Cold exposure

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I have been for some time and still are practicing cold exposure. The Wim Hof method was my main motivation to start this habit. Never could I have imagined that voluntarily exposing my body to high stress for a short period of time could yield of health benefits. I'm curious to know where this journey will take me.

While cold exposure and breath work 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. 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 incorporates breathing exercises, mind and intention. 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 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, exercising, sleep and an overall healthier lifestyle that also affected these results. It's hard to tell exactly how much of it was solely due to cold exposure.

`` Closing thoughts

Listening to my body, I think it likes the cold. Nonetheless, just forcing myself to be uncomfortable for 10 minutes and to exercise 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 incorporate breathing exercises and the mind to practice the full Wim Hof method and maybe report back here in a year or two.