Cold Exposure

I have been for some time and still are practicing and experimenting with cold exposure. Cold exposure such as an ice cold shower is one half of the Wim Hof method which was my main motivation to start this habit. Never could I have imagined that volunteerily exposing my body to high stress for a short period of time and by doing so stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system could yield of health benefits. I'm curious to know where this journey will take me.

While cold exposure and breathing excercises for health benefits are practices that can be traced back many centuries, Wim Hof has been a pioneer and was one of the first to bring a lot of speculations of these practices to science - challenging modern science of what the human body is capable of doing by just using the power of the mind, breath and cold exposure. If this is your first time hearing his name, I would highly recommend watching some of his documentaries that are available for free on the internet.

The following is an observation of personal added benefits from cold exposure alone, and not the full Wim Hof method which incorparates breathing excercices - the most important half of the method. I wanted to first try to experiment with cold exposure before attempting breath.

It took my body around 1 month to get used to staying calm in the cold and about 1 and a half year to really start noticing benefits in improved immune system, blood flow, less inflammations, clearer mind, faster recovery, less itchy dry skin and better mind-body connection etc.

Though, there are a lot of variables here such as the temperature of the cold water depending on the season, diet, excercising, sleep and an overall healthier lifestyle that most likely affected these results and it's hard to tell exactly how much of it was solely due to cold exposure.

Listening to my body, I think it likes the cold. Nontheless, just forcing myself to be uncomfortable for 10 minutes and to excercise discipline would be an enough reason for me to continue with ice cold showers.

I will continue with this experiment, but from now on also incorparate the breathing excercises to practice the full Wim Hof method and maybe report back here in a year or two.