How do cold showers anger and ice baths invigorate?
Summary
Cold showers are an inexpensive way for people in cold climates to introduce a little deliberate cold exposure. They offer some of the same metabolic benefits, but not all the same psychological.
Partial-body cold immersion activates brown fat and the sympathetic nervous system, but it does not initiate the mammalian dive reflex -- which means a cold shower does not initiate a parasympathetic nervous system response.
Additionally, cold showers do not provide the same water quality, grounding, or salt/mineral benefits available from the ice bath.
Can You Cold Shower?
In Getting Started in Cold Plunge Therapy I talked about some of the metabolic advantages of a little deliberate cold exposure. For people who live in climates that experience winter, a cold shower is often an inexpensive way to do that, but it didn't work for me, for two reasons:
I live in Phoenix AZ, where the tap water measures about 90F most of the year, so cold tap water isn't available to me, and
I hate cold showers. They make me angry.
But cold showers is how I got started.
My Motivation to Start Cold Plunge Therapy
Back in 2013, I was a fat, broke, and depressed University Professor. Back then my business partner, Morozko Forge co-founder Jason Stauffer, was still an undergraduate teaching assistant in my Engineering Business Practices class at Arizona State University. If you're curious, you can see us both in this 2013 series of videos in which Kathy Kolbe teaches us her method of discovering our instinctive problem-solving strengths. That was about ten years ago, when I weighed almost 250lbs.
It was about that time when my wife said she was unhappy, and she wanted to pack up and move back to New York with our kids. Our daughter was 15 years old, scheduled to graduate from High School in just 3 years, and our marriage had reached the inflection point at which we had to decide what we wanted our lives to be like when the job of raising children was complete.
I didn't like what I saw in the mirror then.
I decided my wife was right. The man she married in 1995 was handsome, fit, and had bright career prospects. The man she was stuck with was ugly, fat, and on his way to a second bankruptcy.
Why would she want to stick around for that?
I sat her down to explain that she was going to see some changes in me, because I'd figured out that to change my marriage, I first had to change myself.
I asked my daughter to teach me some of the exercises she learned from Keith Wilson at Pro Advantage training, so I could start working out at the gym like her.
She was giddy with enthusiasm for my new self-improvement project!
She got out a new sheet of paper and she wrote along the top of it in big, capital letters...
THE FAT DADDY WORKOUT
... and the last vestiges of my self esteem shrunk into a ball and died.
I went to the gym and I did the workouts she diagrammed for me. At first my only reward was my daughter's admiration, and that was a good start.
But it wasn't enough.
I began to read everything I could about relationships, love, sex, marriage, and self-improvement.
I read No More Mr. Nice Guy (Glover 2003), Antifragile (Taleb 2012), and Married Man Sex Life (Kay 2011).
I lost 40 pounds, switched back to contact lens, upgraded my wardrobe... and separated from my wife.
Although she saw the improvements in me, and she was making her own, we had different visions of what we wanted our lives to be like now that the kids were grown, and we weren't right for one another any longer.
It was soon after our separation that Mike Cernovich's book Gorilla Mindset: How to Control Your Thoughts & Emotions to Live Life on Your Terms (2015) convinced me to start taking cold showers.
For most people, the shower is the most accessible source of cold water for practicing deliberate cold exposure, so it's a natural place to start. At first, I thought maybe it was the resentment I still felt about my marriage, or maybe it was something wrong with me, but the fact is that
I hated every second of every cold shower I ever took.
It didn't take long before cold showers weren't an option, anyway. The tap water in Phoenix, AZ is about 90F in the summertime, and as the shower water warmed up, my discomfort melted away.
I switched from tepid showers to practicing whole-body cold water immersion with bags of ice in a stock tank in Jason's backyard, and a funny thing happened.
Compared to the cold showers, the ice bath put me in a great mood.
I discovered more energy than I'd felt in years. When I was in the ice water, I felt calm, and when I emerged, the feeling of euphoria I felt was amazing.
I was hooked.
Cold Showers vs. Ice Baths
Only now, after years of practicing ice baths, have I found the scientific source that may explain the difference I experienced between the cold showers and the ice baths.
An obscure scientific paper, in an unusual peer-reviewed journal called the International Journal of Circumpolar Health, by an unknown Finnish scientist from a University I can't even pronounce, published a cold pressor study comparing partial immersion in cold water to total body immersion in cold air.
Ilkka Korhonen (2006), from the University of Oulu in Oulun yliopisto, Finland discovered that heart rate increased in young men who submerged only a hand or foot in cold water. But heart rate decreased when the same men were subjected to mild cryotherapy (+10C) for two hours. Korhonen concluded "a sudden local exposure to severe cold would be more stressful than a long lasting, milder exposure to cold, even when the latter is applied to the whole body."
The young Finnish college-age men in the study were presumably acclimated to season cold exposure, given the fact that Oulu is not far from the Arctic circle. And the cold temperatures they experienced are nowhere near as challenging as two minutes in a Forge at a water temperature of +2C ... but could it be that partial immersion creates a different biochemical response than whole body?
That's my experience.
There are at least five important differences between cold showers and ice baths. I've tabulated them below:
Cold Showers | Morozko Ice Bath |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
Water Quality & Salt Benefits to Ice Bath
One of the additional disadvantages of the cold shower is that it water quality can be poor. The tap water that supplies shower heads is typically fluoridated, chlorinated, and contains the toxic by-products of chlorine disinfection called trihalomethanes -- carbon compounds that contain three chlorine atoms and one hydrogen attached. Drinking trihalomethanes from tap water typically results in low level exposures, but breathing trihalomethanes in the shower can result in high levels of exposure. By contrast, even when the Morozko is filled with chlorinated tap water, the chlorine and trihalomethane concentrations diminish fast because they are not being replenished from new tap water. Because Morozko uses ozone exclusively for disinfection, plungers are not exposed to toxic chlorine.
Grounding in the Ice Bath
Now that I live in a high-rise apartment in downtown Phoenix, I don't have my bare feet on the ground like I did during my first ice bath. However, given the outstanding electrical grounding (earthing) properties of the Morozko, and the fact that my initial ice bath practice was outside in the Phoenix sunshine, I'm still getting the same grounding benefit.
A cold shower is usually an isolated experience that is secluded from nature and disconnected from the earth. By contrast, my introduction to ice baths was immersed in nature, social, and grounded. The additional benefits of reduced blood viscosity, improved blood flow, and reduced inflammation that typically come from grounding are likely improving my ice bath experience, compared to cold showers.
When Cold Showers Are All I Can Get
I still take cold showers when I'm traveling and I don't have access to my Morozko. The coldest I've ever experienced was probably my trip to London in February, although the summertime glacier melt in Banff, Alberta gave me an unprecedented brain freeze.
I'm a lot better at cold showers than I used to be. Now I remember to breathe, whereas when I first started I did little more than yell obscenities in Cernovich's name. And I'm more intentional and observant about my experience than I used to be, which is something else that researchers say supports a positive mood.
Nonetheless, if you're struggling with cold showers like I did, you might also discover that a whole-body experience isn't worse, as you might expect. Korhonen's science and my personal experience both suggest that the effect of the ice bath on your mood might just be the opposite of a cold shower.
References
Cernovich M. Gorilla mindset: How to control your thoughts and emotions, improve your health and fitness, make more money and live life on your terms. Mike Cernovich; 2016.
Fu D, Serra NI, Mansion H, Mansion ET, Blain-Moraes S. Assessing the effects of nature on physiological states using wearable technologies. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2022 Jan 22;19(3):1231.
Glover RA, Glover R. No More Mr. Nice Guy. Recorded Books; 2004.
Korhonen I. Blood pressure and heart rate responses in men exposed to arm and leg cold pressor tests and whole-body cold exposure. International Journal of Circumpolar Health. 2006 Apr 18;65(2):178-84.
Taleb NN. Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder. Random House Trade Paperbacks; 2014 Jan 28.
About the Author
Thomas P Seager, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. Seager co-founded the Morozko Forge ice bath company and is an expert in the use of ice baths for building metabolic and psychological resilience.