My Sauna Changed How I Think - 04
50 TABS OPEN - ISSUE 04
By Tanika Chapman - Founder, ZEHN Wellness
Published Mar 23, 2026 - 4 min read
I've had my sauna for two weeks and my brain is different.
I don't mean that in a wellness-caption kind of way. I mean something has actually shifted in how I process things. How long I can sit with a thought before I lose it. How deep I can go before my brain pulls me somewhere else.
I've never been a thinker. That sounds weird to say out loud but it's true. I was the kid who failed at school, dropped to basic subjects, chose sport and media and dancing because sitting at a desk made me want to crawl out of my skin. I was a competitive swimmer, a competitive dancer, turned professional when I finished school. I never finished uni. My brain has always worked best when my body is moving. Stillness was the enemy.
And then I sat in a wood-fired sauna on a Tuesday afternoon with nothing to do and nowhere to be. And my brain did something it doesn't normally do. It slowed down. Not shut off. Slowed down. Like the heat turned the volume knob from ten to three and suddenly I could hear my own thoughts clearly for the first time.
I sat there for 40 minutes and thought about one thing. One single thing. I can't even remember the last time that happened.
Since starting ZEHN I've had to teach myself everything. Scientific research on sauna, cold water exposure, breathwork, mental health, loneliness, nervous system regulation. I've had to read studies, cross-reference data, learn how to tell the difference between real research and wellness nonsense dressed up as science. All while building a brand, running events, doing the photography, managing the socials, replying to every DM.
The girl who couldn't sit through a school lecture is now reading European research papers at midnight. Not because someone told her to. Because she wants to understand why the thing she built actually works.
I think that's what passion does. It makes education feel like something you're chasing instead of something being forced on you. I've learned more in three months of building ZEHN than I did in every classroom I ever sat in. But the sauna is where I actually process it. It's where all the noise of building and creating and researching settles into something that makes sense.
Every other part of my day is fast. The sauna is the only place that's slow. And I didn't realise how badly I needed slow until I had it.
I've started having thoughts in there that I've never had before. Not business thoughts. Life thoughts. Thoughts about health that go deeper than the session itself. About what I put in my body and on my body. About how I spend my time and who I spend it with. About what I actually want the next five years to look like, not the version I'd say in an interview but the real one.
The heat strips something back. I don't know how else to describe it. When you're sitting in 80 degrees with no phone, no music, no distractions, your brain runs out of surface-level things to think about pretty quickly. And then the deeper stuff comes up. The stuff you've been avoiding or just haven't had the space to sit with.
I always thought clarity came from doing more. Moving faster. Working harder. Opening another tab. Starting another project. But it turns out clarity comes from heat, wood, stones, and sitting in the sauna doing absolutely nothing.
I built ZEHN to help other people reset. I didn't expect it to reset me first.
Two weeks in. Everything is quieter. And I mean that in the best possible way.
See you at session soon.
T x
50 Tabs Open is a blog series by Tanika Chapman, founder of ZEHN Wellness. It's about building a brand, figuring things out in public, and having way too many thoughts at once.
@zehnwellness | zehnwellness.com
