Cold showers and cold exposure have been a topic of discussion for a while now I feel. From what I can remember I first tried cold showers when I was in my late teens and early 20s, as a way to help me stay strong on No Fap, another movement that has been around for a bit. However, I was never able to get into a consistent routine of taking them daily until recently.

What made things click was when I listened to two podcasts in particular. The first was one titled, "Mental Toughness: Endurance and Grit Tips from Elite Performance Coach Rachel Vickery". Basically the guest, Vickery, explains why she has her clients take ice baths and go through cold exposure therapy. She explains that anyone can take an ice bath or cold shower, and get through the experience just by enduring, but that is not the point of cold exposure. She goes into detail of how ice baths and cold showers, are meant to be a form of stressor and a teacher if you will, that teaches you over time to control your autonomic nervous system and strengthen it as you learn to control your reaction and response towards the ice cold water. This was a sort of aha moment for me and made me realize why it was difficult in the past to keep consistently taking cold showers, because I wasn't paying attention to how my body was reacting and responding to the cold, I would just stand in it, in misery, and endure it. But now I've shifted to focusing on how I can keep my mind and body as calm and close to homeostasis as possible amidst the external stressor of ice cold water. On top of that, it's been interesting to play around with how I breathe when taking cold showers, and not only during but how I prepare for them before, and how I calm down afterwards.

The other podcast that taught me more about why we should put ourselves through some sort of cold therapy was an episode on the Huberman Podcast titled, "How to Use Cold Therapy and Heat Exposure to Improve Your Health." What was explained and discussed in this podcast had many similar points to the one above, however, the key takeaway I took away from this one was on how cold exposure affects our brown fat and how it impacts our mitochondria. The podcast explains everything much more in depth, but at a very high level, cold showers and ice baths when used regularly begins to activate your brown fat to function better in regulating body temperature. As we grow older and insulate ourselves with warm clothes, we tend to lose our brown fat and they become inactive. However, by exposing ourselves to the cold deliberately, we are then able to activate them once again and as a result our body learns to more efficiently regulate body temperature. In addition, because brown fat's main job is to generate heat, which is energy, activating and increasing the amount of brown fat leads to an increase and improved functioning of mitochondria, which are the energy producing powerhouse of all cells.

With this knowledge, I am more mindful of why I take regular cold showers and what sort of benefits they have for my health, and therefore have been able to consistently take them on a daily basis. I'm give or take a month and a couple weeks in to taking them regularly, and I've learned to really enjoy them as a way to kickstart my day!

Do you take cold showers or ice baths daily? What are your experiences and reasons for taking them? Have you experienced any changes after taking them for a certain amount of days? Do you think they benefit your health or not really?

Thanks for taking the time to read!