Metabolic and Mental Health
Here’s Why a Cold Shower a Day Might Keep the Doctor Away in My Experience.
Five remarkable health benefits of cold exposure: fat loss, better sleep, mood enhancement, fitness improvement, and overall resilience and well-being
A trade-off between comfort and health improvement is vital.
I had a five-minute cold shower just before starting this article to walk my talk so that my messages might resonate with readers better. This post is not a theoretical piece, as I have years of empirical data on the health benefits of cold exposure.
For example, I haven’t experienced a single cold or flu over the last two decades after introducing cold showers and exposing my body to cold temperatures in various ways.
Cold exposure significantly improved my immune system. Coming from a warm climate, I tolerated and embraced the torture of cold exposure due to its compelling benefits.
While looking at the benefits, considering the subjective experience of biohackers backed up by scientific studies that validated my own experience, I attempted to understand why cold exposure has such a beneficial effect on the body and brain for both metabolic and mental health.
Even though the mechanism looks complex, it can be summarised in a single concept called the “built-in survival mechanism.” Cold temperature is a threat to the body, as coded in the reptilian brain.
The neo-cortex has little say, but it can contribute to the adaptation process by sending neural signals that can get stronger with repetitions via the neurogenesis process.
This article reflects my two decades of experience and investigation of cold exposure for metabolic and mental health.
This experience convinced me that cold exposure could help us get better sleep, have a better mood, lose fat, contribute to lean muscles, reduce inflammation, and become more resilient.
The impact of cold exposure might occur directly and indirectly, as I explain under five broad headings.
Even though the title of my article mentions cold showers, it is not exclusive to showers as there are also other cold exposure ways such as going out in cold weather, walking on a cold surface (e.g., grass or beach sand), swimming in cold water, having ice baths, and using ice patches on the abdominal area.
When I started cold showers, fat loss was not my primary goal. I didn’t even know cold showers could contribute to fat loss or healthy weight management.
Interestingly and gratefully, my findings have become serendipitous encounters in the discovery process. So I decided to bear the torture of cold exposure coming from a warm climate.
My main goal in starting cold exposure was the mental health benefits of significantly reducing the risks of depression due to hormonal effects. When I was studying cognitive science, depression and neurological disorders became a strong interest to me as they were across the board.
Since then, the progress of mental disorders has exponentially increased as even more and more people got depressed and experienced neurodegenerative diseases of various undesirable causes.
The more I read about the health benefits of cold exposure, the more I desired to explore them. For example, I gained a strong interest in cryotherapy and cryoablation remedies which gave me insights into the mechanisms of cold exposure on metabolism and mental health.
As a minimally invasive treatment, cryosurgery fascinates me. I plan to share my reviews on cryotherapy, cryoablation, and cryosurgery in another article, as it goes beyond the scope of this post.
This article focuses on five aspects of cold exposure from physical and mental health perspectives. The categories include improving sleep quality, healthy weight management, enhancing mood, improving fitness performance, and creating physical and psychological resilience. Here is the summary of five health benefits of cold exposure at a high level.
1 — Improves Sleep Quality
Like many people, I struggled with sleep deprivation in my younger years. As mentioned in my previous articles, this undesirable situation increased my stress and caused elevated cortisol affecting my metabolic and mental health and making me insulin resistant.
However, the most influential aspect of cold showers with mixed hot showers before sleep time was its contribution to resetting my circadian rhythm. As proven by my smartwatch app, making three to five minutes of mixed showers as a nighttime routine significantly improved the sleep quality, especially deep and rem sleep phases.
Improving sleep quality helped me reduce visceral fat and gain lean muscles like Fredricks, who lost 44 pounds after fixing sleep issues.
2 — Initiates Fat Burning Leading to Lean Muscles
The effects of thermogenesis on fat mobilization and burning calories from stored fat are well documented in the body of knowledge.
I documented the details in a recent article titled How to Reduce Visceral Fat and Increase Brown Fat with Two Practical Steps. The key mechanism for the process is the signaling of the body to mitochondria to create energy via the norepinephrine receptors.
There is significant evidence of the metabolic effects of brown fat, burning more calories, and reducing visceral fat. After exposing my body to cold water and air, my stored fat percentage significantly dropped, and the quality of lean muscles increased, as demonstrated by DEXA Scans.
3 — Enhances Daily Mood
Before immersing my body in cold exposure, I used to experience depressive thoughts that adversely affected my mood and mental performance. It was difficult to wake up in the mornings without taking at least two cups of strong coffee.
However, my mood significantly improved after each cold shower, swimming in cold water, or walking in cold weather in the mornings. Cold exposure was initially stressful, but after a few moments, I felt more energetic due to hormonal effects. Cold exposure contributed to balancing my stress hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine and epinephrine.
As a bonus, I no longer need coffee to feel motivated in the mornings, which made me agitated, anxious, and addicted, adversely affecting my sleep quality. Having a cold shower before challenging meetings has increased my confidence and productivity.
4 — Improves Fitness Performance
Sharp and short stress induction to the body provides numerous health benefits. Unlike machines, our bodies are not designed to cope with constant pressure and load.
The metabolic pathway is highly complex, involving various biological and physiological processes to produce necessary energy. As we know from the lives of sprinters and athletes using high-intensity interval training, a short bout of stress significantly affects the body’s composure. Interestingly, cold showers emulate this stress.
As the body regulates temperature tightly through the homeostasis process, it shows a robust hormonal response to cold temperature, especially from cold water.
The nervous system senses the effects of cold water instantly. Thus, the body produces hormones and neurotransmitters involving the endocrine and nervous systems. For example, stress hormones like cortisol significantly rise but quickly fall when the cold exposure stops.
So it causes no risk of elevated cortisol adversely affecting fat burning or muscle loss. This little burst of cortisol increase recovery and make us feel better after heavy workouts.
5 — Creates Physical and Mental Resilience
The above four points significantly contributed to my physical, mental, and emotional resilience. Since I started cold exposure, especially through daily cold showers, I have not experienced a single cold or flu instance as it significantly improved my immune system and overall defense system.
The biological data I collected over two decades coinciding with the start of cold showers depicted incredible enhancements in my physical and mental health.
Reducing stored fat, maintaining lean muscles, improving fitness performance, reducing inflammation, beating chronic stress and fatigue, and boosting my mood made me more resilient.
Besides, cold exposure might reduce inflammation, decrease hypertension, and improve mitochondrial health.
Conclusions
Even though there are many more benefits of cold exposure, in this article, I focused on five remarkable health benefits of cold exposure, contributing to fat loss, painting lean muscles, improving sleep quality, producing better mood, and leading to resilience.
Based on my experience, I acknowledge that cold exposure might be challenging for many of us due to its nature. As a survival mechanism, the body regulates temperature stringently.
However, taming the primitive brain using our neo-cortex to adapt the body to cold exposure is possible. Like thousands of other people, I proved it.
Wim Hof, a Guinness Book Records breaker in excessive cold exposure multiple times, proved this to the world. He described the process contributing to the science highlighting the benefits of thermogenesis for metabolism and mental health.
After two decades, my body still reacts to cold exposure. Each time when I tried cold showers, I initially felt discomfort with no exception. However, I understood and accepted that this natural reaction indicated the body produces protective hormones and neurotransmitters. Excessive discomfort gradually decreased with persistence.
The reaction to cold exposure never stops for anyone, including the most experienced ones. Therefore, cold exposure is an effective method. The body will always react even if we adapt to it.
However, after adaptation, it gets easier and more manageable. For example, my body does not shiver in cold showers or in cold baths anymore since cold exposure significantly increased the brown fat and made my mitochondria denser.
Takeaways
From my experience, I have three tips for beginners. The first tip is to start very small, like ten seconds, with arms and legs.
The most intense receptors are in the back so leaving them to the end is a good approach. Initially, I gently put water on my back with a cup for a few days rather than immersing my torso in a cold shower. Then, showers were more bearable.
The second important point is the mindful approach to controlling the breath when showering. With each reaction, we can keep breathing but not too heavy or deep.
Nevertheless, we need to be careful as too much and frequent breathing may cause hyperventilation due to getting too much oxygen and eliminating excessive carbon dioxide. Hyperventilation might cause fainting. Again, Wim Hof provided a valuable safety video for beginners.
The third tip is consistency and persistence. Despite its challenges, exposing the body to cold weather or air regularly as a routine in small doses can speed up the adaption process. However, the body will always react, which is an excellent thing to reap the benefits of cold exposure.
Finally, as cold exposure can create excessive and acute stress on the body, it might not be appropriate for everyone, especially those with underlying health issues. Therefore, it is always wise to discuss before exposing the body to cold with qualified healthcare professionals.
Sometimes, especially on cold winter mornings when I wake up, my reptilian brain sees the cold showers as torture. However, I learned to perceive them as pleasure by constantly reframing, causing robust neural pathways in my cognitive brain.
The old brain will never fully get used to cold exposure, but the neocortex can influence it to tame and respond more favorably. Indisputably, learning and skill-building will take time. Improving our health requires a trade-off of comfort.
Stepping out of my comfort zone and performing in a stretch or risk zone has been my best lifestyle, as I explained in an article.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
If you enjoyed this story, you might also check the experience and perspective of Neeramitra Reddy in a story titled 5 Unusual Tiny Tweaks to Make Cold Showers Even More Powerful.
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