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DEEP BREATH, DEEP FREEZE

If you tiptoe into cold water, you’re missing out on the rush of plunging in headfirst.

SIMONE ELKELES

Breath and the cold are the best friends you never knew you had. In fact, you’ve probably been ignoring one and hiding from the other for as long as you can remember. Well, it’s time to emerge from your cozy hiding spot in the hot morning shower and embrace your new allies in the fight against stress and its many cohorts. Once you’re done washing and indulging, take a deep breath, then thirty more, and crank that shower knob to as cold as it can get, because each morning needs to involve the rush that comes with exposing yourself to nature’s extremes for a few minutes and the willpower you cultivate in the process.

Getting Owned

Wim Hof owns two dozen extreme sports world records. He has run a marathon above the Arctic Circle with no shirt on. He has hiked past the death zone on Mount Everest, also with no shirt on … in a blizzard. You might think he just hates shirts, but there is a method to his madness. At age fifty-seven, Wim hasn’t been sick in a decade, his joints don’t ache, and he still enjoys a Heineken (or two) with dinner. His nickname is the “Iceman” but he wasn’t born a superhero, he made himself into one. He isn’t a daredevil, either. He’s just dared to tap the potential we all have inside, by exposing his body to the resistance of extreme natural stressors, so that it—and he—may grow stronger as a result.

Wim’s uniqueness is undeniable, but there is nothing unreplicable in this man. He is not a physical anomaly, nor part penguin. He could be you or me, or anyone. Or rather, we could be him, if we made some of the same choices he has made. Instead, most of us have shied away from exposure to the acute stress of difficult conditions. We choose cozy over cold, automatic over intentional, and with nothing to harden us, we get soft.

Think about it. Our cars have climate control. We have jackets and scarves, and fans, and air conditioning. We can spend the whole day in our office—lunch delivered—without ever going out in the blistering Texas heat or the biting Chicago wind. If we’re lucky, our homes have heated floors so when we go to the bathroom in the night our little feetsies don’t get cold. Our entire culture is built on the elimination of the difficult and the pursuit of the comfortable. Everything panders to it, and we buy into it because we’ve got all these old scripts running through our heads from our mothers and doctors and crazy old neighbors: If you go out in this cold without a jacket, you might catch your death. Put some shoes on, you’ll catch a cold.

Though it was always scientifically dubious, there was a time when this idea wasn’t so crazy. It used to be the harshness of nature that was the greatest threat to human survival, not heart disease or driving. In that sense, one way to look at the frantic warnings of our elders is as the modern version of the prehistoric fight-or-flight stress response. For most of primate history (including our brief history as human primates) we had things trying to fight us, hunt us, and kill us—whether animal, environmental, or fellow man. Our bodily response to that stress is brilliant. We temporarily shut down all systems inessential to the necessary response. We scuttle immune response, reproduction, growth, and digestion processes in favor of musculoskeletal efficiency and cognitive performance. In other words, when threatened we push all our energetic resources to help us move well and think fast. That process—largely modulated by “stress hormones” like cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine—has saved countless human asses and is probably why your grandma can’t totally explain why, when you were a kid, she scrambled to wrap you in a jacket made out of a sleeping bag when it dropped below 60 degrees and then hustled you inside once you were done with whatever brought you outside in the first place.

The real problem is when the body can’t distinguish between physical threats and psychosocial threats—threats to our job security, or bank account, or social status. These threats often have no concrete conclusion, and so the stress hormones that were built for brief bursts to ward off acute stress go buck wild in your brain box, and chronic stress develops. Leading neuroscientist and stress specialist Robert Sapolsky summed it up for the Stanford News: “If you plan to get stressed like a normal mammal, you had better turn on the stress response or else you’re dead. But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, like a Westernized human, then you are more at risk for some of the leading causes of death in Westernized life.”

That is the great irony of the modern, westernized world. Times have changed. We’ve advanced. Things have gotten better. So why is it that now that everything is so comfortable, we are sick all the time? America spends more on health care than any other nation, and yet we keep getting sicker. And that isn’t just among the older, high-risk population. Young Americans are getting sicker too. A 2013 report by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council found that “for many years, Americans have been dying at younger ages than people in almost all other high income countries.” Survival rates of American women under fifty, for example, are plummeting in comparison to their first-world peers. How is this possible? We are the inventors of Nike, the Fitbit, and the kale smoothie, dammit! We should be terminators. We have every app and gadget in the world, all trying to make it easy for us. Yet everything seems so damn fraught and complicated.

And that highlights the problem, right there. You see, collectively and individually, we are in a dysfunctional relationship with stress. We have too much of the bad, chronic kind, and not enough of the good, acute kind. What makes things worse, we don’t force ourselves to confront acute stress, because chronic stress has eaten away at our willpower, and as a result we don’t know how to strengthen the muscles of our resolve. We become powerless to cultivate the willpower we require to make the best choices for our lives. The bad stress beats us down, exhausts our energy, and in a very real sense, starts to kill us. My friend the Olympic gold medal skier Bode Miller used to describe this state as “overwhelmed and underqualified.” (He also taught me a lot about the solution—a skill I call mental override—but more on that later.) It is fertile ground for the unvirtuous cycle of stress and illness.

In fact, in a survey reported by the American Psychological Association, there was a strong correlation between high levels of stress and poor health scores. Chronic stress, which brings with it chronic inflammation, suppresses the immune system, increases occurrence of pain, and is a major correlative to depression. That’s a lot. It’s no wonder that upward of 75 percent of all doctor visits have a stress-related component. What is a wonder, however, is that less than 3 percent of doctor visits include counseling about stress. Maybe it has something to do with the 76 percent of physicians surveyed who lacked confidence in their ability to counsel patients about stress, or the 57 percent who “rarely” or “never” practice stress reduction techniques themselves. Institutionally, individually, collectively, and sometimes even me personally—we are getting owned by stress.

To fix the problems, what we need are simple strategies for reducing the bad, chronic stress and diving feetfirst into the good, acute stress. Fortunately, we can find both in a two-part regimen from that crazy Dutchman who went topless to the top of the world. Wim Hof’s conscious breathing techniques and cold exposure practices are going to deliver for us the reduction in bad, chronic stress we need for greater health, and the increase in good, acute stress we need for more consistent growth in both our body and our character. The best part: we can do them at the same time, just like it happens in nature, and develop our willpower in the process.

Owning It

Wim Hof’s many physical feats are astonishing even to consider, but what is truly impressive is what he has been able to teach others to do. Wim has trained groups of ordinary men and women as old as sixty-five to climb with him up Kilimanjaro. And yes, some of them went without a shirt on. He has proven in a laboratory-controlled study that he can teach people to alter the immune system’s inflammatory response to pathogens—rewriting both textbooks and expectations in the process. His work on breath and cold has also turned him into a performance coach of sorts for some of the greatest athletes and performers in the world, including the biggest of all coaches (in more ways than one), Tony Robbins.

Arguably the most successful motivational speaker in history, Tony Robbins is nothing short of a human dynamo. He’s a bundle of indefatigable energy capable of nearly inhuman feats. He’s six feet seven inches tall but spry and nimble. He can walk across hot coals and keep a crowd of thousands captivated during his legendary weeklong motivation marathons. All of this he embodies at virtually the same age as Wim Hof himself (they’re born ten months apart), after decades of emotionally demanding work and a calendar perpetually filled with grueling international travel.

If you ask Tony, a big part of his capability springs from the fundamentals of the routine I am going to lay out for you in this chapter. As he says, “It’s not exactly a gentle way to wake up, but that’s beside the point.” In fact, it is the point, because this two-part ritual—deliberate, conscious breathing exercises and cold-water exposure—goes a long way toward explaining Tony’s bottomless resolve, vitality, and energy. It also explains why he’s been one of the most successful people in history: he practices overcoming resistance every single day.

The Breath

There are hundreds of different breathing traditions from all over the world. Some are shrouded in arcane symbolism. Others come with complicated instructions, like the world’s worst IKEA dresser: ring finger to the left nostril; spiral helix breath in lotus posture; “turn your stomach into the shape of a vase.” Huh? Wim Hof cuts through that bullshit. His instructions are simple. He just wants you to get the breath in. It doesn’t matter which hole it comes through, because it’s what the breath does for you that matters to him. Here is his method in two steps.

STEP 1: THIRTY TO FIFTY POWER BREATHS

Inhale through the nose or mouth into the belly with deep, powerful breaths. Exhale without additional effort, just let the chest fall. Keep a steady pace and make sure to focus on drawing the breath deep into your belly. Do this until you feel a slight light-headedness and a tingling sensation in your extremities. That is the sign that a shift is happening and your blood is hyperoxygenated. For most people that effect starts to kick in around thirty breaths, but it can take up to fifty, depending on certain factors.

Note: It’s important not to overbreathe to the point of serious light-headedness, strong tingles, or involuntary closing of the hands. That will take you beyond the currently desired effect and into the realm of a practice called holotropic or shamanic breathing, which is a topic for a different book.

STEP 2: THE HOLD (RETENTION AFTER EXHALATION)

After the thirty to fifty breaths, or once you start to feel the tingling, draw the breath in one more time and fill the lungs to maximum capacity. Then calmly let the air out and hold for as long as you can at the bottom of the breath. You don’t need to set a world record, just hold your breath until you feel that gasp reflex and you really want to breathe again.

That is one full breath cycle of what has become known as the Wim Hof method. While it is unique to Wim, it has a couple of ancient forebears from the Eastern world: specifically, Tummo breathing (sometimes called Inner Fire meditation) and the yogic tradition of pranayama, which roughly translates to “the deliberate control of breath.” The part that is particularly unique to Wim is the holding of the breath with empty lungs. Temporarily depriving yourself of breath releases some of the same hormones that coffee produces, namely adrenaline and norepinephrine. This is what makes Wim’s method not just relaxing, like much of the focus of conscious breathing, but energizing. It is why it is such a great way to start the day, and why you shouldn’t melt into a puddle of terror when you realize that I’m asking you to hold off on your morning coffee for a few hours. You won’t need it. This regimen is its own kind of cold brew.

The other reason that the Wim Hof method is energizing is that it reduces the chronic stress that makes you chronically tired. The benefits of pranayama on stress are fairly well documented in the literature. Most relevant for our purposes, a recent study on ninety students, randomized to three different groups—fast pranayama, slow pranayama, and control—showed that specific yogic types of fast and slow conscious breathing reduced perceived stress by an average of close to 25 percent against baseline measurements.

Think about what that means for a second: one of the major tools for coping with bad, chronic stress has literally been right under our nose this whole time. It’s been a solved problem for thousands of years. And yet we breathe roughly 24,000 times a day, while almost never deliberately taking control of our breath. That sounds like hyperbole, I know, but the way we talk about our breath says otherwise. When we’re angry or panicked, we’re told to “stop and take a breath,” as if it doesn’t belong to us or we’ve just been giving it away. When we’re exhausted or feel rushed, we need to “catch our breath,” as if we don’t have control of it and it has gotten away from us.

Deep Dive: Wim Hof and … Lamaze?

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the power of breath to overcome massive stress load was given to us right before we were born. During delivery, mothers are asked to do two things: breathe and push. Not haphazardly or randomly, but with deliberate and conscious control. Many mothers-to-be take a class prior to delivery that teaches them how to take control of their breath. You’ve probably heard of it: it’s a method called Lamaze breathing. In The Official Lamaze Guide, the tips and guidelines are simple and straightforward: “Breathing is easily subject to conscious control. Therefore, controlled breathing is easy to learn. Slow, deep breathing is particularly effective. The ‘right’ way to breathe is whatever feels right. There are no rules related to how many breaths per minute, whether to breathe through the mouth or nose, or whether to make sounds. The key here is that the breathing is conscious, not automatic.”

Sound familiar? These are the fundamentals of the Wim Hof method. And they are the core of Lamaze breathing, because conscious breathing doesn’t only reduce stress; according to multiple studies, it enhances relaxation and decreases perception of pain. If you have been through labor, you know why that’s important. If you haven’t, ask your mom what it was like to push a watermelon with shoulders through a hole the size of a coin purse. Then go buy her some flowers.

Breath is the rudder of our life. We have the choice to either take over conscious control or let ourselves wander aimlessly. If you are going to own the day, you must own your breath.

The Cold

The Wim Hof method of breathing—like pranayama and Lamaze—is about taking back control of your entire breathing apparatus and focusing intently on the breath. It is the simplest and most important weapon in your arsenal for reducing chronic stress and other birth-worthy stress loads. But it is not until the method is paired with cold exposure that it becomes truly life altering—a mechanism for both healing and growth. That is because without the cold there is no external resistance to tell you when enough is enough. There is no force outside the physical capacity of your lungs to push against to guide your sense of progress. There is no acute stress. This is not a revolutionary concept. We have known for millennia that resistance is the shortest path to growth. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another,” says the Old Testament (Proverbs 27:17). Put more weight on the bar, you get stronger. Run harder, you get faster. It’s a form of good, acute stress known as hormesis.

At its most basic, hormesis is a biological phenomenon in which low-dose exposure to an environmental agent (called a “hormetic stressor”) produces a beneficial effect, while a higher-dose exposure produces a toxic effect. The layman’s explanation for this odd duality is often summarized by the famous Friedrich Nietzsche quote: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” In theory, it can apply to nearly any activity, but for our purposes we are focused on the good kind of stressors, which are natural and acute. The ones that happen quickly and then pass, which create a hormetic response that triggers the body to repair itself and adapt to handling the same or greater stress in the future—aka grow. Vaccination is a good example of hormesis at work. You expose the body to a weakened version of a virus, the body adapts to the stress, develops antibodies, and becomes immune to full-fledged exposure of that same virus. Mark Sisson, bestselling author and a thought leader in ancestral health, writes, “Think of hormesis as your body ‘hedging its bet’ and going a little above and beyond just to be safe. You don’t just compensate for the stressor, you super-compensate. You get stronger/faster/healthier/more resistant to the challenge than you were before.”

Cold is one of those good, acute stressors that makes us hearty and resilient, like a sherpa or a Viking. Or a Viking sherpa! Dr. Rhonda Patrick, a top investigative researcher into the benefits of various hormetic stressors like the cold, put together a brilliant 22-page document highlighting the many research-based advantages of cold exposure, including benefits for brain health, pain management, longevity, fat loss, athletic performance, immune health, and mood. People who swim in cold water during the winter, for example, had 40 percent fewer respiratory tract infections (so much for Mom’s advice). Cold showers have also been suggested as a potential treatment for depression. A lot of this rests on the ability of the cold to modulate inflammation.

INFLAMMATION

To give you an idea of the importance of inflammation, having a healthy inflammation response is the key predictor for making it to the age of a hundred or older. But all inflammation is not necessarily bad. In fact, we need it. At its most basic, inflammation is just the body’s response to injury or threat (i.e., stressors), including tissue damage like you would get from exercise or an injury, environmental stress like heat or cold, and pathogens like bacteria or viruses. If the stressor is acute (short-lived, with ample time to recover), inflammation is a positive part of the response that makes you stronger.

Deep Dive:

Good Inflammation versus Bad Inflammation

When you work out, you break down muscle tissue and the body creates inflammation to get more cells into the area and repair the tissue, rebuilding it to be more resistant to injury. It can even happen with bone breakage; with proper time to heal, bones will become stronger at the point of fracture.

When you get sick, it is not the virus that gives you the symptoms; it is your immune system. Fatigue, mild fever, body aches, congestion—the stuff we colloquially identify as “the cold” or “the flu”—are actually manifestations of the inflammatory response. Immune cells called proinflammatory cytokines are produced and directed to the injured or threatened areas through capillaries that open to promote blood flow and help fix the problem. That increased flow, along with all the newly produced immune cells, is the actual physical inflammation. When the virus subsides, so does the inflammation. Or so you hope. When inflammation doesn’t go away, it is called chronic inflammation—and that is literally like living in Dante’s Inferno. Chronic inflammation starts to damage the body. It makes you tired and creates pain. Inflammatory cells can start attacking healthy cells, creating autoimmune diseases and overall wearing the body’s energy resources thin. This leads to many disease states and is generally the root of all sorts of maladies.

What turns off the inflammation when it is no longer needed, preventing it from becoming chronic, are stress hormones like norepinephrine and adrenaline. It just so happens that the Wim Hof method is especially adept at releasing a shitload of those hormones. Cold shock has been shown to reliably release up to 300 percent more norepinephrine, and the deprivation of oxygen from breath holds reliably produces more adrenaline and norepinephrine.

But in chronic stress, with the stress hormones norepinephrine, cortisol, and adrenaline present all the time, the body becomes habituated to their presence. The tolerance that results from chronic exposure is not a phenomenon unique to stress or inflammation. As with alcohol or any drug, excessive exposure leads to increased tolerance. (In chapter 3 we will see how this happens when the constant presence of sugar in the diet makes the body resistant to the effects of insulin.) So instead of shutting down inflammation in the presence of these hormones, the body becomes less responsive. Inflammation is allowed to go relatively unchecked, which is the mechanism that turns it chronic.

With an acute stressor like the cold or a breath hold, hormones like norepinephrine and adrenaline spike enough to reduce inflammation. With inflammation low, the body can relax the chronic production of stress hormones, and you have the opportunity to break the cycle.

COLD MENTAL STEEL

While the benefits of inflammation and stress are vital, the thing that really sets cold exposure apart from other forms of hormesis is the mental edge it provides. In the smithy of life, cold exposure is the anvil against which your character is shaped and your resolve is hardened (one might say that deliberate, conscious breathing is the hammer that does the shaping), so that you might confront your chronic stress and conquer it more completely. Character and resolve are two traits that rarely get tested in modern society, and they tend to atrophy as a result. Resolve, especially, is at the heart of why we let chronic stress steal our life force and why we struggle from our first waking moments to take ownership of our days.

The Powhatan Indians—that’s the tribe Pocahontas belonged to—didn’t have this problem. They would bathe their babies each day in the cold waters of Chesapeake Bay to toughen them up. It was a habit they started from birth and would continue all their lives, each season, each morning. What about the winter? No worries. When the water was frozen over, they’d break through the ice and jump in. It was a daily baptism by frozen fire.

Being an American Indian was not an easy life. Not in the mid-Atlantic, not anywhere. It was a struggle, a fight to survive. So you had to practice your resolve for doing the hard things. That cold plunge bred hardiness. It created courage, defined as moving forward in the face of fear. If you can conquer freezing water, even grow to love it, you can conquer anything.

MENTAL OVERRIDE

Nike’s slogan “Just Do It” is genius. When you are sitting on the precipice of your cold tub, or the shower nozzle is taunting you, your mind is going to be spinning a million miles an hour, attempting to find a solution for your fear and guide you to comfort. What do you do? Just do it. The same applies for starting your workout, or talking to that pretty girl or boy in the bar, or writing your name down on the karaoke call sheet. Even though you are going to feel like a hero when you tackle any of those feats, your mind computer will still scramble to find excuses and justifications why you shouldn’t. But you are not your mind computer, fueled by fear. You are the operator of your mind computer. And you always have the choice to ignore the thought output and do it. It’s what Albert Einstein was getting at when he said, “You can’t solve a problem on the same level it was created.” You can’t always outsmart the thought-machine with more thoughts. Instead, thank the machine for its efforts, take manual control of what is usually on autopilot, and fucking do it.

The more you practice this, the better you get. Bode Miller is the most decorated downhill skier in American history. He’s won multiple world championships, and every color of Olympic medal. If I had to sum up the reason for Bode’s success, I would call it mental override. I have seen Bode win a World Cup downhill race against the best competition in the world, on three hours of sleep and a mild hangover. How is this possible? Because he refused to indulge the thoughts that would tell the average man that it wasn’t possible to win a race under those conditions. I have seen Bode turn an emotionally catastrophic event into a happy vibe in minutes. I have seen him push himself harder than any human being in training.

How was he able to do this? Just like Wim Hof: practice makes the master. As a kid he would push himself to stay longer in the sauna, when every part of him was screaming for relief from the heat. He would force himself to roll shirtless in the snow, when he wanted the cozy warmth of his cabin. When a song got stuck in his head, he would wrestle his mind until he found total, pin-drop silence. This is what made him a champion on the slopes. It is what will make you the hero of your day, and it starts first thing in the morning.

Deep Dive: Heat Is Your Friend Too

No one hates the hot and the cold equally. Those few who do move to Portland and spend their free time weaving their beards into their chest hair. For the rest of us, there is always one that produces a stronger “Aw hell no” than the other, and it is our responsibility to manage that response so we can benefit from all they have to offer us. When it comes to heat, sitting in a sauna, steam room, sauna suit, or traditional sweat lodge and sweating buckets may not seem like the greatest way to spend the morning, but it might actually save your life. In addition to reducing all-cause mortality, hyperthermic conditioning, as it is called, helps blood flow to skeletal muscle and surrounding tissue, supporting circulation and muscle growth. It can help train your cardiovascular system and lower your resting heart rate; it can even assist with detoxification, since sweat transports minerals, both good and bad, out of the body. There’s a catch-22 with that, obviously. Yes, sweat can transport things like lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury out of your system, but it’s gonna take the good stuff with them too. So when it comes to detoxification, make sure you put back all those good minerals after you’re done sucking out all the bad ones. In terms of sheer effectiveness, build up to forty minutes, being mindful to stay hydrated and take as many rounds as you need to reach the forty-minute threshold. You don’t need to go full Bode straight out of the gate. This is a cumulative gain, so just do your best, and make sure to listen to your body.

Prescription

Here’s how:

LEVEL 1: THE POWER SHOWER

There are some savages in our midst who hop into the shower every morning, crank the cold knob as far open as it can go, and grit their teeth while they do their scrubbing and shampooing and teeth-brushing, until the discomfort of the cold slowly wears off and they can finally breathe normally again. I’m not asking you to do that. In fact, I don’t actually think that’s the most effective strategy for getting you to the place, mentally, that you should be as you prepare to start your day in earnest.

Instead, what I want you to do is to turn the shower to hot and take your normal shower. Don’t dawdle, don’t hide from the day under the heavy stream of hot water, but don’t sprint either. Take care to wash and care for yourself in a way that leaves you satisfied. Then, once you’ve completed the actual hygienic part of your shower, and while the water is still hot, begin a cycle of Wim Hof breathing (thirty breaths or until you feel a tingling sensation in your extremities, whichever comes first). At that moment, turn the water as cold as it can go and let it hit every part of your body. Your reaction, likely, will be to gasp for breath. Listen to your body’s reaction. Listen to the cold. It’s telling you what to do: Breathe more. Continue with the Wim Hof breaths until your body and your breathing have calmed to their pre-cold state. When you no longer need to breathe deeply to withstand the cold, hold your breath at the end of your next exhale (this is called the “bottom” of your breath) for as long as you can, until you feel the reflex to grab more breath. If you feel too light-headed, feel free to sit down in the shower under the stream. Falling on your ass is not a hormetic stressor, it’s an emergency room visit with a better than fifty-fifty shot, if the statistics hold true, of being treated by a doctor who will have no idea what you were thinking.

A typical power shower takes about ten minutes all-in, and as part of that you should aim to be in the cold water for a minimum of three minutes. If you want to go for a second or third round of breathing and cold, go for it. You can even briefly turn on the hot water to create contrast in between your breath cycles. Listen to the signals from your body, explore, and experiment. But at the bare minimum, just do your best to have three minutes of continuous cold exposure somewhere in the process.

To the uninitiated, three minutes of cold exposure probably sounds both like an impossibly short amount of time for such profound effects and an eternity to endure. But once you’ve done it, it’ll be hard not to become a convert and three minutes will feel like a small price to pay for feeling immortal. And once you’ve gotten comfortable with the power shower, you can take your practice up a notch, to full cold immersion.

The Power Shower

1 Turn the shower to hot and wash.

2 Do Wim Hof breathing (thirty to fifty breaths, or until you feel tingling and/or mild light-headedness).

3 Turn the shower as cold as it can get.

4 Continue Wim Hof breaths until breathing calms.

5 Hold at the bottom of breath until the gasp reflex kicks in.

Optional: Repeat breathing cycle up to twice more, at your discretion, with cold water running continuously or with periods of warm water between cycles to create contrast.

Total cold water exposure = ~3 minutes

LEVEL 2: THE POLAR PLUNGE (COLD IMMERSION WITH CONTRAST)

I would categorize the power shower as a form of cold exposure. Cold immersion, or “cold shock,” is the next level up from that, for exactly the reason you’d expect: you are not just exposed, you are immersed, engulfed, covered virtually from head to toe, all at once. It is shocking. The best way for most people to do cold immersion is in a tub. If you have an icy river or a plunge pool, more power to you, but the rest of us have to be content being a CO₂-emitting ice-melting force of global warming in our own bathtubs. Unlike the power shower, which likely needs longer exposure to produce benefit, submersion for even twenty seconds in 40-degree water can provide the norepinephrine release we are looking for. But we’re still going to shoot for two minutes, because it’s the amount of time often studied for cryotherapy, and also because it is unlikely you are going to get your bath to 40 degrees.

Generally four or five bags of ice are enough to drop the water temperature in your home tub to the desired level. Hard-core enthusiasts aiming for the 40-degree mark will want more. Kyle Kingsbury, former UFC veteran and director of human optimization for Onnit, explained that it cost him $40 in ice every time he wanted to plunge. That adds up. One solution is to freeze buckets of water in your freezer and use them to make your baths cold all the time.

A great way to enhance the process of cold shock is to include contrast. Contrast comes from heating the body once it is cold, and then cooling the body once it is hot. It sounds odd out of context, but anyone who has ever been drunk on a ski trip has done what I’m describing: it is the classic roll-in-the-snow-and-get-back-in-the-hot-tub trick.

Just like with the power shower, you can do the polar plunge every day that you feel healthy (you don’t want to do cold immersion when you’re sick or already under a simultaneous acute stress load). Contrast is not necessary, but for me it seems to produce the best effect. Listen to your body, not to your mind. Learn to distinguish the voices of resistance and prudence. After all, wrapped up in this concept of hormesis, of exposure to good, acute stress, is recognizing the appropriate dose. A hormetic stressor is only as good as the body’s ability to fully recover from the resistance it overcomes. If the body can’t, then the stressor isn’t promoting growth, it’s toxic and it’s prompting decay. Thus, prudence dictates that you start with Level 1, and stay there for as long as you need to before moving your way up the ladder, or down into the tub, as it were. And once there, if two minutes feels too long for Level 2, set that as a goal and work toward it. Only your body will know—it’s up to your brain to listen to it.

The Polar Plunge

Do the Wim Hof cycle of thirty breaths while still on dry land, or in shower after completing necessary hygiene.

1 Prepare an ice bath, or jump in water as cold as you can find. Set a timer for two minutes, or start playing a song that is two minutes long.

2 Continue Wim Hof breathing until you can breathe calmly and normally (remember, the cold will make you want to gasp for air).

3 Exhale fully, and hold your breath at the bottom.

4 If you have extensive experience (or have a buddy with you in case you pass out), submerge completely.

5 Get out of the water at the end of two minutes.

Optional: Go into a warm shower or sauna to create contrast. If you feel up to it, complete a full additional round of cold shock. Be mindful not to push too hard, as the key to hormesis is not overdoing it.

Caveat: Shallow-Water Blackout

Make no mistake, it is possible to drown in your ice bath. That’s not how your hero’s journey is supposed to end. The combination of full cold immersion and the breathing may induce what is called shallow-water blackout. Just as when scuba diving, the safest bet is to have a buddy or your partner with you while you plunge. If you go all the way under, put up a hand signal or raise your middle finger while you are under water. Blacking out is not a sign of weakness—it can happen to anyone—so be prudent with your cold immersion.

Pro Tip: Cryotherapy

If you want to take cold to the next level, and by next level I mean –280°F, then you can check out cryotherapy. Typically costing around $40 per session, cryotherapy works by taking one of the literally coldest substances on earth, liquid nitrogen, and using it to cool the chamber you are standing in. You rotate around like a rotisserie Popsicle, and in three minutes your skin temperature has dropped substantially and you feel that rush of energy as the animal inside you comes alive. I’ve had the pleasure of introducing cryotherapy to a lot of peak performers. One of the most memorable moments was watching Bode Miller, who I’ve witnessed walk barefoot through the snow in New Hampshire, start to shiver. Not just a little, a lot. Like a shake weight with ears. That’s when I realized that cryotherapy was a different level of cold.

Now Do It

Believe me, I am no stranger to what feels like profound amounts of stress. When I’m stressed, I tell myself I don’t have the time to take an ice bath, or do the breathing. I tell myself that I just need to finish a few more things, and the stress will go away. I’m good at bullshitting myself, and you probably are too. It’s good to have reference points to keep you on track. Tony Robbins has a boatload more responsibility than me, but he takes ten minutes every morning to Wim Hof–breathe and pencil-dive into a sub-50°F plunge pool in his backyard. Or crank the shower to cold if he’s on the road. Or jump into a snowy river if he’s at his winter home.

“If you don’t have ten minutes for yourself,” he has said, “you don’t have a life.” He’s right. If I am truly owning my day, owning my life, it doesn’t matter what is happening externally. To wait for the external world to change before you alleviate your stress is a fool’s errand. You know what is beyond that mountain? More fucking mountains. If you’re going to climb, then you better adapt. Chronic stress is less about the environment, and more about your response to it. So own it. Put yourself intentionally into the occasional fire, and take yourself intentionally out of the chronic stress oven. It’s a choice, your choice. Take that power and never give it away—especially to something as capricious as fate and fortune.

I’m not saying adding the power shower or an ice bath or Wim Hof breathing to your routine will be easy. It won’t be. Just like in life, you are not rewarded for the comfortable choice. You will have to mentally override the fear of the cold. Override the urges that are driving you toward cozy warmth and shallow breath. This is as essential a skill as any. Just know that as soon as the cold hits your body and your fingers tingle, what you are experiencing is the exhilaration of victory—not just over the cold itself but over resistance, over stress. What better way to start the day!

As the great swordsman Miyamoto Musashi said, “Today is victory over yourself of yesterday, tomorrow is victory over a lesser foe.” If you can conquer the acute natural stress of something like freezing water, something that makes you stronger—even grow to love it—you can conquer anything.

THREE POINTERS

 Chronic stress is literally killing us, and the traditional medical model offers us very little help to deal with it. Counterintuitively, one of the best ways to deal with chronic stress is to seek certain forms of acute stress. Through a process called hormesis, acute stress will help you adapt and become stronger.

 Cold exposure is one of the best sources of acute stress, and can be accessed in showers, cold tubs, and cryotherapy. The cold also offers the opportunity to practice an essential life skill—what I call “mental override”—the ability to make yourself do something you don’t want to do.

 The breath, when used in accordance with the Wim Hof method or other forms of intentional deep breathing, is an invaluable tool to modulate and adapt to acute stressors like cold shock, while also helping to melt away chronic stress on its own.