Kerstin's chamber lives in the corner of a sauna house in the countryside. This is how it fits into a life that belongs to two small boys.
At the end of a garden in the Estonian countryside there is a sauna house, and in the corner of the sauna house stands a hyperbaric chamber. It is always up, always ready. On a good day, when one boy is asleep and the other is settled in front of a cartoon, a woman walks across the grass, zips herself in, and disappears for an hour.
The setting is as ordinary as it sounds — a sauna house with a chamber in the corner. The hour inside it is, on most days, the only one that is entirely hers.
A day that belongs to two small boys
Kerstin is at home with two boys under six, and her days are theirs. "A normal day is usually a very unusual day," she says. There is a rhythm to meals and naps; everything else depends on the weather and on what two small people decide they want. Over the summer that meant living outdoors — eating outside, playing outside, one asleep, then the other, a little chaos, then a bike ride if the evening allowed it.
Time that is only hers comes in slivers: when the younger one naps and the older one has a cartoon, or the last quiet hour before bed. "Lately I try to give myself at least half an hour every day." She says it like a small discipline she is still learning.
What she does with it is unhurried. Bare feet on grass. Daylight, as much as the day offers. Breathing, cycling slowly, cooking properly. "These years belong to the children. This is the maximum right now, and I've made peace with that."
She decides quickly and trusts her gut. It's the first thing she says about herself, and the chamber story bears it out.
"Do people like this actually exist?"
Kerstin's older boy was a baby then, and she was listening to podcasts the way new mothers do — while he slept. In one of them a woman described having a hyperbaric chamber at home. Kerstin searched, found Brain Spa, and sent an email.
Triin rang her back, and Kerstin remembers the call with the clarity people keep for turning points: the baby asleep, a rare free moment, standing at the window looking out while they talked for the better part of an hour.
"I remember thinking — do people like this actually exist? Someone who has gone this deep into a thing?"
"I was sold, in the best sense of the word," she says. "It just got to me. This was something you could do for yourself, every day."
So she went and tried it. A cup of matcha first, a long conversation, and then the zip closed. The first session was mostly adjustment — how quickly to go up, how long to stay — and she found that going up and coming down didn't bother her at all; she can do both quite briskly. What stayed with her was something else entirely.
"Like being in a cocoon. Hidden, safe, quiet. I was a tired parent with a small baby, and suddenly I had an hour that was just mine."
Driving home, twenty minutes, she was already looking forward to the next day.
A laptop, a snack and a picture book
She rented a chamber for two months and gave herself forty sessions. It was the Covid spring, when everyone was working from home, and she had just gone back to work herself, so the chamber simply became part of the working day. "I'd take the laptop in. Emails, reading, going through materials. Calls don't work in there, but everything else does — and then you come out and the evening is still yours."
The evenings, in truth, were no longer quiet. There was a small boy who wanted to be wherever she was, so sometimes he came in too, with a snack and a picture book, and spent the session playing, looking out of the window, and generally pleased with himself. "He was completely at ease in there. Never once wanted out."
Renting, she found, has a discipline built in: a date to hand it back and a number of sessions to fit in before then. "So you go. Every day. It's a very good motivator." What those weeks felt like she can only describe from the inside.
"A kind of extra energy, an extra fizz, that you hadn't known was available. You can't really explain it. You have to feel it."
She has since spent time in a large hard-shell chamber as well, and the comparison she draws is about comfort — which, for her, includes feeling safe. "In there you change out of all your clothes, you can't bring anything with you, and you lie still for an hour." And somewhere at the back of her mind, the thought of fire. Feeling free and feeling safe turned out to be the same thing. "Here I have my book, my laptop, a snack. It's my own small space."
"Why don't we put it in the sauna house?"
Owning one never felt like a decision so much as a conclusion. "I could see it was a background force — something that should always just be there. Renting again and again didn't make sense." Then a second pregnancy, a second baby, and a pause of the kind babies impose. When the younger one was nearly a year old, she bought. "I didn't doubt it once. I knew I'd buy when the time was right, and the time ripened exactly when it should have."
Her husband liked it from the first session. "He felt that calm straight away — that settled, zen state. He doesn't count sessions, but when he has time, he goes."
The city flat was small, and for a few months the chamber waited for its place. It found it the day the family moved out to the country for the summer, when someone — her husband or her brother, she can't remember which — asked why they didn't just put it in the corner of the sauna house.
"I said: wait, why don't we? I'd blocked that option in my own head."
Moving it, she says, was the easiest part of the whole story. It folds down, went into the back of the estate car with the rest of the summer things, and was standing in the sauna house the same afternoon. "Mega-easy. You just need to be a bit careful — small children and scissors, that sort of thing. Though they never actually go near it."
The corner changed how she uses it. At home she'd had to plan — shift the bed, clear the floor. Now it waits, inviting, and slipping in is easy.
"That's just human nature. You won't use something you have to dig out every time."
A room of its own would be lovely one day, she says, but it isn't the point. The point is that there is always a corner. "Look at your home with an open eye. I didn't see the sauna house myself until someone pointed at it."
Two goes and you know it
Out in the country it gathered a following. Her sister-in-law came a dozen times over the summer — "a good pick-me-up for women," she decided. Her mother comes too, at a gentler pressure than Kerstin uses, and only when someone else is in the house. "I keep telling her there's nothing to be afraid of. She still wants company."
Learning to run it takes about two goes. "It's simple. Older people need a little longer, but it's simple."
The younger boy, now one and a half, went in with his father and decided it wasn't for him — the hum of the compressor, perhaps. "Children are different. The older one loved it. The younger one, not yet."
When your eyes get heavy
These days a session happens during the boys' nap, or when someone else is home to mind them, and takes a little over an hour with the time to go up and come down. She takes her phone in out of habit and then turns it face down. "Otherwise you scroll, and that's not what you're there for. At some point the relaxation gets so deep that your eyes get heavy and your breathing slows down, and you just let it." Sometimes she reads. On the way up she does breathing exercises — small nervous-system things — to help the settling along. "You can fall asleep in there, which is even better. Right now, if I went in, I'd be gone in minutes."
It runs a couple of degrees warmer than the room, which she counts in its favour. "It's cosy. In autumn especially — you get warm right through." There was one July afternoon when the sun had baked the sauna house and she gave up halfway; that was the exception. What summer was really short of was shape. Two children, a garden, visitors, long bright days that didn't hold a routine — she used it less than she'd meant to, and says so.
"And when it's your own, not rented, you stretch the rules a bit."
Coming out, the feeling is the same every time, sometimes stronger, sometimes softer. "Refreshed, loosened, and that sense of your body having had oxygen. That one's always there."
What she'd tell someone deciding
"Try it first. Go somewhere you can have a few sessions and feel what it does for you. If you know it's something you want in your life for the long run — not for a few weeks — then have one at home. And don't worry about space. We had a fifteen-square-metre bedroom with a cot in it, and it fitted in the corner. I only had to move the cot a little to give it room to fill."
A background force
Asked to say in one sentence what the chamber is in her life, she laughs — she has several — and then settles.
"It's a background force that's always there for you. It always does you good. In a world that's a bit all over the place, that's a very good thing to know is standing in your sauna house."
This autumn she and the boys are away, stretching the summer a little longer somewhere warmer, and the chamber is waiting in its corner. When they get back the evenings will be dark, and that, she says, is exactly the right time to begin again.
Kerstin's story is her own experience, shared with her permission. A hyperbaric chamber is a wellness device, not a medical treatment — how any one person experiences it varies.
