That's when a bath gets to do its job. Take away the rush and that same warm water can do something a five-minute shower never gets the chance to.
For most of us, that time turns up in the evening, once work’s done and there’s nothing left demanding your attention.
Here’s all the ways a bath can help you properly switch off.
Rest that isn’t quite rest
Relaxation happens in stages. Sitting down is the easy part, but it doesn’t mean the mind has clocked off too.
A lot of evenings can look like rest without quite being it. The TV's on, there's a phone in your hand, but your thoughts are still on that email from earlier.
Your mind often stays on standby. It carries on filing the day away, even from the couch. It's closer to a browser with a dozen tabs left open in the background than a mind that's fully switched off.
Real relaxation is what happens when those tabs close. Not minimised, or moved off the screen a little, but closed. The mind stops sorting through today and planning tomorrow, and settles on right now instead.
A long soak beats meditation for switching off
In our Great British Bath Report, 27% of people said a long soak in the bath was the most effective way they'd found to reset mentally. For them, that was ahead of meditation, exercise, or time alone in the garden.
Part of what makes it work is what doesn't happen when you’re in the bath. Leave your phone on the couch and there’s no notification lighting up just as you’re starting to relax. There’s no one asking where you are or whether you can do something for them.
But it's not just the silence that does it. Switching your phone off is one step. Trusting that nothing needs you for the next thirty minutes is the harder one, and it's the part that lets the tabs close instead of just muting the sound.
Why warm water works on more than your skin
Hydrotherapy is simply what happens when water stops just being about getting clean and starts having a physical effect on your body. And an ordinary bath at home counts. It's the simplest and most common form of hydrotherapy there is.
Warm water immersion can slow your breathing and lower your blood pressure and heart rate, which is why your muscles start releasing tension they've been holding onto all day.
It also curbs production of cortisol, one of the hormones most responsible for keeping you full of tension in the first place.
Harvard researcher Herbert Benson named this the relaxation response back in the 1970s. It’s the direct counterpart to the stress response. A bath creates a lot of the conditions that bring it on. Warmth, stillness, and nowhere else you need to be.
Give it enough time and the shift goes deeper still. Past twenty minutes or so, your brain activity is thought to settle into the same slower wave pattern associated with deep rest.
It's one more reason a fifteen-minute bath is relaxing and a forty-minute bath takes it to a different level.
Why a bath sends you to sleep faster
That physical calm carries through to sleep too. 52% of people in our research said a warm bath improved how well they slept afterwards. And part of that reason is your body’s internal clock.
It’s the same clock that decides when you feel alert and when you’re ready to wind down, and a warm bath gives it a nudge in the right direction.
Time it right and that clock does even more of the work for you. A review of thirteen separate sleep studies found that a warm bath taken 1 -2 hours before bed cut the time it takes to fall asleep by 36%.
Even ten minutes in water between 40°C and 42°C was enough to see the effect, so this isn't a soak you need to build your whole evening around.
A shape that asks you to stay in it
The best baths are ones that invite you to linger for longer. They’re comfortable to be in and they stay warm, giving you no reason to want to jump out early.
A slipper bath, with one end raised higher than the other, gives your neck and shoulders something to properly rest against, rather than the flat wall of a standard tub.
A double-ended bath, with the same gentle slope at both ends, means support wherever you end up sitting, not just at one side. A double-skinned bath holds its heat for longer so you’re not feeling the chill of cooling water any earlier than you're ready to get out.
Finding the bath that suits you means nothing gets in your way and you can take full advantage of that evening soak. When the bath does what it's meant to, you get to relax completely.
The room finishes what the water starts
Spare a thought for your bathroom set up too. The bright, task-lit glow that gets you ready for work is the opposite of what a relaxing bath needs. Swap it for something softer, and the room starts to agree that the day's jobs are done.
A wall lamp instead of the main light, or the mirror light turned down low with some music playing through Bluetooth both have a similar effect. Simple little tweaks that make all the difference.
Scent works fast too. Lavender and rose are the classic choices for calming a room down and helping to get into that wind down mode.
The average bath in Britain lasts around 39 minutes. Among younger adults, that stretches past 45, which says something about how far people let a soak run once there's no reason to hurry it.
Here at Drench, we’ve been running our Save our Soak campaign to keep the humble bath in British homes.
A spot just for you to relax and unwind after a long day is something worth protecting. And you think so too! You’ve been sharing your bath stories and we’re loving reading them!
A bath doesn’t have to be a big piece of furniture that takes up too much space in your bathroom. From compact baths to back to wall and through to freestanding, there’s a wide choice of sizes and styles to make sure you can have the bath you want and enjoy the relaxation it can bring you.
