30 Days Cold Shower: I Did Not Expect This

I’ve seen a lot of positive talk about cold showers recently and I saw a guy posted about his experience doing cold showers for a full year on Reddit and asked him for some advice. It’s just a shower. He said. I guess he had a point so I decided to give it a shot.

Photo by Hannah Xu on Unsplash

Why would I do this to myself? Especially when it’s snowing outside. I hate the cold. Well, first of all, many of us not all of us, but many of us lead very comfortable lives in the developed world. I’ll speak for myself here. All of my needs are pretty much always met. I never really have to worry about going hungry or being unsafe and I recognize that many of my ancestors didn’t have access to those sorts of luxuries and many people in the world of today don’t have access to those luxuries. So I do my best to be as grateful for these things as possible and not to take them for granted. But it is easy to fall into a comfortable life and the problem with a comfortable life is that for me comfortable equals not growing and expanding?

Life sometimes demands great things from us. Live in your own bubble for long enough and you’ll start to become like one of those people in wall-e. I personally believe uncomfortable and challenging situations are good there what has shaped me to be the person that I am. So if that’s how that works logically my thinking is that the more I put myself in those kinds of situations the more I’ll grow. Discipline. I think we all like the idea of discipline. But the word has an almost mythical quality for a lot of us. Like where does it come from? How do you get it? I hear you can attain it if you meditate in the forest at 6 a.m. I think in reality. It’s a lot simpler than that. It's just a shower. I knew I had to build things up or I wasn't going to stick with this new habit. I mean, I really wanted to take this seriously, you know failure was not an option. So my approach was to start off by setting the water right below lukewarm so definitely not warm or hot, but also not shockingly cold and lowering the temperature a notch or two every 30 to 60 seconds. I quickly realized that cold showers end up being fairly short. So within about five minutes, I was out of there. “Nice and awake, alert, ready to tackle the day”. In an attempt to build up my tolerance I would make sure that at least the last 10 to 20 seconds of the shower was freezing and I would count slowly. Fortunately, I found that my body adjusted to the cold throughout the shower, and once I was at that stage, as long as I focused on controlling my breathing I could handle it without too much of a problem. You will find that if you set your mind on something you are capable of much more than you think. It’s just five minutes of cold water. I’ll say to myself. I’ve done much harder things I noticed three immediate perks of cold showers:

1. There’s a sense of accomplishment I just did something that was a little bit challenging and that was optional. I didn’t have to do it but I did it anyway.
2. You feel wide awake. Like I would definitely feel clear-minded which is huge for me.
3. My internal body temperature would adjust and I would feel naturally warm for the next few hours, which is nice. Especially if you live in a cold place, in the beginning, it was definitely challenging before every shower I would get this pang of like I don’t want to do this.

However, by week two I want to say I started to build up a streak that I didn’t want to break and I almost started looking forward to these showers because of all the benefits that I just mentioned like the shower itself wasn’t enjoyable yet but all of the benefits became like afterward or worth it and then even that changed because I started to enjoy the cold itself. Believe it or not, the cold shower started to become a way for me to give myself a natural boost and to like dive back into work. It really did feel like a natural alternative to like a cup of coffee or something along those lines. Another interesting thing happened my relationship to the cold has changed. The cold doesn’t need to be this evil thing to avoid at all costs. It’s not something you have to necessarily shy away from it can be a positive thing something that pushes you it sharpens the senses a little bit. What I found in the last month is that I just had to build things up slowly and now I have no plans to stop taking cold showers. Which I never thought I would say. So just a couple of final notes. I did not use the Wim Hof Method. I think it’s super interesting and helpful, but also not necessary. That’s something that I might explore more in the future but for this, I found that as long as I took deep breaths and maintained control and focus on my breath that I was all right.

Also, I just want to reiterate really quickly that I think it’s important to build things up. According to the comfort level. It is important I think to be a little bit uncomfortable, but I would really warn against doing anything extreme and turning yourself off from the potential of exploring a really cool new habit. The way I kind of see things is that if this improves your life even by like 2%. That’s so worth it.