Cold Therapy

Cold Therapy

You can do this in a variety of different ways. The simplest way, no special equipment required for most people, is to take an ice-cold shower. You’ll notice when you do this a sort of shock to the body. You’ll notice when you do this that your breathing will suddenly hitch and change rapidly. You will feel this. It is electrifying.

At the level of the Autonomic Nervous System, what you are doing with this exposure to a sudden cold bath, is massively changing autonomic inputs. There are whole set of vagal maneuvers, that you can learn more about in Hacking Your Connection System, that are ways to quickly alter the neural inputs to your vagal system.

Cold therapy is a method for doing this. It has the power to rapidly shift your autonomic state.

For people looking for a more sustained or focused method of doing this, there are various kinds of options, depending on where you live. In climates with cold winters, there are polar bear clubs and this sort of thing for swimming in cold water. You can purchase an ice bath, though you could also probably make one. The commercial versions usually look like a wine barrel purposed for taking an ice bath. Some people have a cold plunge.

Please note that prolonged immersion in ice water can lead to hypothermia. Please note that jumping into ice water is shocking to the body, and so if you have significant challenges with autonomic state regulation, or if you have heart difficulties, you should check with a licensed health professional before engaging in this kind of restorative regime.

Cold therapy has been utilized, probably since time immemorial, to treat injuries. The more immersive versions of this have been made popular in mainstream western culture by people such as Wim Hoff, who is known as the Iceman. His methods combine cold therapy with breathing exercises. Since the breath is one of the most direct routes to experiencing and regulating autonomic function, and has been modulated in ancestral cultures all over the world since time immemorial (pranayama, for example, is an entire branch of Yoga concerned with conscious modulation of the breath for particular effects), the combining of cold therapy, which causes autonomic state shifts, and breathing exercises, is a form of training the neural inputs to the ANS to achieve state modulation.

If you've never done cold therapy, just try taking an ice-cold shower. You don't have to stay in that long- just a couple of minutes is enough. Notice how your body and breath respond. Bring attention to sensation. See if you can stay in contact with the felt sense of the body, the contact of the water on your skin, and your interoceptive awareness. Notice how you feel afterwards. Experiment from there. This kind of practice can generate a lot of baseline shift in a short time.