A Good Shvitz

The steam room at the JCC smelled like eucalyptus and old men. I was maybe ten, trailing my dad through the locker room on a Sunday morning, trying not to stare at the parade of naked bodies in various states of decline. Hairy backs. Pendulous everything. These guys would sit in that steam room for what felt like geological epochs, kibitzing, while sweat pooled in their belly buttons. They'd emerge pink and satisfied, like slow-cooked briskets, and shuffle to the showers with the urgency of men who had nowhere else to be. I didn't understand the appeal. I was just a boy. I wanted to watch the girl’s gymnastic practice.

But something about it stuck. The ritual of it. The way these men, acquaintances bonded by towels and proximity, casually surrendered to the heat like it was a form of prayer. There was a reverence there I couldn't name yet. A willingness to sit with discomfort until it became something else. There was something deeper I had yet to uncover about a good shvitz.

My next sauna memory came from hotboxing Artie and Laurie Siegel's defunct sauna during a party. Mike and I found ourselves in there with two attractive upperclassman girls, likely because one of them liked Mike. We packed a bowl, and sat there coughing and filling the place with smoke. I want to say this is the first time I got high. At least that’s what my matrix-brain recalls now. I remember I liked it. Maybe it was because of the girls.

The sauna thing lay dormant for a long time. Through my twenties and thirties, I gave it a whirl here and there in my travels. Everyone said you had to do the baths in Budapest. They creeped me out. The Romans once had the greatest bathhouse culture ever known, but during my studies there – again just creepy. I found a great love for hot springs, and thermal pools and started seeking them out in places like the Lipary Islands or on riverbanks in Colorado & New Mexico. The contrast of the hot pools and a cold dip were satisfying. Tho I never really liked the cold part. More on that later.

It wasn't until my forties that I started seeking out a proper shvitz. Maybe, as an aging Jewish man it’s programmed on our DNA? Steam rooms were my preference and I relished the idea of getting a proper steam with a face full of it, sweat immediately pooling into every crevasse. It was an enjoyable sort of torture that left me in a better state when it was done. It wasn’t long before I started to crave the heat. I mixed in dry saunas for a very different experience and then I discovered Refuge in Carmel.

This place became my little secret getaway for a long stretch. I would sneak off on a Friday evening, drive 4 hours, and spend all day Saturday bounding silently from sauna to hot pools to steam to cold plunge to fire pits and Adirondack chairs. This place was like a Disney World for the shvitz obsessed. (I guess Disney World is also Disney World for the shvitz obsessed in a different way).

Here's the thing I've come to understand about sauna that I couldn't have got at ten in the JCC, or at fifteen stoned in the Siegels' attic: the heat is a negotiation with yourself. You sit there and your body screams to leave, and you breathe through it, and something shifts. The resistance melts. Your thoughts slow down. For someone whose brain runs like a stock ticker on meth, that's no small thing. Twenty minutes in a proper sauna and I'm closer to my nirvanic self than I am after half the meditation sits I've attempted on a cushion.

I love it. Genuinely, deeply, irrationally love it.

Which is exactly why I need the thing I hate.

Because here's the truth about sauna on its own: it's become too easy for me to love. It asks you to sit in warmth and let go. That's basically a hug. The heat whispers stay. It seduces. And often in life we need to Yin to our Yang, the Drago to our Rocky, the Vader to our Skywalker. Without something to challenge us, we can easily become complacent and diminish our returns.

The cold plunge is the counterweight.

Let me be unequivocally clear: I loathe cold plunge. Loathe it the way I loathe bad sidewalk etiquette and people who blow their nose in public. Every fiber of my being recoils from it. The sauna is a warm embrace from your mom. The cold plunge is a slap across the face from a Yeti. And yet, annoyingly, maddeningly, I’ve come to believe that they need each other. The way inhale needs exhale. The way tension needs release. Take away either one and the whole thing collapses into just... temperature.

There's no graceful way to enter cold water. You can't ease into it like a gentleman lowering himself into a bath. You have to commit. And that moment of commitment, the half-second between deciding and doing, is where the whole thing lives. Your body is screaming “FUCK YOU”, and your mind says “FUCK YOU, BACK, YOU NEED THIS”. My internal dialogue is clearly a couple from the Bronx.

The first ten seconds are genuine suffering. The breath seizes. The skin feels like it's being peeled off by tiny furious elves. The internal monologue is a manic negotiation: stay in, get out, stay in, get out. And then, if you can stay, something happens around the forty-five-second mark. The panic recedes. A weird calm settles in. Not comfort, exactly. More like... acquiescence. The body stops fighting and starts adapting, and there's a clarity in that transition that I've found almost nowhere else.

That clarity is the point. Not the cold itself. The contrast.

Anna Lembke lays this out beautifully in Dopamine Nation. We've wrecked our reward circuits with cheap, easy pleasures – scrolling, sugar, streaming, all the effortless hits. The result is a baseline that keeps dropping, leaving us needing more and more stimulation to feel anything at all. Lembke's argument is that voluntary exposure to pain and discomfort resets the balance. The dopamine that floods in after you endure something genuinely unpleasant is qualitatively different from the dopamine you get from your fourth espresso or your tenth Instagram refresh. It's earned. It's clean. It actually raises your baseline instead of just borrowing against it.

But here's what I think Lembke's framework misses, or at least what my body has taught me that the book didn't fully articulate: the magic isn't in the heat or the cold alone. It's in the oscillation. The contrast. Going from 200 degrees to 45 degrees isn't just a dopamine hack – it's a full-system reboot that neither stimulus can achieve on its own. The sauna opens you up, loosens the grip. The cold snaps you into focus. Back and forth, over and over. Expand, contract. Melt, sharpen. It's the rhythm of the thing that rewires you, not any single temperature.

I love the sauna. I hate the plunge. And every time I alternate between them, I come out the other side feeling more alive than either one could make me feel alone. The world is brighter, sharper, more vivid. My body hums with a warmth that didn't exist before the cold. I feel alert in a way that's completely different from caffeine or exercise, as if someone wiped the fog off a window I didn't know was dirty. The feeling lasts for hours, and it's earned through the whole cycle, not just one half of it.

I think about this yin-yang thing beyond the sauna sometimes. Much of life is a negotiation between comfort and effort. I built a business that lets me live within a hundred yards of home – I work really hard when I’m home and then I disappear to Bali for six weeks. I’ll spend days, weeks prepping for a dinner party, shopping in a dozen stores, putting together a mise en place that makes my life easy on the night-of so I can dazzle. To some that is torture, to me that is pleasure.. I crave stillness and I crave movement. I want the embrace and the slap. Maybe that's just being human. Or maybe that's being in mid-life and finally figured out that the things you love and the things you hate are doing the same work from opposite directions.

Lately my friend Marshall and I have started a weekly ritual of happy hour and sauna + plunge. We normally invite one or two others who we find interesting to spark some deep conversations. It never fails. As a social tool, sauna is the perfect setting. Something magical always seems to come the vulnerability of being half naked, baking yourself like a Thanksgiving turkey until your thermometer pops in a confined space. Then squealing like a stuck pig as you endure the three minutes of hell in the plunge. After a few rounds, you’ve entered another realm of existence, together.

I think about those old guys at the JCC. They had their steam room, their schmooze, their post-shvitz nosh, and that was plenty. Nobody was asking them to hack their nervous systems or chase quality dopamines. They just sat in the heat because it felt good and they'd earned the right to feel good. And a part of it was simply tradition. Just kinda did shit like that if you were a certain type of person, from a certain place, in a certain community. There's a simplicity to that I genuinely envy.

Now Judah has picked it up. We share it together, and he loves a good shvitz. Owning a sauna and cold plunge at the shop has made his indoctrination much much simpler than mine at the JCC. Not only does he have private and personal access to shvitz any time he wants, but he also has been spared the old men with the hairy backs and the pendulous everything.