Yes. Cold showers (and that means as cold as you can make em) stimulate your immune system and activate your brown fat cells who in this artificial environment in which we’re never cold lie dormant. Brown fat activates just before you start shivering, it heats up the body by burning calories and helped our ancestors survive situations where they could just turn up the heat.
There’s a cool book on this: “What doesn’t kill us” by Scott Carney. It’s about Scott, a journalist, being sceptical of the achievements of Wim Hof (the dude that takes hour long ice baths) and visiting him to prove that he’s a false prophet.
I once spent almost a year only taking cold showers. It sucks big time for ten seconds and then your body adjusts and you’re actually quite comfortable (seriously, try it. Pretty amazing feeling). Wish I hadn’t stopped, but come winter hot showers just became too enticing :D
Save me some time, is Wim Hof full of it? I was mildly skeptical but open to it. We obviously don’t know all there is to know about the human body and mind. But then I saw that everything was behind paywalls and speeches I became more skeptical but I’m still interested.
Wim Hof does pretty much everything he claims to do. His ‘method’ however is pretty much nonsense. It doesn’t take a genius to say ‘hey if you get used to being in the cold you’ll feel less cold when you’re in the cold’. It’s unclear how much of it is a blatant cash grab and how much he actually believes, however.
It is (technically) possible to learn to trick your body into fight-or-flight mode, releasing adrenaline which will cause your body to heat up. You can even learn to do this for extended periods of time, as at least one group of Tibetan monks practice. But unless you’re a monk, you’re highly unlikely to ever achieve anything other than life-threatening tachycardia.
As you may imagine, it’s quite difficult to achieve and even if you do so, it’s not great for your long-term heart health to constantly trick your body to release adrenaline for extended periods. It’s even worse for the brain.
Yes. Cold showers (and that means as cold as you can make em) stimulate your immune system and activate your brown fat cells who in this artificial environment in which we’re never cold lie dormant. Brown fat activates just before you start shivering, it heats up the body by burning calories and helped our ancestors survive situations where they could just turn up the heat. There’s a cool book on this: “What doesn’t kill us” by Scott Carney. It’s about Scott, a journalist, being sceptical of the achievements of Wim Hof (the dude that takes hour long ice baths) and visiting him to prove that he’s a false prophet.
I once spent almost a year only taking cold showers. It sucks big time for ten seconds and then your body adjusts and you’re actually quite comfortable (seriously, try it. Pretty amazing feeling). Wish I hadn’t stopped, but come winter hot showers just became too enticing :D
There’s an interesting Vox video about this too.
https://youtu.be/zpcI_g_zrpk
Just a simple explainer, but interesting nonetheless.
Save me some time, is Wim Hof full of it? I was mildly skeptical but open to it. We obviously don’t know all there is to know about the human body and mind. But then I saw that everything was behind paywalls and speeches I became more skeptical but I’m still interested.
Very much not full of it. The author ends up being completely convinced and even climbs a mountain with Wim Hof while wearing nothing but short pants.
Depends on your definition of ‘full of it’.
Wim Hof does pretty much everything he claims to do. His ‘method’ however is pretty much nonsense. It doesn’t take a genius to say ‘hey if you get used to being in the cold you’ll feel less cold when you’re in the cold’. It’s unclear how much of it is a blatant cash grab and how much he actually believes, however.
It is (technically) possible to learn to trick your body into fight-or-flight mode, releasing adrenaline which will cause your body to heat up. You can even learn to do this for extended periods of time, as at least one group of Tibetan monks practice. But unless you’re a monk, you’re highly unlikely to ever achieve anything other than life-threatening tachycardia.
As you may imagine, it’s quite difficult to achieve and even if you do so, it’s not great for your long-term heart health to constantly trick your body to release adrenaline for extended periods. It’s even worse for the brain.