Heat me happy: How community saunas are helping people heal through trauma

Ihonestly think the sauna saved my life.” Hanna tells me this calmly, without any sense of hyperbole, over coffee at a local café.

In 2020, the 45-year-old graphic designer had what she describes as a “seriously bad” mental breakdown, with bouts of anxiety that would last for up to 12 hours a day. Living in the UK at the time, she found no mental health resources readily available and was eventually forced to return to her home country of Germany to get proper support. While there, she started going to a sauna every day. The result was transformational.

“It was the only place I felt safe for sure – I always knew that, however I felt during the day, there was this place I could come back to, to relearn how to feel safe, to unlearn anxiety. The combination of the extreme heat and cold rush brought me back into my body. I spent every evening in this comforting place for three weeks – and I feel sure that healed me.”

It’s why, when she moved back to Folkestone in Kent and discovered a community sauna was in the works, she joined as soon as she could. “Thankfully I’ve been very well now for two years – but I know that, whatever happens, the sauna is there. My dad died last year, and I knew the sauna was there. If I go through rough patches and the anxiety comes back, I know the sauna is there. I’m quite sure this will be my medicine.”

It’s a feeling that’s shared by nearly every member of Folkestone Sea Sauna’s now 170-strong community that I speak to – myself included. Officially up and running since February 2023, the sauna was something I stumbled upon after moving to this coastal town in the autumn of the previous year.