One Year of Wim Hof
Exactly one year ago, today, I took my first cold shower with an unprecedented degree of conviction. Sure I had taken cold showers before — most notably on the mornings of the SAT, AP exams, or whatever other terrifying standardized tests that I endured throughout high school. But this time, there was something different. I went into it expecting results, and prepared to make it a habit. In fact, I anticipated the mere idea of “cold showers” so much that I didn’t even wait until the morning to take one. I decided to take a cold shower at a very arbitrary time in the afternoon. Why was I in such a rush to do so?
Ironically, I found inspiration in some of the lowest-attention-span content that is offered to us: YouTube Shorts. Having never written it down, I never realized how juxtaposed YouTube Shorts and cold showers are. On one hand, you have fast-paced and random content that requires no discipline or attention span (I would even argue that it encourages a lack of discipline and focus), and on the other hand, you have a very difficult and uncomfortable practice that most people regard as “crazy” or “insane.” In saying this, I have to admit that I was no exception to this perception (apologies; I didn’t mean to start rapping on you). When I heard that one of my friends took cold showers regularly, I told him, “You’re insane.” And now, I’m one of those insane people.
Where It All Began
In a clip from Mikhaila Peterson’s podcast, Wim Hof tells us that the best thing that you can do for yourself is a cold shower. He often says “A cold shower a day keeps the doctor away!” If you aren’t familiar with Wim Hof, I definitely recommend giving my first blog post on him a read. But to give him a brief introduction, he’s an Dutch extreme athlete, guru, and writer who has set a myriad of world records, mostly categorized as cold-related feats. For his extreme ability to endure the cold, he has been dubbed “The Iceman.”
Though I don’t recall if I was scrolling through YouTube Shorts or if it popped up into my recommended (I want to guess that it was the former here), I watched the less-than-30-second clip and instantly felt like I had to try it out.
That afternoon, I decided to take a cold shower, starting with 30 seconds, like Wim had prescribed. I knew one option was to start with a warm shower and end with the timed, cold portion, but that seemed like a pretty half-assed option to me. I grabbed my phone to use as a stopwatch, barely turned the shower on so the water would be cold, and braced myself.
It was terrible. My reaction to the cold water was like I had never taken a cold shower before, but that wasn’t true. I shivered uncontrollably, practically having large muscle spasms in an involuntary effort to increase my body temperature. I did this for the entire 30 seconds, and by the time it was over, I was somewhat confused. At this point, I thought back to the few cold showers that I had taken in the past, wondering why I had never shivered so uncontrollably in a cold shower before. Though I hadn’t realized it at the time, I probably was shivering in a cold shower the morning of, say, the SAT. But I wasn’t shivering uncontrollably. Why?
My best guess is that going into those cold showers in the past, I had a completely different mindset and intention. I wanted to take a cold shower for the sake of waking up and getting ready for the test ahead of me, but this time, I was taking a cold shower… for the sake of taking a cold shower. So for me, going into a cold shower without expectations of the cold shower itself made me shiver moderately, but going in with some type of “prediction” made me shiver uncontrollably. Both types of shivering were involuntary reactions, but one was more severe. But that isn’t to say that going in without expectations is ideal — depending on what you want out of it.
Gaining Control of “The Wedge”
“Scott Carney is the perfect antagonist in the anime plot that is Wim Hof’s life: Carney is a skeptic, a journalist, and a scientist at heart — exactly the type of person that would find flaws in Wim’s method, denouncing Wim as a charlatan that profits from the countless minds of gullible people who desperately look for a way out from their physical or mental health deficiencies.
Carney is an investigative journalist and anthropologist who has worked across four continents. He has spent significant time in South Asia, speaks Hindi, and is the author of multiple books, with “What Doesn’t Kill Us” being a New York Times bestseller. His work has also been included in television and radio programs, like NPR and National Geographic TV. You can click here to learn more about Scott Carney.”
*Excerpt a blog that I made specifically on Wim Hof
In Scott Carney’s What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength, Carney discusses his journey with the Wim Hof Method and Wim Hof himself. He participated in various obstacle course races in freezing weather, met with Wim Hof, Laird Hamilton (where he also met Orlando Bloom), and even set a new record for summiting Mount Kilimanjaro with Wim Hof’s group of unassisted (and often physically impaired individuals). You can read more about this climb here.
Scott also discusses what he calls “the wedge,” which is the idea of being able to “wedge” voluntary control between the autonomous nervous system and stress stimuli. In the case of cold showers, successfully placing the wedge between the autonomic function of the body and stress factors would mean subjecting oneself to cold water and not shivering.
I’m proud to say that I have long since reached this point. Probably just a week or two into doing cold showers, I stopped shivering entirely. But what’s the benefit of this? Isn’t shivering an automatic reaction to your body temperature dropping too low?
Yes. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t benefit to be had in gaining control over what should just be an uncontrollable, autonomic function. Taking cold showers can certainly improve cold tolerance, but not necessarily in a straightforward way. That is, just being exposed to the cold more will most definitely make you “more used” to the cold, but the degree to which you get used to the cold can be made more efficient by consciously not shivering, and therefore, building up brown adipose tissue, or brown fat. Consider this excerpt from part one of my book review on What Doesn’t Kill Us:
“Even though I don’t directly mention this “forgotten power” in my last blog post, I kept it as my central focus throughout the various sensory descriptions I gave about my cold plunge in Lake Josephine, Glacier National Park, MT. Carney’s description of this forgotten power can even be found in the title, in the phrase “Our Lost Evolutionary Strength.” I should also note that in that cold water plunge, that I overcame the automatic response that our bodies undergo when exposed to extreme cold — shivering. Willfully stopping yourself from shivering is a key step in building up the next forgotten power that Wim possesses:
Carney discusses one of Wim’s superhuman abilities — his build-up of brown adipose tissue (BAT), otherwise known as brown fat. Brown fat concentration is very high in human infants, since maintaining high core temperatures is an infant’s first battle to survive (alongside breathing), but in the average adult, brown fat is scarce. Wim’s percentage of brown fat compares to that of infants, likely from all the cold stimuli he has been exposed to since birth. Brown fat, unlike white fat, can actually generate heat for the body by actively burning white fat. This is almost certainly the explanation for how Wim was able to increase the temperature of his body while in an ice bath. As I mentioned earlier, your body naturally builds up brown fat when other means of generating heat are unavailable. Whether that’s due to human ingenuity (like a fire, or clothing), or a biological response (like shivering), removing those factors will spur your body to build up brown fat reserves for cold environments that you experience in the future.”
Just to clarify, brown fat can be called “good fat” because it is a predictor of good health — it has a negative correlation with likelihood of diabetes and other chronic diseases. More brown fat, less chance of debilitating (mostly weight-related/cholesterol) diseases. In addition, it’s something of a human “superpower.” At least, we would regard it as a superpower now, but it was likely normal for our ancestors to have higher concentrations of brown fat, particularly those that lived through cold climates/ice ages.
Everything is controlled in our current environments. Too cold? Turn up the thermostat. Too hot? Turn on the fan; turn on the A/C. But tens of thousands of years ago, humans didn’t have that luxury. They had to rely on their biology, and unknowingly, utilized what Carney calls the wedge — to build up their stores of brown fat and survive the cold, harsh winters.
So do I have the ability to consciously increase my body temperature just by thinking about it? I’m not sure. I haven’t tried it yet. But that doesn’t mean the Wim Hof Method has failed. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from taking cold showers, and one thing alone, it’s this: Voluntary stress gives strength. I’m sure that the shocking cold of a freezing shower, an ice bath, or whatever form of cold therapy it may be, will never fail to surprise me.
Here’s to many more years of learning from the cold!
