Mental Health

 

Cold Showers

 

Your alarm rings. It’s 6am and time to get up and go to  work at the restaurant that you own where you make fire pizza and gyros but your employees steal from you. You’re running on 1 hour of sleep because you were up all night degening. You know what the first thing that you DON’T want to do is? Take a cold shower. Sounds miserable, right? Let me tell you why you might want to reconsider.

 

Cold exposure has been gaining (or losing, depending how you look at it) steam the past several years. The possible benefits include prolonged dopamine release (leading to decreased anxiety and depression), improved circulation, weight loss, and even protection against illness. A popular advocate of cold exposure therapy treatment is a Dutch man by the name of Wim Hof. He’s held records for things like swimming under ice, prolonged full-body contact with ice, barefoot half marathon on ice and snow, and climbing 24.3k feet up Mount Everest in shorts. What’s most impressive is that he was purposely injected with an endotoxin. As he was being monitored, he had hardly any flu-like symptoms and was said to have had an immune response of 50% of what a normal person would.

 

Do cold showers suck? Yeah, kinda. But they get easier. And if you’re anything like me, you love a good challenge to make you feel like you can conquer the world. The alertness and euphoria afterwards are all icing on the cake. I can’t speak to their other possible health benefits but give it a shot and see what you think!

 

Monthly Challenge:

Take a cold shower every day for a week

• Start with a hot shower and then turn the water to cold
• Try to do 30 seconds and end the week with 1 minute
• The shock will make it hard to breath - focus on deep breaths in and out
• Enjoy the feeling afterwards