Skip to main content

What’s a Salt Cave and Why Are They So Damned Relaxing?

Good looks, wellness, and relaxation seem to intersect in quite a few places. But one of the easiest ways to decompress, detoxify and soothe your skin has to be chilling in a salt cave. And it requires zero effort. There’s no poking, prodding, or deep tissue pain — just pure relaxation served with a side of medicinal benefits. Surely you’ve seen those Himalayan salt lamps? Just imagine what sitting in a dimly lit room with 14 tons of the stuff can do.

What the Heck is Halotherapy Anyway?

Superfine, vaporized salt (and a lot of it) is used to detoxify and energize your body. How? Pink salt from the Himalayan mountains is known to be particularly beneficial when it comes to respiratory and lung function. The superfine aerosol can reach deep into your bronchi to bust up and help you expel mucus and phlegm. Ew! Yep, it’s kind of gross when you think about it, but a big relief if you are suffering from allergies, a cold or sinus condition. And it allows you to take in more oxygen.

Related Videos
salt cave
Montauk Salt Cave

Shannon Coppola owner of Montauk Salt Cave originally discovered the benefits while in search of a remedy for her son’s severe sinus and respiratory ailments. After exhausting all other medicines including adenoid surgery, a salt room did the trick. She explains, “The salt is antiviral, antibacterial, antifungal, antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory.” But that’s not all a salt cave can do.

Salt Therapy Can Help Skin Ailments

How can a salt room improve upon your handsomeness? If you suffer from eczema, psoriasis or acne, you should try it. The salt contains soothing minerals like calcium, potassium, magnesium, sodium, iodine, bromine, copper, selenium and iron that can clear and improve your skin. And all you have to do is sit there and relax. No exfoliating, scrubbing, or creams required.

Salt Cave Santa Barbara

And then There’s the Stress Relief

Deeply inhaling and exhaling in a salt room helps your body release negative ions, which is said to reduce fatigue and tension.

Is this all sounding a bit too woo-woo for you?

One visit to the Salamander Spa’s Salt Suite at the Henderson Beach and Spa Resort in Destin, Florida will make you a believer. Their super luxe version of this trendy wellness therapy involves stepping into the calming, light pink glowing room of salt blocks while you sit back and chill to the low hum of the salt distribution.

And you don’t have to just sit there to reap the benefits. Salt rooms like Montauk Salt Cave and Salt Cave Santa Barbara offer yoga classes, meditation, Reiki healing, sound classes, and salt scrub treatments as well. It’s pure relaxation or relaxing purification depending on how you look at it

For other ways to relax, why not try something altogether different, like this insane muscle massager that will rattle your bones and relax your brain.

Editors' Recommendations

Is It Safe to Workout at the Gym During COVID-19?
best workout songs according to science man prepping for listening music in the gym unsplash

Diehard gym goers breathed a collective sigh of relief earlier in the summer as we saw (or made) social media posts celebrating being back in the gym after COVID-19 shutdowns. Whether hard at work perfecting a deep squat or just anticipating a solid bench press, we were ready to return to our clubs’ full array of equipment and friendly — if socially distanced — camaraderie. When cases began to spike again in mid-July, California governor Gavin Newsom, for example, was forced to roll back reopenings for the Golden State. Once again gyms were closed; and at-home or outdoor workouts were back in session.  

At this rate, are we sure we even want to go back to the gym? Even before COVID, gyms had a reputation for being petri-dishes for disease; spreading everything from athlete’s foot to MRSA. Maybe it’s worth putting those monthly fees toward a piece of home equipment. Well, to clear things up a little, we caught up with Dr. William Greenough from Johns Hopkins University of Medicine, and also checked in on leading fitness club chain Equinox’s reopening standard. 
It’s Just Common Sense
Dr. Greenough emphasizes that the precautions you can take in headed back to the gym are not so much a medical issue, it’s more about using common sense. 

Read more
The Best Non-Fiction Books About Pandemics, Diseases, and Outbreaks of the Past
reading book bed

For some of us currently living through the COVID-19 pandemic, reading a book about another outbreak that afflicted humanity might sound like the last tome on Earth to crack open right now. Others, however, will find reading about epidemics of the past just the right thing for the moment. A good nonfiction account can help the reader gain a better understanding of how pandemics start, spread, and ultimately end, potentially offering comfort in these uncertain times. It can also offer a broader and deeper context that the daily news cycle might not.

If a book about a past disease was a compelling read before the novel coronavirus spread around the globe, it's still a good read post-COVID-19. Viruses and bacteria have done so much to shape the history of the world that it's impossible to imagine our human story without them. From the deadly role malaria played in ancient Rome (Roman Fever, as it was known) to the devastating bouts of bubonic plague that swept Europe, to smallpox ravaging the native populations of the Americas, to the Spanish flu coming on the heels of World War I, epidemics have caused death on a scale second to none. Just take the Spanish flu, properly called the 1918 Pandemic: that pandemic killed somewhere between 50 million and 100 million people in just over a year, whereas WWI, immediately before it, caused 40 million casualties.

Read more
Why You Should Start Meditating in Quarantine
meditation

We all respond to stress differently. For some, it produces a panic of tail-chasing “what if” ideation or sets off a downward spiral of lethargic cynicism. For others, it leads to explosive overachievement, which doesn’t seem that bad until you run out of stuff to clean, cook, or organize. And for still others, stress is a trigger for serious disorders like anxiety, depression, addiction, and self-harm.

These are all side effects of the brain and body going into "emergency mode." When your brain senses danger, it signals the body to shut down anything unnecessary, while turning up the senses to maximize your perception of where and whom the danger is coming from.

Read more