Petr Jahoda

Posted on Jan 26

30 Days of Sauna: The Sleep Hack That Made Me a Better Developer

#development

Why Daily Sauna Is the Best Productivity Tool I Never Expected

As a developer, I optimize everything: code, workflows, deploy times. But I’d neglected the most important system: my own brain.

Two years ago, I spent two days on and off in a Finnish sauna and felt relieved like never before — a complete nervous system reset. I knew I needed this regularly, so I decided to build my own Finnish sauna. It took me two years.

Why? Because I was deep in coding, building justRead and other projects, with no time to spare. Now I regret I didn’t finish it in two weeks.

On December 22, 2025, with sauna finally finished, I committed to daily sauna for 30 days. Not for fitness, but as an experiment in cognitive recovery and mental “garbage collection.” I wanted to know if deliberate heat exposure could help me think more clearly, switch contexts faster, and actually shut down after work instead of never-ending thinking until midnight.

What I discovered surprised me. My sleep changed first, then my focus, and only later my stress baseline. And once I dug into the neuroscience of heat stress, blood flow, and endorphins, the science backed up what I was feeling in real life.

If you’re a developer stuck in burnout loops, poor sleep, or creative drought: read on.

This might be the recovery protocol you’ve been missing.

This is the story of that 30-day experiment, what worked, what didn’t, and how sauna quietly rewired the way I build, think, and recover as a developer.

The problem: developer brain decay

I was caught in a pattern most developers recognize. Deep whole day focus sessions draining me by 6 PM.
Fractured sleep, waking three, four times a night, thoughts spiraling.
Brain fog thick enough that fresh ideas felt impossible ( I was caught in non stop solving problems).

I’d notice problems but react with anxiety instead of clarity.

Recovery wasn’t happening. Each day started where the previous one ended.

The 30-day experiment

Daily routine: 2×15 minutes in sauna (90°C), separated by cold exposure. Plus the minutes before and after.

About one hour completely offline.

Simple. Consistent. Measurable.

What changed (the good)

Sleep quality improved dramatically. I now sleep 8+ hours straight with no, or little, interruptions. My Apple Watch confirms: 90%+ sleep quality, nearly every night. For last 30 days I got 99% five times. I know, not much, but this was impossible for me before, for a whole year. This alone is significant. Sleep deprivation compounds: lack of sleep erodes decision making, impulse control, and the ability to do sustained cognitive work.

Better sleep is better code.

I can work productively until 9 PM and wake fresh. I used to hit a wall around 6 PM, depleted and fried. Now I extend into the evening without the characteristic burnout feeling. Next morning, I don’t feel the accumulated exhaustion.

It’s real recovery, not willpower.

My default nervous system state shifted. I’m naturally high-strung. Overreactive. Small obstacles triggered disproportionate stress. Now when something breaks — a bug, a business complication — I notice it, acknowledge it, and move forward calmly. This is the biggest change for me. Calm.

You think more clearly under calm.

Ideas flow. Second most valuable change: I get problem-solving ideas while in the sauna. New ideas about justRead, the project I am working on, architecture decisions, feature approaches, how to solve this and that. Before, I was stuck in execution mode. Now, my brain regenerates creative capacity. I do my daily tasks better and faster and have time for thinking.

This is what cognitive recovery actually looks like.

Joint pain vanished. I have a healed broken ankle and a past elbow injury. Both would ache, especially with stress or fatigue. Or weather. For 30 days, they’ve been silent. I stopped noticing them entirely.

The electronics-off hour matters. I’m around computers 10+ hours daily. That hour of pure heat, no screens, no input: it’s not meditation.

It’s your nervous system resetting.

The bad: teenage acne at 46

For three weeks, my face erupted like in puberty. Acne everywhere. At 46, I looked 16 again. Heat stress + detox purging sebum buildup. Week 4, skin started clearing. Worth it? Yes. But prepare for the mirror shock.

My 17 years old daughter refused to go in, when she was seeing me for those three weeks.

Why sauna beats other recovery methods

I’ve tried them all: meditation, walking, music, running, you name it.

The problem? My brain still stayed on. Work problems, bugs, architecture decisions: they followed me. Even with “free time,” I was mentally working.

Sauna is different. The heat demands 100% attention. You can’t think about SwiftUI bindings when your core temperature is 39°C. Your nervous system hijacks control. Work disappears. For the first time, my brain actually shuts down. Why? I don’t know. But it works.

The science

All of this written above isn’t placebo. Recent neuroscience research on sauna bathing shows measurable cognitive shifts.

Brain wave patterns change. EEG studies show increased theta and alpha power post-sauna — the same patterns associated with clarity and emotional processing. Your brain becomes more efficient; it uses fewer attentional resources to process the same information.

Stress hormones drop. Heart rate decreases significantly post-sauna. Cortisol (stress hormone) reduces in regular users. Your nervous system downshifts into parasympathetic activation — the recovery state.

Cognitive processing speeds up. Reaction times improve measurably after sauna. Your pre-attentive auditory processing (how your brain filters relevant signals) becomes sharper. More signal, less noise.

Sleep architecture improves. Heat exposure triggers melatonin regulation and creates a core temperature drop that signals sleep onset. The evidence is clear: sauna users report significantly better sleep quality.

Why this matters for developers

We optimize our tools. We rarely optimize recovery.

A developer’s output isn’t measured in hours worked. It’s measured in decision quality, code clarity, and sustained focus. All three degrade under chronic stress and poor sleep.

Sauna maybe isn’t a productivity hack, like promised in the title.

It’s infrastructure repair.

If you’re experiencing burnout, fragmented sleep, reactivity masquerading as decisiveness, or creative drought: 30 days of daily sauna might reset you the way it reset me.

The barrier is consistency. There’s no sauna in most offices. Most of us don’t have one at home. It requires commitment: showing up daily, staying the full duration, tolerating discomfort.

But the return on that commitment is significant: sleep, calm, ideas, and the capacity to work without depletion.

Is this all?

I’m continuing. At day 60 and day 90, I’ll measure what else emerges, because research says that most changes occurs at the end of third month. Long-term effects, the compound advantages of three months of daily recovery.

If you build software and you’re not recovering properly, sauna is worth testing.

And if you’re looking for an app that respects your reading time and gives you offline-first focus? justRead is designed for people who understand the value of deep, undistracted engagement with text. Same principle: clear the noise, reclaim your attention.

Peter
Reader, Developer, justRead Creator

References

DEV Community

30 Days of Sauna: The Sleep Hack That Made Me a Better Developer

The problem: developer brain decay

The 30-day experiment

What changed (the good)

The bad: teenage acne at 46

Why sauna beats other recovery methods

The science

Why this matters for developers

Is this all?

References

Sleep Quality

Stress & Calm (Cortisol Reduction)

Brain Clarity & Ideas

Cognitive Decline & Dementia

Joint/Pain & Flexibility

General Research & Happiness

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