How You Perceive Colors & The Ways Heat Can Make You Healthy

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“On something you should know, have you ever been all alone?”

But felt like someone was watching you. What does that mean? Then the interesting ways colors affect you. Keep going to the grocery store and you go to the meat counter. You'll notice that the meat is usually lying on some kind of green background.

And the reason that is is because the green and the red playoff of each other And it makes the red more vibrant. Also how chewing gum affects your brain. And the emerging science of how heat, like in a sauna, can seriously improve your health. The series of studies from Finland found that frequent sauna users had about 40%

A rate of fatal heart attacks, cardiovascular disease, and all cause mortality. That's an astonishing finding. And that changed the conversation around heat.

“Or was today on something you should know.”

What is that? Is it real? Well, that's what we're going to start with today. On this episode of Something You Should Know. What is that?

Is it real? Well, that's what we're going to start with today. On this episode of Something You Should Know. Hi, I'm Mike Herrothers. So that feeling that someone is watching you is pretty common.

But very often you turn around to look and there's no one watching you. Psychologists say that feeling is usually an illusion created by your brain. But it's not random. You see, humans are highly tuned to detect eyes and the direction of their gaze. Even in low visibility or out of the corner of your vision.

It's an ancient survival skill. If something or someone is watching you, it could be a threat.

The problem is your brain would rather make a false alarm than miss a real one.

So it fills in gaps, a shadow or a movement, even just a vague sense of presence. And suddenly you think someone is staring at you. When you add in things like the spotlight effect where we overestimate how much people notice us. And confirmation bias that is we remember the few times we were right that someone was staring at us and then the illusion gets stronger.

So that feeling you're being watched is probably not true. But the reason you feel it is very real. And that is something you should know. Talking about color is a little like talking about music. You can describe it, analyze it, even debate it.

But unless you experience it, words never quite capture the whole thing. And color is stranger than we often realize. We attach emotions to color. We have favorite colors and ones we avoid. And then there are endless shades in between.

But here's the really fascinating thing.

“How do we even know that the color I call blue looks the same to you?”

Then there's the bigger mystery of how color affects us. Why certain colors commas excites or even influence our decisions.

So how did we come to define color in the first place?

And why has it been such a surprisingly complicated thing to describe? Well, here to unravel the story of color and how we perceive it is Cory Stamper. She is a lexicographer who spent nearly 30 years writing dictionaries for Miriam Webster, Cambridge Dictionaries and dictionary.com. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian New York Magazine and the Washington Post.

She's author of a book called True Color, the strange and spectacular history of defining color

Hey, Cory, welcome to something you should know.

Thanks so much, Mike. It's great to be here.

“So you're a word person having written dictionaries for years.”

And here you are talking about colors and words and colors. Well, you know, don't often those two words don't often show up in the same sentence.

So why are you talking about color?

You would think they don't go in the same sentence a lot. Until you start actually talking about color and then you realize how difficult it is to describe colors without using some kind of a color chip or some kind of a visual reference. Because not everyone can see color, not everyone has access to those visual references.

“So it really start the journey with color for me begins with language and not so much with color.”

You know, it sometimes seems that we complicate the discussion about color and the words about color. Because if I'm talking to you about something and I say, look over there, see that blue thing over there. I don't have to say see the Aquamarine. It's just blue and yes, it's one of many blues. But just using the word blue is good enough in that situation that you know what I'm talking about.

But it seems like there are so many different shades of blue and a lot of times they're not necessary. It's true, but there's also times when you want to be able to distinguish between all those blues. And you know, a great example of this would be I live in a part of the country that's near the ocean. I did not grow up near the ocean, but now I live near the ocean. And I have people who know the ocean tell me, oh, you know, when the ocean is this particular kind of blue when the ocean is really sort of a gritty gray blue.

You don't want to be out in it because that means there's a lot of undercurrents that are dangerous. When the ocean is a much clearer blue, that's better to be out in. I don't know what that means because I didn't grow up in the ocean, but clearly there's two different blues that someone's talking about. And in those cases, those blues could be the difference between someone taking a boat out and sinking and someone having just a lovely, you know, Pacific troll around the harbor.

“Well, it would seem that words are kind of a lousy way, you know, the best way to convey a color is to show you the color.”

Here's what I'm talking about, rather than try to come up with words that describe it.

Here's what I mean, it's this color. Sure, but what happens when someone has impaired color vision or what happens when the color that I want to show you is on something paper, let's say, that is going to be a different medium than the thing I need you to match it to. If I show you a paint chip, and I say, I would like you, Mr. Mike Carellers, to mix me a gallon of paint in this beautiful color that's called Rejuvenate. And you say, "Great, is that going on your bathroom wall?" And I say, "Yes, they say, alright, would you like that in egg shell, satin, matte, semi-gloss or gloss finish?"

And I say, "Semi-gloss, why not, sounds fancy?" I get it home and I put it on my wall, well, it doesn't match the chip because the chip is a different gloss. Or I get it home and I put it on my wall, and it's not that color Rejuvenate anymore because the light in my house is different from the light in the hardware store. So even when we have color chips and examples of color to show people, it's still not airtight. The other thing that's interesting about that is we think that it's very easy to show someone a color and say,

"This is what I mean by aqua." And the thing is, as some people, particularly with sort of these borderline colors, like aqua or magenta, people have such strong associations with what a color is in their head that they'll argue with you about it. I used to dye my hair, what I thought was purple, and I was endlessly fascinated when I would go way at the train station or I'd be in line with a grocery store and people would say, "Ah, I love your hair. I wish I could dye my hair, and then they'd come up with a color that was not the color that was on my head."

And I would argue with people, "No, it's purple. It's pink or it's blue. No, it's purple. Nope, it's pink." So people have such strong associations with what they think a color is when you give it a name or you show them a chip and say, "This is aqua." And so what is this idea? You know, I've heard people talk about there's this color psychology that certain colors affect people. Is that a real thing?

Functional color is using how people perceive colors in places like factories or on ships to help differentiate between different parts.

So functional color was really important after World War II in factories because people who were not well trained were suddenly in the workforce and they kept shoving their hands into gears or touching moving parts. But if you paint those moving parts are really different color than everything else, like a red or a yellow, a color that people associate with warning, they're going to be less likely to jam their hand into it. This comes up even in an example I give. And the book is there's a way if you go into the grocery store and you go to the meat counter, you'll notice that the meat is usually lying on some kind of green background or that's divided up by green plastic grass.

“The reason that is is because the green and the red playoff of each other and it makes the red more vibrant, so you associate that brighter red with better quality meat.”

So functional color is sort of where color psychology gets applied, but in terms of these universal ideas that reds are the color of love and that blues are the color of calm.

There's not a whole lot of science that goes behind that, and that's certainly not universally true across culture, either.

“And what about like in logos, supposedly you see like the red and the yellow and fast food logos a lot and because it's supposed to do what?”

I think the idea there is that reds, yellows, oranges are supposed to make you hungry, right? They're warm colors and look onto your appetites, I think, is maybe how a color marketer would put it.

Often times what you're seeing is just a market pattern. There's one successful fast food place that's got yellow and red and their logo, so, you know, we'll associate with that other fast food place by also using a different yellow and red in our logo, but yellow and red all the same. There's this very interesting language of color psychology that's been built up that I think becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in some ways. So lots of people are like, oh, we, you know, I painted my kitchen blue because I wanted it to be calming and now it feels very cold and impersonal.

And that's, you're, you're just repeating back what color psychologists tell you those things mean, whether you actually feel that way or not. Yeah, well, you know, things like earth, we hear earth tones are very, you know, earthy, I guess.

“But that being in a room that's brown and beige that supposedly has an effect and the assumption is that it has the same effect on everyone that enters it, but does it?”

No, there were experiments and studies done throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s about how color would affect people mostly in institutional settings, so prisons or hospitals or other kinds of institutions. And these experiments went so far as to see if we paint a barracks red, is that going to produce more aggressive soldiers, if we paint a hospital beige, is that going to mean that psychiatric patients are calmer and the result is, we just don't have enough good data to be able to say that that's the case.

Because color is not just a subjectively experienced thing, but it's also subjectively talked about how can you have an experiment about color and how color affects a group of people without somehow people realizing that they're supposed to be keen on the color. If you're used to being in a barracks that's painted gray and they put you in a barracks that's red, of course you would notice that difference and of course you would probably have some kind of reaction to it. Maybe your reaction matches up with what your experimenters hopes are, but it's so hard to know because these things are all such subjective experiences for us. And again, they're very culturally specific. It's hard to say yes red makes everyone angry yes blue columns everyone down.

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“I'm speaking with Corey Stapper, she's author of the book True Color, the strange and spectacular history of defining color from Azure to zinc pink.”

So Corey, you go into a paint store and you will see so many odd weird different names for colors, who comes up with those names that this one looks just like that one, but it has a completely different name. And this one is named this color is called champagne, it doesn't look anything like the champagne I've ever drank. Where does this all who's doing this? There's an entire industry devoted to naming consumer colors and it's called color marketing and it is a blend of psychology, color science and marketing.

And there are hundreds, possibly thousands of people who are involved in color marketing. Paint stores are the thing that we think of the most because all the colors are right there and, you know, there seems to be thousands of colors in front of you and all of the names seem to be very of the moment. So naming is so specific and the thing that is so fascinating about it is there are different fields of color naming specialists. So you have people who work in paint stores and they talk very specifically about how paint is a particular product that can only have particular kinds of names.

If you talk to someone who does fabric dying, they will talk about how commercially fabrics are all named particular things for particular markets. So if I'm shopping at, you know, macy's or something like that, I'm going to get the same colors as someone who's shopping at a very high end. Cotourier, but those color names are going to be different because I'm in a different consumer bracket than the people who are shopping at the high-cotourier store. Well, it does to an outsider like me seem unnecessarily complicated. You go to a paint store and say, I want white.

Oh, is he my god, I mean, there's a million different whites, but you would think white would be white.

I would probably guess that there are more whites and grays and even blacks than there are more chromatic colors, reds or inches yellow screens because whites can tip in any chromatic direction. You can have a white that's got a little bit of a yellow undertone or a little bit of a green undertone or a little bit of a purple undertone. You can't have a purple that's got a green undertone, that's a different color.

“So there, there are white is not white is all this confusion and bizarreness deliberate or is it just so many people are doing so many things with color, it's just a big mess or what?”

It's a little of both color is very much like language in that it's very elastic. So the way that we talk about color changes depending on our context, the way that we encounter color changes depending on our context. And one of the great things about both color and language is that it's flexible enough to accommodate all of that. So a painter can talk about their palette and a scientist can talk about enamel coatings for your refrigerator and color and language can accommodate both of those fields.

Sure, titanium oxide is that's that white, but over here the painter calls it titanium white and both the painter and the color specialist arguments, no, no, no, no, no, no, the other one's wrong.

That's right. And when I just say, well, that's just white. All of these things are so complicated in part because the way language grows is through iteration. So I've got blue, I've got one color blue, it might get 15 different names over the course of the English languages reckoning with that color doesn't mean that that color is 15 different colors and it doesn't mean that we need to get rid of all of the redundancy in language.

“It just means that's what an elastic living breathing language and discipline do it iterates.”

Well, it's interesting to me that the name of a color can influence what you think about that color and I have, I think a really good example of that.

I remember many, many years ago of painting a room and I saw this color and it was called harvest gold and I thought, well, how lovely. How wonderful. Looks great. I looked at the paint chip and I said, great. So I painted the room harvest gold. It was just gas. It looked like vomit. It was horrible.

“But it sounded great and the little chip looked great, but on the whole room, it was terrible.”

I have done the same thing. I have repainted whole rooms because of that color names are so fascinating because they, they are meant all language, all words.

If Voka feeling in us, whether we want to have that feeling evoked or not, we have a reaction to them. Now color marketers take advantage of that reaction and that's one of the things about color names and talking about color that gets so interesting is that the language we use for color effects are response to it. There have been studies done on how names, particularly in commercial contexts affect a person's willingness to buy an item that is that color.

“And they found these various groups found that a fancier color name brought in more dollars because people expect something with a fancy name to be more expensive.”

Calling your wall color brown is not going to make anyone buy it. We're calling your wall color yellow. Well, that doesn't sound very exciting, but if you call it harvest gold or sunrise. Well, now that's evoking a feeling in me, even if it's the same color. But maybe I don't know enough about color science and illuminance and things like that to realize that harvest gold in the paint catalog in the paint store is actually going to turn out to be this really gross pukey color on my wall because I don't take into account the fact where I don't know to take into account that the light is going to be different.

And the space itself is going to change how I see that color and even things like, oh, I have brown wood trim and I didn't realize that that brown wood trim would make that color go less yellow and more brown and now it just looks gross and dull. These are all things that the feeling that a color name gives us and the feeling we have about a color so context specific and languages very much that way too. So color names, they're meant to make us do a thing with that color and often it's to buy that color and put it on our wall.

We know it's interesting for as long as we've been doing this podcast for several years now, I have tried to find a really good expert on how color affects people and it's been very difficult to find anyone. And you've pretty much explained why because color is so subjective and is so confusing that it's I guess it's hard to know how color affects people and I appreciate your explanation through the through the eyes of a word person about how color works. Speaking with Corey Stapper who for 30 years wrote dictionaries at Miriam Webster came for dictionaries and dictionary dot com and she's author of a book about color.

It's called true color the strange and spectacular history of defining color from Azure to zinc pink.

Thanks so much for having me, Mike, it's been great.

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It can dehydrate you cause heat exhaustion and in extreme cases, heat can even be deadly. But what if heat isn't just something to avoid? The research suggests that when used the right way, heat can actually be good for you, improving your health, boosting athletic performance, and even helping you live longer, from saunas to hot baths to heat training.

Scientists are discovering that exposing your body to heat may trigger some powerful benefits.

My guest, Bill Gifford, has been exploring this fascinating science. He's a veteran magazine writer and editor who covers cutting edge health research. He's author of a book called Hot Wired, how the hidden power of heat makes us stronger.

“I bill, welcome to something you should know.”

Hey, thanks for having me, Mike. So this idea that heat is good for you. I've heard, you know, put a heating pad on it if it's sore or something, but this idea that overall health can be improved with heat is news to me. So what is the argument here? Yeah, so it actually surprised me as well because I am not somebody who instinctively likes hot weather, heat waves, summer, even.

I don't even even like saunas five years ago, and we're told that heat is kind of the devil that he will kill us. And it's true that the excessive heat can be dangerous, but there's sort of an emerging strand of scientific research and athletic knowledge that's now showing that that he can be healing as well. And it can even improve performance for athletes.

“And when you talk about heat, what does it mean? What kind of heat? Like heat from a heater, heat from the sun, heat from going to a hot climate, like what kind of heater we talking about?”

I'm really talking about targeted controlled safe emphasis on safe exposure to temperatures higher than normal, let's say. So, for example, the sauna, which is an ancient tradition in Finland, but also in many cultures around the world. They go into these spaces that are extremely hot, and they derive social, communal, just basic cleanliness type benefits, but also health benefits. And so, a series of studies from Finland actually, about 10 years ago, found that frequent sauna users had about 40% the rate of fatal heart attacks, cardiovascular disease, and all cause mortality.

So, your chance of dying is reduced by half if you go to sauna every other day. That's an astonishing finding, and that changed the conversation around heat from something that's inherently dangerous to something that is dangerous in some situations and potentially healing in other situations.

I've never gotten this sauna thing. I've never understood it. I've been in one, and I thought, well, you know, it's really hot.

Right, can I get out of here? Can I get out of here? Because I don't like the heat. I don't see the pleasure in it.

“And I thought that's why people did it. Like, yeah, there was some vague health benefits to maybe doing it, but the vagueness of it all didn't, didn't counter the fact that it's hot in here, and I went out.”

Yeah, and that's a natural reaction to any extreme environment. I mean, it's the same reaction. These people who go into cold plunges, right? It's like an instant panic, and you want to leave. And once you kind of fight through that, there are some benefits that happen. Interestingly, I like a hot tub. I mean, I like a hot. There you go. I like hot water, but I don't like hot, because then I sweat, and then it's uncomfortable and sticky, and you're sweating in the hot tub as well. What do you mean?

Your view sweat when you're in hot water. Your body's natural response when as your temperature becomes elevated is to try and cool yourself down, because we have this this idea of homeostasis. We want to stay at a stable within a stable temperature range. So your body is fighting to stay cooler.

So I don't know, and maybe you just did ruin it for me. You know, sorry. Sorry. So, but it's interesting point though, the hot tub is actually more effective at raising your core body temperature than a sauna is and is raising my core temperature a good thing. Yes, weirdly, you know, we're told that having a fever is bad and raising your body temperature is bad, but some good things happen when you get your body temperature slightly slightly elevated. So we're talking like 101 Fahrenheit and some adaptations take place, which I can get into later.

“Well, let's get into it now. What are those benefits? For starters, there are a cardiovascular benefits. So your heart rate increases as your body, like I said, is trying to turn to stay cool.”

So you send more blood to the skin, right, and so you have more blood flow and then that in turn, in addition to the heart rate elevation, you get your blood vessels are dilated. So your circulation improves. So that's a good thing. If you go a little deeper, even down to your inside your cells, they're these things called heat shock proteins. I call them like the maintenance department of your cells, but they're also like some scientists I talked to said they're like the mommy proteins and they kind of take care of the other proteins, basically the machinery inside your cells and they clean things up.

So DNA, you know, intact and keep that from breaking down. So it makes you more stress resistant essentially on it on a cellular level. Pretty cool.

So you said earlier that people in sonas, the research shows that they have a lower mortality rate that they, their health benefits because what's going on, like what is it that if I didn't go in that sauna, I might have died from that now the sauna is protecting me from.

“I mean, you're actually literally on point when you say protecting you from something you might have died from.”

This research started in Finland back in the 80s and Finland had a huge problem with middle-aged men dying of heart attacks, sudden heart attacks dropping dead.

And so they did this huge study of cardiovascular risk factors and they asked them about all aspects of their lives including sonos. And so 30 years later, these researchers looked at the data and found that the men who said they use sauna the most at 60% reduced rate of those fatal heart attacks. So it is literally protecting it protected those guys from dying of a heart attack. So it's heart, it's heart attack, it's cardiac, it's cardiac, it starts with cardiovascular health. And then a lot of benefits read it out from there. For example, they looked again at the data and found that the guys who used sauna every other day or every day had about one third, the rate of Alzheimer's disease, that gets your attention.

“Well, this is surprising to me, I've never heard this about men in saunas before, but are there other ways to heat up or must you create a sauna like experience in order to get these heat benefits you're talking about?”

Well, they're infrared saunas, which have a different kind of heat, but also have been found in Japan to have some cardiovascular benefits and have been used actually to treat patients with serious heart conditions. But also just taking a hot bath has been found to have very similar benefits. So again, in Japan, a huge study found that people taking hot baths every night had reduced their cardiovascular disease risk by about a quarter, about 25%. Are there other diseases or conditions that this is good for like does heating you up like inhibit cancer growth or I mean, does there anything else or is it mostly cardiovascular stuff?

It's interesting. So the finished studies, which are the best sort of long term studies of heat exposure in humans, found that there is no effect on cancer, but it kind of helped with everything else. So not only heart stuff, stroke, Alzheimer's, potentially psychosis, they fewer episodes, psychotic episodes in their life. But I'm going to go back to cancer if you, if you will, because it's an interesting topic.

In Germany, for decades, they would, they would use what they called whole body hyperthermia, so basically heating up cancer patients in a kind of infrared little mini infrared sauna contraption.

And I think the idea broadly is that the heat sort of weakens the cancer cells and allows them the medicine to penetrate them more effectively.

“There are other ways to get hot other than sitting in heat, like you can go to the gym and the gym is 72 degrees, but you could work yourself up into a sweat does that count?”

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting, you know, when we exercise, this is an astonishing fact, when we exercise, you know, we're producing all this energy in our muscles in our mitochondria, only about 20% of that energy that we create is translated into motion or effort or lifting. The other 80% is heat. It's like a byproduct. There are, obviously, there are similar benefits to exercise, but as we work out in that 72 degree gym, we get quite hot and we sweat, right? And our body's trying to cool us cool us down athletes have found that there are adaptations that take place as we work out in hot conditions that sort of improve and extend on the benefits on the inherent benefits of exercise.

So you get a sort of a force multiplier effect if you work out in a slightly hotter situation, it's called heat adaptation. And it's very similar to the effects of sitting in a sauna or sitting in your hot tub or sitting in a hot bath. Well, it's interesting because there's been a lot of talk lately and you mentioned it before about, you know, the cold plunge of taking a cold shower and putting your face and cold ice water and and that's just the opposite of what you're talking about.

But they must be related somehow.

If you dig into the science, the data supporting cold plunging is actually quite a bit weaker than the data supporting this targeted heat exposure than I'm talking about.

“And so that's not to say that you shouldn't do it, but I think the expectation that cold plunging is a great thing to do after like a strength workout, I think that's incorrect.”

There's a lot of research showing that jumping in cold water after you lift weights actually blunts your muscle group. So you're blunting the benefits of the workout you just did. Well, I can't say I'm sorry to hear that. I'm not a big cold plunge guy. I'd rather be in a heated pool frankly. I want to ask you about like, so what do we do with this information about targeted heating in just a moment? I'm speaking with Bill Gifford. He's author of the book Hot Wired, how the hidden power of heat makes a stronger.

“And so Bill, I want to get a sense of like, what's the prescription here?”

You've talked about the benefits of a sauna, but not everybody has access to one or is likely going to sit in a sauna every day or every other day. So what can you do? I mean, you could just take a hot bath, too. Honestly, like if that's where you're at, the hot bath again has has been found to have many of the same benefits as sauna, if not greater. In fact, what about a hot shower? Not quite the same thing. Because you're not getting as much of a heat transfer to your body. You're just kind of sitting in the sprinkling shower.

If you're actually immersed in the hot water in the tub, then you're getting your core temperatures going up and you're getting those those benefits of heat.

You know, I think one of the things about sitting in a sauna is, I've never, I've been in a sauna once, but it's kind of boring. Like there's not much to do.

There's this interesting sort of cultural phenomenon that's kind of developed. I think it started in Germany, but they actually do these performances in a sauna. They'll have these sort of attractive performers come into the sauna and there'll be like 40 people in there. And they'll play music or they'll kind of dance around and they'll wave these towels like blasting heat, moving the heat, the hot air around the room in your face. It's like it's very intense. And then that, that's called alfgoose. It's crazy. It's like a whole culture. There's competitions, there's costumes, there's people who do like miniature plays and skits in the sauna.

And so that cure is the boredom problem. So you could, you're not just sitting there, stewing in your own juices. You know, you've got something to sort of divert your attention.

You're making it sound so appealing. It is very, it's very cool.

“Is there a benefit to when you're done and you step out back into the cool, like is that, is that a rush or is that, is that not why people do it?”

That's more kind of like hitting yourself with a hammer and then stopping. There's a little bit of the hitting yourself with a hammer thing. I won't lie, but there's a phenomenon. You almost get sauna drunk or sauna high. So if you go into the hot room and then you either you cool off or you do a quick, whole dip, you do that a few times. Many people have noticed, I noticed you get almost like sauna drunk, like you're just a little bit euphoric, you know, you know, really care about the things that were bothering you before you went in.

And honestly, I noticed that. Well, it's certainly interesting, but does modern medicine typically, like if you were to ask people in the medical profession, they would, oh, yeah, we know about that. Or is this all fairly new stuff?

“You know, I think medicine is starting to take some notice of it.”

I mean, your doctor might not, might or might not prescribe you sauna sessions, but one thing that I found that was really interesting is that,

what they call again, whole body hyperthermia, basically heating you up to a certain level is being actively researched as a potential treatment against severe depression.

And there have been some like pretty striking results. For example, there is a study done initially in Germany by, you know, German and American researchers where they put people in these same devices that I talked about, for that they used to use for treating cancer patients, so they put very depressed people in these things. Heated them up to 101 Fahrenheit for an hour, which is, you know, not fun. I tried it myself. It's not fun. But then afterwards, their depression symptoms were cut in half.

And even more, which is way better than any anti-depressants, probably anti-depressants only working about 20 to 40% of patients. Even better, they went back a month later thinking that the anti-depressant effect would be, would have evaporated, would be gone. And they found that they were still not depressed, still less depressed, and again six weeks later, so it lasted six weeks. And so that got some attention, and then there are various studies happening right now. Other studies have come out since then kind of confirming this result, which is great news, I think.

I would think one of the concerns, if you're using heat for the health benefits that it supposedly produces, that one of the concerns would be hydration, because heat will evaporate water, and that you could get dehydrated from doing the kinds of things you're talking about. So everybody walks around with a water bottle now everywhere, right, on the airplane, in a theater, in a restaurant, everybody's got their sort of emotional support water bottles.

“And I was kind of shocked and amazed to discover that drinking too much over hydration, and again, this is related to heat in the sense that you need to hydrate to replace the water you lose from sweat, et cetera.”

Over hydration can actually kill you or make you sick. So how does that work? Seems like you'd have to drink an awful lot of water for that to happen. If you drink too much water, these mechanisms in your body that regulate your fluid level and your salinity and all this kind of stuff,

you can essentially dilute your body to a situation called hypo-neatremia, which basically means you're not salty enough.

You don't have enough sodium so that your sal membranes and neurotransmitters and things like that kind of stop working. It's a very serious situation. It's relatively rare, but it happened to brick shields, about a year ago, a year and a half ago, she nearly died, so we need to be careful around the hydration situation. I think the big takeaway is that targeted, limited exposure to heat can actually have some benefits in terms of our physical, mental, emotional health.

but I've never heard of all these health benefits you're talking about, and you're a well-regarded writer that clearly has researched this.

I find it fascinating. I've been talking to Bill Gifford. He is a veteran magazine writer and editor who covers cutting-edge health research, and he is author of a book Hot Wired, how the hidden power of heat makes us stronger, and there's a link to that book in the show notes. Bill, great. Thanks. Appreciate the info. Thanks, Mike. This is great. I loved all your questions. This is great.

It sounds too simple, but research shows that chewing gum can improve alertness and help you stay focused, especially during long or repetitive tasks.

In studies, people who chewed gum perform better on tests of attention and reaction time, particularly as tasks went on and mental fatigue set in. Scientists think it works because chewing gum increases brain arousal and keeps you mentally engaged, almost like giving your brain something small to do so it doesn't drift. There's even some evidence that mint flavors like peppermint may add a slight boost, possibly because they stimulate scent. But here's the catch. Choing gum won't make you smarter or better at complex thinking.

What it can do is help you stay in the zone longer. So if your focus starts to slip, you might not need more coffee. You might just need a stick of gum.

“And that is something you should know. This program is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Jeff Havison, executive producers Ken Williams.”

I am Mike Herruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. We've all heard the warnings about heat. On a hot day, it can dehydrate you, cause heat exhaustion, and in extreme cases, heat can even be deadly. But what if heat isn't just something to avoid? New research suggests that when used the right way, heat can actually be good for you, improving your health, boosting athletic performance, and even helping you live longer from saunas to hot baths to heat training.

Scientists are discovering that exposing your body to heat may trigger some powerful benefits.

My guest, Bill Gifford, has been exploring this fascinating science. He's a veteran magazine writer and editor who covers cutting edge health research.

“He's author of a book called Hot Wired, how the hidden power of heat makes us stronger. I bill, welcome to something you should know.”

Hey, thanks for having me, Mike. So this idea that heat is good for you. I've heard, you know, put a heating pad on it if it's sore or something, but this idea that overall health can be improved with heat is news to me. So what is the argument here? Yeah, so it actually surprised me as well because I am not somebody who instinctively likes hot weather, heat waves, summer, even I don't even didn't even like saunas five years ago. And we're told that heat is kind of the devil that he will kill us. And it's true that the excessive heat can be dangerous, but there's sort of an emerging strand of scientific research and athletic knowledge that's now showing that that he can be healing.

He can be healing as well, and it can even improve performance for athletes. And when you talk about heat, what does it you mean?

“What kind of heat like heat from a heater heat from the sun heat from going to a hot climate? Like what kind of heater we talking about?”

I'm really talking about targeted controlled safe emphasis on safe exposure to temperatures higher than normal. Let's say. So for example, the sauna, which is an ancient tradition in Finland, but also in many cultures around the world, they go into these spaces that are extremely hot, and they derive social, communal, just basic cleanliness type benefits, but also health benefits. And so a series of studies from Finland actually, about 10 years ago, found that frequent sauna users had about 40% the rate of fatal heart attacks, cardiovascular disease, and all cause mortality.

So your chance of dying is reduced by half if you go to sauna every other day. That's an astonishing finding, and that changed the conversation around heat from something that's inherently dangerous to something that is dangerous in some situations and potentially healing in other situations.

Right, can I get out of here? Can I get out of here? Because I don't like the heat. I mean, I don't see the pleasure in it.

“And I thought that's why people did it. Like, yeah, there was some vague health benefits to maybe doing it, but the vagueness of it all didn't, didn't counter the fact that it's hot in here, and I went out.”

Yeah, and that's a natural reaction to any extreme environment. I mean, it's the same reaction. These people who go into cold plunges, right? It's like an instant panic, and you want to leave. And once you kind of fight through that, there are some benefits that happen. But interestingly, I like a hot tub. I mean, I like a hot, there you go. I like hot water, but I don't like hot, because then I sweat, and then it's uncomfortable and sticky, and you're sweating in the hot tub as well. What do you mean?

You're you sweat when you're in hot water. Your body's natural response when as your temperature becomes elevated is to try and cool yourself down, because we have this, this idea of homeostasis. We want to stay at a stable within a stable temperature range.

“So your body is fighting to stay cooler, whether you're in a sauna or a hot tub. Oh, I didn't know that.”

It's just washed away in the, yeah, well, that's kind of gross. I hope I didn't hope I didn't ruin the hot tub for you.

Well, it's just that now I know I'm sitting in a pool of everybody else's sweat. So I don't know. Maybe you just did ruin it for me. You know. Oh, sorry. Yeah, that's all right. So, but it's interesting point though, the hot tub is actually more effective at raising your core body temperature than a sauna is, and is raising my core temperature a good thing. Yes, weirdly, you know, we're told that having a fever is bad and raising your body temperature is bad, but some good things happen when you get your body temperature slightly slightly elevated. So we're talking like 101 Fahrenheit and some adaptations take place, which I can get into later.

“Well, let's get into it now. What are those benefits? For starters, there are a cardiovascular benefits. So your heart rate increases as your body, like I said, is trying to turn to stay cool.”

So you send more blood to the skin, right? And so you have more blood flow and then that in turn, in addition to the heart rate elevation, you get your blood vessels are dilated. So your circulation improves. So that's a good thing. And then if you go a little deeper, even down to your inside your cells, through these things called heat shock proteins, I call them like the maintenance department of your cells, but they're also like some scientists I talked to said they're like the mommy proteins, and they kind of take care of the other proteins, basically the machinery inside your cells, and they clean things up.

And they keep your DNA intact and keep that from breaking down. So it makes you more stress resistant, essentially, on a cellular level. Pretty cool. So you said earlier that people in sauna, as the research shows that they have a lower mortality rate that they, their health benefits, because what's going on, like what is it that if I didn't go in that sauna, I might have died from that now the sauna is protecting me from. I mean, you're actually literally on point when you say protecting you from something you might have died from.

This research started in Finland back in the 80s, and Finland had a huge problem with middle-aged men dying of heart attacks, sudden heart attacks, dropping dead. And so they did this huge study of cardiovascular risk factors, and they asked them about all aspects of their lives, including Sony's. And so 30 years later, these researchers looked at the data and found that the men who said they used sauna the most, that 60% reduced rate of those fatal heart attacks. So it is literally protecting, it protected those guys from dying of a heart attack.

So it's heart, it's heart attack, it's cardiac, it's cardiac. Yeah, yeah, it starts with cardiovascular health, and then a lot of benefits read it out from there.

For example, they looked again at the data and found that the guys who used sauna every other day or every day had about one third, the rate of Alzheimer's disease.

That gets your attention. It's surprising to me, I've never heard this about men in saunas before, but are there other ways to heat up or must you create a sauna like experience in order to get these heat benefits you're talking about?

And have been used actually to treat patients with serious heart conditions, but also just taking a hot bath has been found to have very similar benefits.

So again, in Japan, a huge study found that people taking hot baths every night had reduced their cardiovascular disease risk by about a quarter, about 25%.

“Are there other diseases or conditions that this is good for like does heating you up like inhibited cancer growth or I mean, does there anything else or is it mostly cardiovascular stuff?”

It's interesting.

So the finished studies, which are the best sort of long-term studies of heat exposure in humans, found that there is no effect on cancer, but it kind of helped with everything else.

So not only heart stuff, stroke, Alzheimer's, potentially psychosis, they fewer episodes, psychotic episodes in their life. But I'm going to go back to cancer if you will, because it's an interesting topic. In Germany, for decades, they would, they would use what they called whole-body hyperthermia, so basically heating up cancer patients in a kind of infrared, little mini infrared, sauna contraption. But peer to help their chemotherapy treatments be more effective, so that was a whole thing in Germany heating up cancer patients. Is it still? Well, now there's something called focused ultrasound, which is kind of an exciting new area of cancer treatment that's being sort of pursued here in the US, where you used focused ultrasound to, it's essentially administering very localized heat treatment.

“And I think the idea broadly is that the heat sort of weakens the cancer cells and allows them the medicine to penetrate them more effectively.”

And it's always to get hot other than sitting in heat, like you can go to the gym and the gym is 72 degrees, but you could work yourself up into a sweat does that count? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

And it's interesting, you know, when we exercise, this is an astonishing fact, when we exercise, you know, we're producing all this energy in our muscles in our mitochondria. 20% of that energy that we create is translated into motion or effort or lifting. The other 80% is heat. It's like a byproduct. There are, obviously, there are similar benefits to exercise, but as we work out in that 72 degree gym, we get quite hot and we sweat, right? And our body's trying to cool us cool us down athletes have found that there are adaptations that take place as we work out in hot conditions that sort of improve and extend on the benefits on the inherent benefits of exercise.

So you get a sort of a force multiplier effect. If you work out in a slightly hotter situation, it's called heat adaptation. And it's very similar to the effects of sitting in a sauna or sitting in your hot tub or sitting in a hot bath. Well, it's interesting because there's been a lot of talk lately and you mentioned it before about, you know, the cold plunge of taking a cold shower and putting your face and cold ice water. And that's just the opposite of what you're talking about, but they must be related somehow.

If you dig into the science, the data supporting cold plunging is actually quite a bit weaker than the data supporting this targeted heat exposure than I'm talking about.

“And so that's not to say that you shouldn't do it, but I think the expectation that cold plunging is a great thing to do after like a strength workout, I think that's incorrect.”

There's a lot of research showing that jumping in cold water after you lift weights actually blunts your muscle group. So you're blunting the benefits of the workout you just did. Well, I can't say I'm sorry to hear that. I'm not a big cold plunge guy. I'd rather be in a heated pool frankly. I want to ask you about like, so what do we do with this information about targeted heating in just a moment? I'm speaking with Bill Gifford. He's author of the book Hot Wired, how the hidden power of heat makes a stronger.

And so Bill, I want to get a sense of like, what's the prescription here? You've talked about the benefits of a sauna, but not everybody has access to one or is likely going to sit in a sauna every day or every other day. So what can you do?

Hot bath again has has been found to have many of the same benefits as sauna. If not greater in fact, what about a hot shower? Not quite the same thing.

Because you're not getting as much of a heat transfer to your your body. You're just kind of sitting in the sprinkling shower. But if you're actually immersed in the hot water in the tub, then you're getting your core temperatures going up and you're getting those those benefits.

“Those benefits of of heat. You know, I think one of the things about sitting in a sauna is I've never I've been in a sauna once, but it's kind of boring like there's not much to do.”

There's this interesting sort of cultural phenomenon that's kind of developed. I think it started in Germany, but they actually do these performances in a sauna.

They'll have these sort of attractive performers come into the sauna and there'll be like 40 people in there. And they'll play music or they'll kind of dance around and they'll wave these towels like blasting heat. Moving the heat the hot air around the room in your face and like it's very intense. And then that that's called alf goose. It's crazy. It's like a whole culture. There's competitions. There's costumes. There's people. There's people who do like miniature plays and skits in the sauna. I went sat in a sauna and listened to a singer built out an area from the opera Towska and there wasn't a dry eye in the room. And we were all sweating, but it was it was powerful. And so that cure is the boredom problem.

So just you could you're not just sitting there, stewing in your own juices. You know, you got something to sort of divert your attention.

You're making it sound so appealing. It is very, it's very cool.

“Is there a benefit to when you're done and you step out back into the cool like is that is that a rush or is that is that not why people do it?”

That's more kind of like hitting yourself with hammer and then stopping. There's a little bit of the hitting yourself with a hammer thing. I won't lie, but there's a phenomenon. You almost get sauna drunk or sauna high. So if you go into the hot room and then you either you cool off or you do a quick hold dip, you do that a few times. Many people have noticed I noticed you get almost like sauna drunk like you're just a little bit euphoric, you know, you don't really care about the things that were bothering you before you went in.

“And honestly, I noticed that. Well, it's certainly interesting, but does modern medicine typically like if you were to ask people in the medical profession, they would, oh yeah, we know about that, or is this all fairly new stuff?”

You know, I think medicine is starting to take some notice of it. I mean, your doctor might not might or might not prescribe you sauna sessions. But one thing that I found that was really interesting is that what they call again, whole body hyper fermia, basically heating you up to a certain level is being actively researched as a potential treatment against severe depression. And there have been some like pretty striking results. For example, there is a study done initially in Germany by, you know, German and American researchers, where they put people in these same devices that I talked about,

for that they used to use for treating cancer patients. So they put very depressed people in these things heated them up to 101 Fahrenheit for an hour, which is, you know, not fun. I tried it myself. It's not fun. But then afterwards, their depression symptoms were cut in half, and even more, which is way better than any anti-depressant drug anti-depressants only working about 20 to 40% of patients. They went back a month later, thinking that the anti-depressant effect would be, would have evaporated, would be gone, and they found that they were still not depressed, still less depressed, and again six weeks later, so it lasted six weeks.

And then there are various studies happening right now on other studies have come out since then kind of confirming this result, which is great news, I think. I would think one of the concerns, if you're using heat for the health benefits that it supposedly produces, that one of the concerns would be hydration, because heat will evaporate water, and that you could get dehydrated from doing the kinds of things you're talking about.

And I was kind of shocked and amazed to discover that drinking too much over hydration, and again, this is related to heat in the sense that you need to hydrate to replace the water you lose from sweat, et cetera, over hydration can actually kill you.

Or make you sick. So how does that work? Seems like you'd have to drink an awful lot of water for that to happen.

If you drink too much water, these mechanisms in your body that regulate your fluid level and your salinity and all this kind of stuff, you can essentially dilute your body to a situation called hyponeetremia, which basically means you're not salty enough. You don't have enough sodium so that your sal membranes and neurotransmitters and things like that kind of stop working. It's a very serious situation. It's relatively rare, but it happened to brick shields. About a year ago, a year and a half ago, she nearly died, so we need to be careful around the hydration situation.

“I think the big takeaway is that targeted, limited exposure to heat can actually have some benefits in terms of a physical mental emotional health.”

When I hear about heat, I think that's something to avoid because heat can be dangerous and people get sick and die from exposure to heat, but I've never heard of all these health benefits you're talking about.

You're a well-regarded writer that clearly has researched this.

I find it fascinating. I've been talking to Bill Gifford. He is a veteran magazine writer and editor who covers cutting edge health research and he is author of a book Hot Wired. How the hidden power of heat makes us stronger. And there's a link to that book in the show notes.

“Bill, great. Thanks. Appreciate the info. Thanks, Mike. This is great. I loved all your questions. This is great.”

It sounds too simple, but research shows that chewing gum can improve alertness and help you stay focused, especially during long or repetitive tasks.

In studies, people who chewed gum perform better on tests of attention and reaction time, particularly as tasks went on and mental fatigue set in. Scientists think it works because chewing gum increases brain arousal and keeps you mentally engaged, almost like giving your brain something small to do so it doesn't drift. There's even some evidence that mint flavors like peppermint may add a slight boost, possibly because they stimulate scent. But here's the catch. Choing gum won't make you smarter or better at complex thinking.

What it can do is help you stay in the zone longer. So if your focus starts to slip, you might not need more coffee. You might just need a stick of gum.

“And that is something you should know. This program is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Jeff Havison, executive producers Ken Williams.”

I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from the longest shortest time and award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right now in the world of reproductive health and we're covering it all. Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm, so many stories about sperm. And of course, the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages.

If you're new to the show, check out an episode called The Staircase. It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talked to plenty of non-parents, so you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods,

the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at longass shortest time.com.