Sauna Etiquette for Americans

Before you go in

Shower first. This is the closest thing to an actual rule, and it is the one people skip.

Don't eat a big meal beforehand and don't drink alcohol beforehand. Both make the heat harder to handle and neither improves the experience.

Bring a towel to sit on. This is separate from the towel you dry off with. In Finland it has its own word, laudeliina, which tells you how settled a habit it is.

Inside

Sit on your towel. It is partly hygiene and partly that a wooden bench at 170°F is unpleasant against bare skin.
On clothing, read the room, and understand that an American gym sauna is not socially the same place as a Finnish one. In Finland people are naked and nobody thinks about it. In a mixed American facility, people wear swimsuits, and showing up without one makes a statement you probably did not intend to make. Neither norm is more correct. They are just different rooms.

Talking is fine. Loud talking is not, and a phone call is out. Leave the phone outside anyway, because 180°F is bad for the battery and worse for the room.

If you want to pour water on the stones in a public sauna, ask first. Somebody on the top bench always wants it hotter and somebody near the door always doesn't, and the pour is the one action in there that changes the experience for everyone.

On temperature, the Finnish Sauna Society recommends 176 to 212°F at bathing level. Plenty of people are happiest closer to 160°F. There is no prize for the top of that range.

What a first-timer actually wants to know

Three questions come up every time and nobody answers them directly.

How long should I stay in? Until you want to get out, with a ceiling of about twenty minutes for a first round. There is no target. If you are five minutes in and uncomfortable, that is information about the bench you chose rather than about your character.

How hot is too hot? The Finnish Sauna Society's recommended band is 176 to 212°F at bathing level, and plenty of regulars prefer something closer to 160°F. If the room is hotter than you like, sit lower rather than leaving. You can find a 20+ degree difference without going anywhere.

What if I feel dizzy or sick? Get out, sit down somewhere cool, and drink water. This is normal for beginners and for anyone who has had a hard day, and it is not a sign you did something wrong. It is a sign you have had enough. Nobody in the room will think anything of it.

One practical warning about pouring

Not every sauna is built to have water thrown in it.

A traditional sauna, electric or wood-fired, has a bed of stones on top of the heater, and those stones exist specifically to be doused. Water on them turns to steam, which is the entire point.

An infrared cabin has no stones and no stove in that sense. It heats your body directly with radiant panels, the air stays much cooler, and pouring water on anything in there ranges from pointless to a way to destroy a panel.

Some electric sauna heaters are also rated dry-only. If there is a sign telling you not to pour, that is why, and it is probably not an arbitrary rule about mess.

If you are in an unfamiliar room and there are stones on top of the heater, you are almost certainly fine. If there are no stones, don't.

The thing we’ll say loudest

Finland's own tourist board describes competing over who can stay in longest as both silly and unhealthy. When the people who invented the practice put it that bluntly, you should listen.

The format that actually works is several shorter rounds with cooling in between, not one long heroic sit. Ten to twenty minutes, cool off, go back. Two or three rounds is a full session.

If you find yourself counting, you have stopped doing the thing and started doing a different thing.

Cooling off

The break between rounds has a name too: jäähy. Cold shower, cold plunge, a lake, or fresh snow if you have it. Fresh powder, not the old icy stuff, which is unpleasant in a way that is hard to describe until you have tried it, especially if you’re in your birthday suit.

One caution to take seriously: if you have a heart condition or high blood pressure, the cold immersion part is the part to be careful about, and that is a conversation for your doctor rather than a blog.

Leaving

Here is the mistake nearly everyone makes, and it is the last one, so it is the one you repeat the most.

You finish your last round, you towel off, and you get dressed. Twenty minutes later you are still sweating, and now you are sweating into your clothes.

Wait until you have actually stopped. Sit somewhere cool in a towel, drink something, and let your body finish. The cooling down is part of the session rather than the end of it, and giving it ten minutes changes how you feel for the rest of the evening.

Two traditions we think you should know about

The whisk. A bundle of fresh birch branches, called a vihta in western Finland and a vasta in the east, soaked in warm water and used to slap your own shoulders and back. It smells extraordinary and it is less strange than it sounds. Entirely optional.

And the sauna elf. The saunatonttu is a small spirit who is said to live in the sauna, look after it, and take a dim view of people who behave badly in there. Finns will tell you about him with a completely straight face. Whether or not you believe in him, the underlying instruction is a good one: the sauna is a room you are supposed to treat well.