25 Proven Health Benefits of Taking Hot Shower
Do you love hot shower? Did you know that hot shower possesses many health benefits? We learnt about the health benefits of showering up before sleeping recently but our focus is on hot shower. Simply getting your body showered by hot water could be an amazing treatment for calming your mind. Just imagine how nice is it to have your body touched by hot water after working so hard during the day.
At least you can move the tiredness away and there are still some other benefits you can get for your health from just getting hot showering.
1. Making You Feel Better
First Health Benefits of Hot Shower is make you feel better. Feeling stress and anxious is common especially when you have a job that takes almost all of your good time. Taking a hot shower can make you feel better as it calms your nerves, which influences the overall state of your body and mind. The more stressful you are, the more tired your body feels. So eliminating the stress can make you feel fresher.
2. Cleaning the Pores and Skin
If you have clean skin, it doesn’t guarantee that you have also clean pores, but if you have clean pores, you definitely have clean and clear skin. Exposing your face to the air pollution, dirt and toxins daily make them accumulated inside the pores and cause some skin problems like blackheads and acnes. The key for clean skin is having clean pores, so if you want to start it all, get your pores clean first by getting a hot shower. The hot water can open the pores so that the dirt clogging up can be washed away by the flowing water from the shower. After showering, you will feel your skin better and cleaner. If you want to really clean your pores, it is better to wash your face with cold water afterward so that the pores won’t remain open after showering. Sometimes to make your skin clean needn’t expensive skincare products since hot shower might help.
3. Treating Headaches
Headaches happen when your blood vessels are narrowing. Hot showering can reduce such pressure so the blood vessels can get back to normal. In the other words, showering with hot water helps you reduce the feeling of headaches so you might not need aspirin. This easy and natural treatment can be safer.
4. Relaxing Your Body
As has been mentioned in the first point that hot shower can make you feel better, one of the reasons is because it is a relaxing activity. You can just spare a little of your busy time to experience the relaxing feeling under the hot shower. Warm water is great for comforting your body and reducing all the tension in the muscles after your long, tiring day.
5. Helping the Blood Circulation Improved
Healthy heart is greatly influenced by proper blood circulation. Hot water can be helpful in improving the blood circulation so that you can give some light exercises for your heart with the pressure from the water to make it better. Also Read 10 Tips To Improve Circulation
6. Relieving Flu and Coughs
Showering with hot water is helpful in drying out the mucus when you are having flu. The mucus in the throat is the big reason why you are experiencing persistent cough, so drying it can cure the cough and make you feel better. It doesn’t have to be a long treatment, but simple a-5 or -10 minutes showering is excellent for addressing flu symptoms, treating cold aches and curing cough.
REALTED: How To Prevent Sweating After Shower
Benefits of Hot Shower
1. Making You Feel Better
First Health Benefits of Hot Shower is make you feel better. Feeling stress and anxious is common especially when you have a job that takes almost all of your good time. Taking a hot shower can make you feel better as it calms your nerves, which influences the overall state of your body and mind. The more stressful you are, the more tired your body feels. So eliminating the stress can make you feel fresher.
2. Cleaning the Pores and Skin
If you have clean skin, it doesn’t guarantee that you have also clean pores, but if you have clean pores, you definitely have clean and clear skin. Exposing your face to the air pollution, dirt and toxins daily make them accumulated inside the pores and cause some skin problems like blackheads and acnes. The key for clean skin is having clean pores, so if you want to start it all, get your pores clean first by getting a hot shower. The hot water can open the pores so that the dirt clogging up can be washed away by the flowing water from the shower. After showering, you will feel your skin better and cleaner. If you want to really clean your pores, it is better to wash your face with cold water afterward so that the pores won’t remain open after showering. Sometimes to make your skin clean needn’t expensive skincare products since hot shower might help.
3. Treating Headaches
Headaches happen when your blood vessels are narrowing. Hot showering can reduce such pressure so the blood vessels can get back to normal. In the other words, showering with hot water helps you reduce the feeling of headaches so you might not need aspirin. This easy and natural treatment can be safer.
4. Relaxing Your Body
As has been mentioned in the first point that hot shower can make you feel better, one of the reasons is because it is a relaxing activity. You can just spare a little of your busy time to experience the relaxing feeling under the hot shower. Warm water is great for comforting your body and reducing all the tension in the muscles after your long, tiring day.
5. Helping the Blood Circulation Improved
Healthy heart is greatly influenced by proper blood circulation. Hot water can be helpful in improving the blood circulation so that you can give some light exercises for your heart with the pressure from the water to make it better. Also Read 10 Tips To Improve Circulation
6. Relieving Flu and Coughs
Showering with hot water is helpful in drying out the mucus when you are having flu. The mucus in the throat is the big reason why you are experiencing persistent cough, so drying it can cure the cough and make you feel better. It doesn’t have to be a long treatment, but simple a-5 or -10 minutes showering is excellent for addressing flu symptoms, treating cold aches and curing cough.
7. Building Your Body
The result your body feels during exercising and hot showering is the same: it makes it very hot. So instead of doing intense exercising, just take hot shower for a while. Just like exercising, showering in hot water can also make the cells in your body releasing the HSPs or the Heat Stress Proteins. This is one of the reasons why exercising are helpful in building muscles as the HSPs do the support. This case has even been researched using mice and the result was amazing. Exposing your body to heat can build your muscle up to 20-percent. This research conducted the test for an hour, so it can be the measurement of the required time for muscle building.
8. Giving You a Better Sleep
If you want a good quality of sleep, then taking a hot shower at the end of the day can help you get such a nice sleep. The muscles can be relaxed with hot water so that you can refresh your mind as an escape from your busy world. Not only hot shower, but also hot tub works well for that relaxing treatment. Just ensure that you don’t stay too long in the tub.
9. Healing Ached Muscles
Normally your muscles will get straining and aching after doing long running or competitions. You need to give them some heat to recover the aches so they can go back to normal. Heating your body is helpful in increasing the metabolic reaction’s rate so that your muscles can be recovered after aching. When the rate of the metabolic reaction is reasonable, the chemical processes in your body can work properly and one of the results of that is getting your muscles healed better.
10. Cutting Your Weight
Hot showering can be a good trick for losing some weight and it has been showed in a study that people with diabetes can feel the benefit from it by getting their glucose and sugar level lowered. However, the study conducted a research with hot tub, not hot shower, so the result might be different using shower and another study need to be conducted too. Read more: Top 6 Fruits For Weight Gain
11. Relieving Pain
Muscle-related pain and aches tend to happen after injuries or sports, so treating your muscles with hot water, bath or shower, might help. End your exercise with hot showering is an amazing idea to keep your muscles healthy. Moreover, pain in the joints and muscles in arthritis can be also treated using hot water. It might not be a total cure at the end, but relaxing the muscles, reducing inflammation and easing the pain is what it can do. Hot water is good in improving blood circulation and it results with loosened muscles too. In the case of painful muscles, hot tub is more useful than hot shower.
12. Treating High Blood Pressure
High blood pressure is closely related with heart disease and it must be properly treated to prevent that deathly illness from growing. The effectiveness of hot water for lowering high blood pressure was shown in a study that conducted a research with hot bath. However, even if this natural treatment seems easy and simple, it must be done only when your doctor has said yes for allowing you doing this. Hot water might influence your heartbeat, so make a consultation first is very important. Remember that it is hot bath that was said to be useful, according to a study, not hot shower.
13. Improving the Health of Your Hair
Not only your skin, but also your hair can get the benefits from hot water. While your skin can become clean and fresh after hot showering, the hair can be healthier as the water is rejuvenating.
14. Getting Your Body Protected
Above has been mentioned the relation between HSPs or the Heat Stress Proteins and hot water and now there is one more good thing about this. Those proteins are used for protecting your body from stress. By maintaining their production, your body can be resistant of stress because they work by protecting your body and if they are successful in that job, the next time you feel stress, they will work even better as they have learned how to do that from the previous experiences. Due to that reason, maintaining their production is necessary and hot water is one of the simple ways to do that. It can be as simple as taking hot shower daily and the HSPs amount in your body can be maintained.
15. Keeping Your Skin Moisturized
The good effect of hot water for your skin is more than just cleansing the pores, but it is also useful in making the skin moisturized longer. You can avoid getting dry and cracked skin by taking a proper hot showering.
16. Relieving Menstrual Cramps
Menstrual cramps are annoying and frustrating. Rather than taking medicines to deal with this, it is better that you just take hot shower and the cramps can be well treated. It is easy, simple and cheap.
17. Treating Itches
When your skin is itchy, try to get some hot water by showering and it will be helpful in relieving your skin. Even when there is rash on the skin, hot water can be used eliminating it. You can feel your skin better after showering with hot water.
18. Fighting Migraines
Since hot water can help improving your blood flow, taking a hot shower is one of the simplest ways for fighting migraines. With a better blood flow, migraines can be eliminated so you can feel more energetic without the migraines stopping you from doing your activities. (What Is The Best Remedy For Migraine?)
19. Opening Stuffy Nose
Stuffy nose is absolutely annoying. It distracts your sleep a lot so you need to spend the whole night just to find the right way of how to breathe properly. If that ever happens to you, don’t stress out, just wake up and take a hot shower. With the ability of hot water in drying the mucus in the nose, you can finally breathe properly and sleep well.
20. Becoming an Easy Warming Up
Health Benefits of Hot Shower could make you warming up. Instead of spending some minutes for stretching to warm up your body before exercises, consider to just taking a hot shower and the result could be the same.
21. Opening the Lungs
If you experience difficulty of breathing like asthma, just use hot water and it is able opening the lungs so you can breathe easier.
22. Preventing Infection
The reason why hot water can prevent infection is because it has the ability killing bacteria, which is mostly the cause of infection. Taking a hot shower daily might keep you healthy from infection with the germs on your skin are wiped away. (Gonorrhea: Symptoms, Causes, Risk Factors, Diagnosis, Lifestyle And Home Remedies)
23. Dealing with Arthritis
It has been mentioned above that hot water is good for relieving muscle pain, including arthritis. You just need to spare 20-minutes of your time daily for taking hot shower so your pain related with arthritis can be relieved due to the improved blood circulation. (5 Powerful Home Remedies for Arthritis Pain Relief)
24. Helping Wounds Healed Faster
Don’t worry to take a hot shower when you have open wounds on your skin because it will stimulate their healing processes. Still about the ability of hot shower in improving the blood circulation, it plays an important role in helping healing process better so it acts like an antibiotic to your skin. Keep in mind that you shouldn’t try this for large and bad wounds as it might be appropriate only for smaller ones.
25. Removing Toxins
It acts like a detox by removing the toxins from your body through sweat. With its hot temperature it can increase the heat of your body, making you sweat and healthy. (12 Foods That Naturally Remove Toxins From Your Body)
With the long list of benefits by simply taking a hot shower, why don’t you spend some minutes for giving your body such relaxation?
Just because hot shower is full of many benefits doesn’t mean that it is fully, completely healthy. There are still some other side effects to pay attention so that you won’t take the shower too much and too long.
Lowering Blood Pressure
Although hot water can be good for the blood flow, it can be bad for the blood pressure. Hypotension might happen as the blood vessels dilating due to the heat from the water. Even when you are healthy without cardiovascular disease, such condition can make your heart work harder and faster resulting in a straining situation. The worst effect of this straining heart is fainting started with lightheadedness. You can just imagine how dangerous it is to collapse in a bathroom where the floor is so wet and slippery.
Experiencing Nausea
Your blood flow might change during a hot shower as the water’s temperature influence it. Such change in some people can cause nausea and even vomiting especially when they take the shower after finish eating something that might trigger it. However, this kind of nausea can go easily once you step out from the shower. So if you experience such condition, just stop your hot shower and get out of your bathroom.
Lightheadedness
The change of the blood flow mentioned above also influences the brain and it leads to lightheadedness. In this case you might feel dizzy and imbalance. This imbalance is very dangerous because it can stop you from getting out of the shower easily especially with the wet floors around.
Exposing Your Body to Chlorine
This can be dangerous for your health as warm water is potential in exposing your skin to chlorine due to its ability in opening the pores. Once the pores are opened when you are taking a hot shower, the chlorine from the shower’s steam can easily enter your body through the pores. Just imagine how much amount of chlorine will be inhaled by the pores considering that the skin is the largest part of the body. Chlorine, compared to tap water, is far more dangerous. If you drink water containing chlorine, there is still liver and kidneys inside your body that can filter it, but when it enters your pores, and then there is nothing to filter as it will directly move to the blood stream. A study showed that chlorine can cause bladder cancer, but the number is increasing when the chlorine is inhaled like the people who swim in chlorinated water or take a hot shower, which means that inhaling makes the bladder cancer’s risk becoming higher. So, the longer you are in a hot shower, the more you get the chlorine and other chemicals in your body.
Drying Out the Skin
Although hot water is able in cleansing and moisturizing your skin properly, exposing the skin to hot water too long can lead to dryness. This is because the water’s temperature makes the oil barrier of the skin stripped away. It is better that once you finish the hot shower, your skin is applied with moisturizer to retain its moisture. Dry skin is not comfortable as sometimes it makes you itchy that you want to scratch and scratch. So don’t forget for using the moisturizer afterward and sticking with shower gel containing moisturizer to avoid dryness.
The key for getting the health benefits from hot shower is to not taking it too long. The chemicals can be the most dangerous thing that could harm your body, so you shouldn’t put your health at risk. It is so nice to take a long hot shower during cold months, but you need to remember that your body can’t resist it. Take it properly, feel the warmth, and as the benefits have come to you, stop and step out. You can actually do this daily as long as it is only a few minutes. To reduce the amount of chemicals inhaled during your shower time, turn on the bathroom’s fan so the air circulation can happen.
The result your body feels during exercising and hot showering is the same: it makes it very hot. So instead of doing intense exercising, just take hot shower for a while. Just like exercising, showering in hot water can also make the cells in your body releasing the HSPs or the Heat Stress Proteins. This is one of the reasons why exercising are helpful in building muscles as the HSPs do the support. This case has even been researched using mice and the result was amazing. Exposing your body to heat can build your muscle up to 20-percent. This research conducted the test for an hour, so it can be the measurement of the required time for muscle building.
8. Giving You a Better Sleep
If you want a good quality of sleep, then taking a hot shower at the end of the day can help you get such a nice sleep. The muscles can be relaxed with hot water so that you can refresh your mind as an escape from your busy world. Not only hot shower, but also hot tub works well for that relaxing treatment. Just ensure that you don’t stay too long in the tub.
9. Healing Ached Muscles
Normally your muscles will get straining and aching after doing long running or competitions. You need to give them some heat to recover the aches so they can go back to normal. Heating your body is helpful in increasing the metabolic reaction’s rate so that your muscles can be recovered after aching. When the rate of the metabolic reaction is reasonable, the chemical processes in your body can work properly and one of the results of that is getting your muscles healed better.
10. Cutting Your Weight
Hot showering can be a good trick for losing some weight and it has been showed in a study that people with diabetes can feel the benefit from it by getting their glucose and sugar level lowered. However, the study conducted a research with hot tub, not hot shower, so the result might be different using shower and another study need to be conducted too. Read more: Top 6 Fruits For Weight Gain
11. Relieving Pain
Muscle-related pain and aches tend to happen after injuries or sports, so treating your muscles with hot water, bath or shower, might help. End your exercise with hot showering is an amazing idea to keep your muscles healthy. Moreover, pain in the joints and muscles in arthritis can be also treated using hot water. It might not be a total cure at the end, but relaxing the muscles, reducing inflammation and easing the pain is what it can do. Hot water is good in improving blood circulation and it results with loosened muscles too. In the case of painful muscles, hot tub is more useful than hot shower.
12. Treating High Blood Pressure
High blood pressure is closely related with heart disease and it must be properly treated to prevent that deathly illness from growing. The effectiveness of hot water for lowering high blood pressure was shown in a study that conducted a research with hot bath. However, even if this natural treatment seems easy and simple, it must be done only when your doctor has said yes for allowing you doing this. Hot water might influence your heartbeat, so make a consultation first is very important. Remember that it is hot bath that was said to be useful, according to a study, not hot shower.
13. Improving the Health of Your Hair
Not only your skin, but also your hair can get the benefits from hot water. While your skin can become clean and fresh after hot showering, the hair can be healthier as the water is rejuvenating.
14. Getting Your Body Protected
Above has been mentioned the relation between HSPs or the Heat Stress Proteins and hot water and now there is one more good thing about this. Those proteins are used for protecting your body from stress. By maintaining their production, your body can be resistant of stress because they work by protecting your body and if they are successful in that job, the next time you feel stress, they will work even better as they have learned how to do that from the previous experiences. Due to that reason, maintaining their production is necessary and hot water is one of the simple ways to do that. It can be as simple as taking hot shower daily and the HSPs amount in your body can be maintained.
15. Keeping Your Skin Moisturized
The good effect of hot water for your skin is more than just cleansing the pores, but it is also useful in making the skin moisturized longer. You can avoid getting dry and cracked skin by taking a proper hot showering.
16. Relieving Menstrual Cramps
Menstrual cramps are annoying and frustrating. Rather than taking medicines to deal with this, it is better that you just take hot shower and the cramps can be well treated. It is easy, simple and cheap.
17. Treating Itches
When your skin is itchy, try to get some hot water by showering and it will be helpful in relieving your skin. Even when there is rash on the skin, hot water can be used eliminating it. You can feel your skin better after showering with hot water.
ALSO: 8 Causes of Night Sweats: What Are Night Sweat A Sign Of?
18. Fighting Migraines
Since hot water can help improving your blood flow, taking a hot shower is one of the simplest ways for fighting migraines. With a better blood flow, migraines can be eliminated so you can feel more energetic without the migraines stopping you from doing your activities. (What Is The Best Remedy For Migraine?)
19. Opening Stuffy Nose
Stuffy nose is absolutely annoying. It distracts your sleep a lot so you need to spend the whole night just to find the right way of how to breathe properly. If that ever happens to you, don’t stress out, just wake up and take a hot shower. With the ability of hot water in drying the mucus in the nose, you can finally breathe properly and sleep well.
20. Becoming an Easy Warming Up
Health Benefits of Hot Shower could make you warming up. Instead of spending some minutes for stretching to warm up your body before exercises, consider to just taking a hot shower and the result could be the same.
21. Opening the Lungs
If you experience difficulty of breathing like asthma, just use hot water and it is able opening the lungs so you can breathe easier.
22. Preventing Infection
The reason why hot water can prevent infection is because it has the ability killing bacteria, which is mostly the cause of infection. Taking a hot shower daily might keep you healthy from infection with the germs on your skin are wiped away. (Gonorrhea: Symptoms, Causes, Risk Factors, Diagnosis, Lifestyle And Home Remedies)
23. Dealing with Arthritis
It has been mentioned above that hot water is good for relieving muscle pain, including arthritis. You just need to spare 20-minutes of your time daily for taking hot shower so your pain related with arthritis can be relieved due to the improved blood circulation. (5 Powerful Home Remedies for Arthritis Pain Relief)
24. Helping Wounds Healed Faster
Don’t worry to take a hot shower when you have open wounds on your skin because it will stimulate their healing processes. Still about the ability of hot shower in improving the blood circulation, it plays an important role in helping healing process better so it acts like an antibiotic to your skin. Keep in mind that you shouldn’t try this for large and bad wounds as it might be appropriate only for smaller ones.
25. Removing Toxins
It acts like a detox by removing the toxins from your body through sweat. With its hot temperature it can increase the heat of your body, making you sweat and healthy. (12 Foods That Naturally Remove Toxins From Your Body)
With the long list of benefits by simply taking a hot shower, why don’t you spend some minutes for giving your body such relaxation?
Hot Shower Side Effects
Just because hot shower is full of many benefits doesn’t mean that it is fully, completely healthy. There are still some other side effects to pay attention so that you won’t take the shower too much and too long.
Lowering Blood Pressure
Although hot water can be good for the blood flow, it can be bad for the blood pressure. Hypotension might happen as the blood vessels dilating due to the heat from the water. Even when you are healthy without cardiovascular disease, such condition can make your heart work harder and faster resulting in a straining situation. The worst effect of this straining heart is fainting started with lightheadedness. You can just imagine how dangerous it is to collapse in a bathroom where the floor is so wet and slippery.
Experiencing Nausea
Your blood flow might change during a hot shower as the water’s temperature influence it. Such change in some people can cause nausea and even vomiting especially when they take the shower after finish eating something that might trigger it. However, this kind of nausea can go easily once you step out from the shower. So if you experience such condition, just stop your hot shower and get out of your bathroom.
Lightheadedness
The change of the blood flow mentioned above also influences the brain and it leads to lightheadedness. In this case you might feel dizzy and imbalance. This imbalance is very dangerous because it can stop you from getting out of the shower easily especially with the wet floors around.
Exposing Your Body to Chlorine
This can be dangerous for your health as warm water is potential in exposing your skin to chlorine due to its ability in opening the pores. Once the pores are opened when you are taking a hot shower, the chlorine from the shower’s steam can easily enter your body through the pores. Just imagine how much amount of chlorine will be inhaled by the pores considering that the skin is the largest part of the body. Chlorine, compared to tap water, is far more dangerous. If you drink water containing chlorine, there is still liver and kidneys inside your body that can filter it, but when it enters your pores, and then there is nothing to filter as it will directly move to the blood stream. A study showed that chlorine can cause bladder cancer, but the number is increasing when the chlorine is inhaled like the people who swim in chlorinated water or take a hot shower, which means that inhaling makes the bladder cancer’s risk becoming higher. So, the longer you are in a hot shower, the more you get the chlorine and other chemicals in your body.
Drying Out the Skin
Although hot water is able in cleansing and moisturizing your skin properly, exposing the skin to hot water too long can lead to dryness. This is because the water’s temperature makes the oil barrier of the skin stripped away. It is better that once you finish the hot shower, your skin is applied with moisturizer to retain its moisture. Dry skin is not comfortable as sometimes it makes you itchy that you want to scratch and scratch. So don’t forget for using the moisturizer afterward and sticking with shower gel containing moisturizer to avoid dryness.
The key for getting the health benefits from hot shower is to not taking it too long. The chemicals can be the most dangerous thing that could harm your body, so you shouldn’t put your health at risk. It is so nice to take a long hot shower during cold months, but you need to remember that your body can’t resist it. Take it properly, feel the warmth, and as the benefits have come to you, stop and step out. You can actually do this daily as long as it is only a few minutes. To reduce the amount of chemicals inhaled during your shower time, turn on the bathroom’s fan so the air circulation can happen.
DR. APPIAH
Dr. Appiah is a Natural Health Therapist (Naturopath) who engages the natural healing agents given by God to save lives. EAT FOOD AS MEDICINE! EAT TO LIVE, DON'T LIVE TO EAT!! FOR BOOKINGS AND MORE: WANT TO ADVERTISE YOUR PRODUCTS? WANT A PERSONAL(CERTIFIED) NATURAL MEDICINE PRACTITIONER? REACH ME DIRECTLY ON WHATSAPP +233245643615 appiahinok@gmail.com
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