The nurse took the temperature under my tongue. “Your temperature is 93°F! That’s not good,” She said.

Normal body temperature is 98.6F. The life-threatening emergency medical condition known as hypothermia is defined as the core body temperature dropping below 95°F. I was technically hypothermic.

“Wait, your pulse is 33! That’s not possible. I’m not even going to write that down.” She continued, before rushing out of the room to bring in a physician’s assistant. He ran all the tests again. When I stopped talking to him, my pulse slowed back down to 33 again.

“I thought my resting pulse rate was low.” he said, “It’s in the fifties because I run a lot.”

“Mine is usually about 38 bpm.” I said, “I meditate a lot.”

“How are you feeling? Do you feel light-headed?” He asked me, looking very concerned.

I responded, “No, I feel fine.” I felt great: calm, relaxed, clear minded, and focused.

“Well, your blood oxygen level is 100%, so you have good profusion,” he said, with some relief.

I had already told them more than once, including just after I arrived for the routine test, that only twenty minutes earlier I had gotten out of a 15-minute ice bath at 41°F (5°C). It takes some time for the body to warm up again.

After administering the scheduled test, they reluctantly let me go, asking me to contact them immediately, or go to the emergency room, if things got worse.

I’m clearly a relatively hardcore ice bather. I get into my cold tank most days at least once, even if only for five minutes. But I hadn’t realized how weird I was until my practice accidentally clashed with the mainstream medical establishment following this particular session.

I later learned that a slow pulse can be caused by low core body temperature due to an effect called cardiac drift, which is a fancy way of saying that pulse rate is correlated with body temperature.

I started getting into deliberate cold exposure in 2016, while visiting a friend who lives in the Netherlands. On his bathroom wall, to track his cold showers, my friend had stuck a printed chart from Wim Hof, who is known as The Iceman. After that trip, I started taking regular cold showers myself.

Then in late 2019, Cindy (my wife) and I attended The Wim Hof Experience in San Jose, California. This is where I had my first real ice bath. Up to the point in my life, those two minutes in the ice water were the most painful. I had to assert all of my willpower not to jump out and run away.

Then I started taking a couple of ice baths per week. I would buy eighty pounds of ice from a local grocery store, put it into our bathtub, and then fill it up with cold water from the faucet. This enabled me to get the water temperature down to around 40°F. The next morning, when it had warmed to around 55°F, I used it for a second and final plunge before draining it.

We moved to a new residence just before lockdown in 2020, to a place that didn’t have a bathtub. So I bought one of these (paid link) free-standing tubs to use in one of our shower enclosures.

Once I realized that I wanted to do this every day, or even multiple times per day, and that I didn’t want to spend the time and money to bring 560 pounds of ice home every week (not that any store would even be able to provide that much ice), I decided to obtain a more permanent solution. Even though I love doing DIY, I just didn’t have the time to convert a chest freezer, which John Richter explains how to do marvelously in The Ultimate Chest Freezer Cold Plunge DIY Guide (paid link).

After researching the different options for pre-made, free-standing cold plunges, I chose to spend almost $10,000 on a tank from Renu Therapy. I’ve been using that for five months now and I have not yet changed the water, which is always around 40°F and crystal clear and clean. The unit achieves this without using harsh chemicals like chlorine; it has a powerful pump, a filter, and an ozone generator and infuser.

Although deliberate cold exposure seems to provide various health benefits, I’m most interested in the psychological effects. I’m going to share with you what I see as the main benefits from that perspective.

Focus

After about ninety seconds of being in the cold water, I notice that my mind becomes very clear and focused. Then, after I get out, I’m able to work very intensely for many hours. I actually have to remind myself, using an hourglass, to regularly get up and move around, because otherwise I’m able to not move for dangerously long periods.

In the late afternoon, when my ability to be productive seems to naturally wane, I have found that going into the cold tank for a few minutes will lead to several more hours of intense focus and productivity.

Apparently, this is due to the release of the hormone and neurotransmitter called norepinephrine (also known as noradrenaline) due to encountering this brief but intentionally extremely stressful situation. According to Wikipedia, “norepinephrine increases arousal and alertness, promotes vigilance, enhances formation and retrieval of memory, and focuses attention.”

Calmness

I don’t know why it does this, but it makes be feel very calm, removing any anxiety. If I have an ice bath in the morning, I barely worry all day. I don’t know if this is because I’m so focused on what’s directly in front of me or because I faced a real, visceral threat and survived it, making all the imaginary, conceptual threats seem relatively harmless.

I know of people for whom ice bathing in the evening has enabled them to sleep soundly through the night, free from their usual anxiety.

Stress Inoculation

When I subject my system to this stressor, it triggers my fight, flight, or freeze response, activating emotional reactivity in my amygdala, the part of the brain that keeps track of trauma. I can then intentionally self-soothe by breathing slowly and deeply, taking time to exhale. This reactivation of unintegrated trauma, coupled with effective self-regulation, seems to effectively anneal my psyche, allowing the tensions to be released.

This is a practice of consciously activating the sympathetic branch of my autonomic nervous system and then consciously invoking the parasympathetic branch. It trains my body to move from stress to recovery, breaking up the old patterns of being continually stuck in survival mode, scanning for threats, unable to relax.

When situations that would normally be considered stressful then arise in my life, not only do I tend to be less reactive because of the trauma integration, but, when I am triggered, I am able to (because of all this practice) bring my body back into equilibrium.

A recent electro-cardiogram has revealed that the cause of my low resting heart rate is sufficient vagal tone, meaning chronic sufficient activation of the parasympathetic branch of my central nervous system, the part that promotes rest, digestion, integration, and regeneration. Vagal tone can be increased by both cold exposure and meditation. I have written about what 4,300 hours of meditation has taught me.

Procrastination: Gone

Getting into an ice bath often feels like being stabbed all over my body with little knives. It can be excruciatingly painful. Sometimes I feel a deep aching in my bones. Sometimes I get brain freeze. There is a period before getting in when there is heightened anxiety, which I soothe myself through with slow, deep breathing.

Someone once asked me how I get into an ice bath. My answer was that, “you just get into it like you’re getting into a bath. Just step in, and lower down into it. You just do it.”

And then there is the panic, the adrenaline, the shock. This is the cold shock response that would have led to the deaths of many on the titanic. If there was not an immediate heart attack, there would be an involuntary inhalation underwater, which would start the process of drowning.

I’m very familiar with cold shock, and I like to imagine that should I fall into an ice-cold body of water I would probably not drown immediately due to the shock. I might even survive longer than most in the water due to my body’s ability to protect its core temperature, because of a well-exercised cardiovascular system, and ability to generate warmth from the additional brown fat that I assume and hope that I have developed. As demonstrated by the medical examination that I described at the beginning of this story, my body seems to have even developed resilience to having a lower core body temperature.

So, after getting into an ice bath to start my day, everything else seems easy. There’s much less resistance to start working on something new, or to handle a tricky interpersonal situation. I find myself just stepping into it, just as I find myself lowering into an ice bath. My system has been trained to feel anxiety and proceed, and then to be rewarded by increased peace and joy.

Conclusion

Ice baths are now an integral part of my life. Apart from all the physical health benefits, which I may write about at a later time, the psychological benefits, as discussed above, are significant. For me, deliberate cold exposure is an important tool for living a happy life. I highly recommend it. I also recommend getting training about how to safely and effectively experience deliberate cold exposure from Jesse Coomer.

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