, right? That's the benefit from sunlight. Well actually vitamin D production in the skin and stuff is due to exposure to ultraviolet. And ultraviolet is actually only about 6 or 7% the sun's spectrum. The largest polarity or according to some measures in fact the majority of sunlight is again near infrared. So when you don't have enough light in the winter and we're feeling sad or there's even this acronym called SADs, seasonal affective disorder. It's really near infrared that we're missing.
And so instead of ... And I am not a healthcare practitioner. I have to of course say these are not medical devices. I don't claim to diagnose or cure anything here.
But if we just look at it from a basic understanding of what our ancestral environment was, it was near infrared. What is restorative in terms of light and light therapy? It's near infrared.
There are over 5,000 studies now on ... If you just search that on the PubMed, low level light therapy, you'll see near infrared light and red light is being used to heal almost anything. Almost any issue. And as is sauna therapy as it were.
Sauna therapy is one of the most widely studied of all natural therapies. And we're talking about in vitro, in vivo, in animals also and in humans. And everything from mitochondrial health to longevity to ...
Basically sauna reduces all cause of mortality. It reduces your cause of dying of all things, which is kind of I think what everybody's going for here and it's something that everybody can do, everybody has access to. And I think we just have a really unique approach in doing it. But any sauna is better certainly than no sauna.
And people will then say, "Well maybe I can just get out in the sun." Well again, you can but the ancestral humans didn't go out and sunbathe at 1 p.m. in the afternoon at the beach. They understood that near infrared is the regenerative and blue and ultraviolet is ultimately the damaging high energy component.
So ancestral humans were up at sunrise and got a lot of sun in the morning when the ratio of near infrared and red to blue UV was really high. And then the maximum blue UV exposure's in midday, so that's when they would rest under the tree. And then at sunset blue light and ultraviolet like is high frequency and moves fastest so it ends first and that's why the sunset is red. So at the end of the day you get this kind of red near infrared only rejuvenative boost, and so that's why we're supposed to watch sunset.
And then as you mentioned before, according to our circadian cycle, we ought to be preparing to go to sleep after dark. And so we don't want anymore blue light sources.
And so if you can't achieve that and if you can't be outside in those times of the day, kind of naked or primarily naked, then what we're doing here at SaunaSpace is kind of the next best thing. It's a way to get a daily near infrared light dose and of course get all of these benefits that come with heat therapy in the comfort of your home and the privacy of your home too.
It's not easy or convenient to be naked outside. And certainly not in the northern hemisphere. And then nowadays there's ... I feel like I'm bouncing around a lot of subjects right now. But nowadays there's an interesting thing going on in nature. So you think okay well I'll go camping in the wilderness and I'll be naked there and I'll do this ancestral human cycle of early day and late day. But most places now where you can go camping and get out into the outdoors, you can answer your cellphone. And that's because there's a microwave cellphone tower close enough by that it's transmitting a signal to wherever you are. Which means your body's under that subtle microwave stress all the time.
And so it's interesting that even out in nature you can't get back to an ancestral context anymore. And so that's part of what drove us to come out with our faraday product where you have basically a stainless steel liner system that protects you from that. We feel like nowadays with unfortunately all this modern electromagnetic stress everywhere, and cellphone signal everywhere, inside of this faraday sauna that we've created is really the most ancestral space you can possibly get. You have the heat therapy, you have the near infrared red light therapy and all of that.
And you have it in a truly ancestral context that is without man made EMF. And so it's kind of disturbing that's the case nowadays that we have to create this really sophisticated environment to recreate what we evolved under, but that's the reality of today. And now we have what's called 5G cellphone technology being put in place where we have a dramatic increase in the current frequencies and then we have the addition of higher frequency bands. And it's already being rolled out and so there's really no going back and there's no escaping it.
Naomi Nakamura: It's really important to point that out because you talk about how we can't even escape it in nature, but in our homes if you think about all the sources. You know I have my laptop here, I have my phone, I have my television, I have fluorescent lights. We have all of these things just within our home and this is just a really great solution to help circumvent some of that.
Brian Richards: Yeah it is and people also ask, "Well okay so you made this awesome EMF free sauna in this environment but how significant of an impact could it possibly have if I'm only in there for a half hour a day and the rest of the day I'm out in the toxic world?" And the answer is, I think that when you do heat therapy and light therapy without the electromagnetic stress, it's the most optimal way to do it. The beneficial cellular effects are not being counteracted by the EMF stress with the peroxynitrite cycle dysfunction and all your voltage gated calcium ion channels opening. So you have an optimal rejuvenative therapy that continually rebuilds your proteins and corrects your gene expression and cleanses your body of these toxins. And just fixes your nervous system, fixes everything solely and subtlety at the cell level. And then you go out and you've re-galvanized yourself.
Your body is prepared to be exposed again all day long. So it's not just about getting a break from EMF inside, it's about rebuilding and restoring and pulling back kind of in this tug of war against the modern toxic world and all this exposure that you invariably get. Even if you totally mitigate your house of all of these unnatural stressful stimuli, what happens when you go outside or you go to your office where you don't own your office and you're just working there and you just have to deal with what you have? Well that's why a core restorative practice is essential and I think that the research really supports sauna therapy and light therapy as being two of probably the most powerful things you could possibly do. And we've kind of combined those together in what we're doing here. And so I think that you don't have to escape and become a hermit and move into some jungle environment or something to escape all modern life. Just recognize that the sources of stress and toxins and toxins in the modern world, and try to reduce your exposure to those and maintain a daily core practice of restoration.
Naomi Nakamura: And as someone who is type A through and through, it's really, really hard for me to tap into my parasympathetic rested state. And I think just the ritual of allowing yourself to do this 30 to 45, 60 minutes a day, that ritual just helps ... It's helped me to let my mind rest and tap into that as well. Because the first time I ... And I haven't tried your saunas yet, but when I did find just a local spa that had an infrared sauna, and I went in there that first time, it was just 30 minutes, it was so hard for me just to sit there and not do anything. Like that was my biggest challenge. And so I find just the whole ritual of doing that is just ... It's the most relaxing time of my day.
Brian Richards: Yeah it is and it's good that you bring up the parasympathetic sympathetic kind of scale. That's another thing that we have totally backwards nowadays. Ancestral humans were 90 or more ... I'm just throwing a number out there. But the vast majority of their day they were in parasympathetic state. They were in a rest and digest and heal state. And these are basically nervous system gearings and they were only in a fight or flight state, what we call a sympathetic nervous state when they were responding to an environmental danger and they had to escape. And so your adrenaline gets pumping and your cortisol levels go up and you get tons of energy and kind of time slows down and that's a survival mechanism and absolutely essential. But the ancestral environment only had a few ... There were only a limited number of environmental triggers for that. And so you only experience that jacked up nervous state a minority of the day and a minority of the life. And so most of the time the human body was resting, digesting, healing, and having a relaxed time of it.
Nowadays that scenario is flipped. We're probably vast majority of the day in sympathetic dominance, in fight or flight. As soon as you get up your cellphone starts ringing, people start yelling at you, you have traffic on the way to work. And then at work you have all this blue light stimulus, that's a sympathetic stressor. You have flicker stress, which is another sympathetic stressor. The electromagnetic stress from the dirty electricity and the microwave signal. And then just that's all day long, eight hours, nine hours a day, which ancestral humans didn't do either. They had short periods of high intensity activity for food acquisition or responding to environmental threats. But most of the time they were just lounging around. They didn't work 40, 50, 60 hour weeks that are par for the course in western society. And on top of that, they had restorative practices that we have here but we kind of ... I think maybe in America we see these things as luxuries or we see rest and parasympathetic activity and healing activities as ... It's kind of a second tier after exercise. More people are thinking, oh well for my health I want to go to the gym. And there are absolutely amazing benefits to high intensity exercise, but they need to followed up with a period of rest and digest and heal.
And so people are missing that component. They're thinking oh for my health I need to go to the gym. Well it's like, well if you only had time for one of the two things you'd be better off doing the sauna therapy. Or if you're going to go to the gym you need to follow up with sauna definitely afterwards. And so it's also a thing that in our particular type of sauna where you're completely protected from the EMF stress and you have no sympathetic stressors at all, it really is an ideal environment to meditate actually and concentrate. And so for people who have never done that before, don't have a practice of that, it's simply just this concept of trying to keep the mind present. And so you're not worrying about what happened yesterday, and the regrets of yesterday. And you don't have worry and concerns for what's the future and what's coming up next. You're just here in this moment and it turns out that that's incredibly beneficial for one's health as well. It's not just like mental discipline. It has to do with keeping the body relaxed and dropping the cortisol levels and a marked improvement in your health, this practice.
And so it's something you can also do in the sauna and appreciate that that is not just a thing that people do for mental discipline, in fact it has beneficial health effects. And it's really something that we all ought to be doing.
Naomi Nakamura: Absolutely. So I have one last question for you. So you described SaunaSpace with these tents and these lights. I live in the San Francisco Bay area. I don't have lot of space. I have a small home. Would your single photon light be the solution for me? Because I know a lot of my listeners live in large cities with small places as well. So what would be a solution for someone like us?
Brian Richards: Yeah. The photon light, it's not just ... It is an adjunct, so it's like an add on to the sauna. The sauna's a full body therapy. The photon is more of a targeted therapy. But obviously if you don't have the room, start out with that. It's a lower cost concept than the sauna. It doesn't take up all the space. It's also less of a discipline commitment. In the sauna you get in for 20 or 30 minutes, you have to take a shower afterwards. The photon you can kind of use all the time and it's really versatile.
You can use it at home, you can use it at the office. And people are absolutely using it first and foremost for relief. It's being used for relief from pain. People are using it for neuropathies and skin issues and for mood issues and the rest. And it's a great way to start out and it also stands on its own as bringing a big improvement to your environment. So yeah, if you don't have room for it start out with that and certainly that and everything else that we do here comes with really generous long trial periods. So we give you opportunity to try it out in all the different scenarios for many months and make sure you're really pleased with it.
But yes, I think that that's not just something that I'm saying and we do have some customer reports of folks including one, this lady V. Capaldi, who has a damaged hypothalamus I think. She has progressive MS and she's been dealing with that for a long time now. And she was doing this van tour where she didn't have the sauna, she only had the photon light. And she would just use it on her feet and on her gut and on her face on a daily basis. She reported that it actually helped her improve her body temperature regulation symptoms due to her MS where she gets too hot and too cold and she has like no control over it. So the photon light, even as a targeted approach, it had systemic effects. It had effects on her whole body and her whole wellbeing that were really dramatic. So I think it's definitely an option for those who don't have the space. And time will tell. More and more we get more and more reports of different beneficial effects that people are having in the whole body even just with the photon light.
I know that many people now use it for the environmental therapy effects and really swear by it. Like can't work at a computer without it sort of thing. And in the winter ... Especially here in the northern hemisphere in the United States. It seems like here in Missouri its just been so cloudy and Missouri we're usually a four seasons place and it should be April showers, it should be May flowers by now. But its been super cloudy here. Its been kind of a bummer. And so just all the more reason to incorporate something like this to stave that off and to get that near infrared dose. It seems like the sun will never come out.
Naomi Nakamura: Well I'm excited to give it a try. And for those who want to learn more they can go to your website at saunaspace.com. And I will say there's tons of really great resources and articles on there that I have spent lot of time reading through those. So I really encourage everyone to go and check that out. Any other resources or places people can check you out on social media or anything like that?
Brian Richards: Yeah. We're on Facebook and Instagram. If you want to see the product it's @saunaspace and also on Facebook. But if you want, we do have nice articles that I've written. They're kind of in depth and a bit wordy but they have a lot of inline citation for folks who want to read the research and read the white papers. And for those who prefer to listen or watch, I've done a fair number of interviews now that are all on YouTube with different folks where we do deep dives into various aspects from the sauna stuff to the light therapy stuff, to just the hormonal stuff and just you name it. So for those who prefer to listen on YouTube as well you can just search Brian Richards and SaunaSpace and I've done a number of interviews that I think are pretty good and long and get to the nitty gritty of all of it.
Naomi Nakamura: I will link to those on the show notes. So with that, thank you so much for taking the time to come and speak to us today. I appreciate it.
Brian Richards: Yeah, thank you for having my Naomi.
Naomi Nakamura: If you enjoyed this episode it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to this podcast, write a review, or even share it with someone who you know would enjoy it too. In the meantime you can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes over on my website at www.livefablife.com. There you can submit a question to be answered right here on the show, sign up for weekly updates, insider access, and get behind the scenes scoops, and learn how we can work together too. Most importantly, thank you so much for being here and I can't wait to connect with you again on the next episode of the show. See you next week.
Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Nutrition Health Coach. She helps passionate, ambitious high-achievers who are being dragged down by fatigue, burnout, sugar cravings, poor sleep, unexplained weight issues, and hormonal challenges optimize health, find balance, and upgrade their energy so they can do big things in this world.
Through her weekly show, The Live FAB Live Podcast, programs, coaching, and services, she teaches women how to optimize their diet, support their gut health, reduce their toxic load, and improve their productivity, bringing work + wellness together.
Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!
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