Cold Showers Will Destroy Your Success

What’s all the rage is not what will advance your life

Photo by Anna Tarazevich: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-showering-5846882/

So, you’ve watched “30 days doing Marcus Aurelius’ morning routine”.

You’ve added to it, taken away to suit your needs. Journalling is a keeper, though. That’s a non-negotiable.

You’ve added cold showers. Every morning at 3:14, you wake 47 minutes before you fell to sleep and fall bleary-eyed into the bathroom, preparing yourself for that moment the ice-cold water send electric jolts through your body.

And that feeling is the feeling of victory. You know that you’ve won. And your ready for your 2 hour routine that will only make you if you complete it every single day.

Aren’t routines great

But have you won? Is having a cold shower really necessary? Is it productive and will it help you to achieve what you need to achieve?

And is the rest of the morning routine really that important? Sure, journaling is good. In my experience it helps to sort out what I’m thinking and make it sensible.

But if I miss it, will the world end?

What about the stretching? The morning walk? The broccoli smoothie and the meditation? Are these non-negotiables too? And if so, what time and energy will you have left for actually being productive?

Well, if your morning routine is anything like what I’ve seen on Youtube, then not much.

And YouTube is full of them. So many ways to implement so many different morning routines. And evening routines. And pre-work routines to focus and enter a nebulous creative space. And post-work routines to wind down and enter a relaxed state, ready for bed.

You need to be rested for your next morning routine.

And many of these routines contain cold showers, alongside videos telling us “30 days of cold showers changed my life!”.

Did they really, though?

What cold showers aren’t

First off the bat, they aren’t bad. They aren’t going to kill you and I do believe that they can have some benefits to health.

But what they also aren’t are wins. A cold shower may take some discipline and brave pills to leap under at 5:30 am on a cold Monday in January, but they aren’t a win.

And they are also not productive.

When I hear productivity, I think of getting things done. But not just any things. Things that are going to advance my life. Things that will get me from A all the way to Z, one small step at a time.

And notice that I said “advance” rather than improve. That’s an important distinction. I meditate, and I (sometimes) journal. These activities definitely have their place, and they do improve my life.

But, they don’t advance it. They don’t move me from A to Z. They don’t directly help me in my career, or in my writing, or increase my income. They are things that I would recommend, but they aren’t productive.

They just aren’t.

And that’s my problem with cold showers. Cold showers aren’t bad, in and of themselves. It’s a rather hot day today, and I’ve had two just so I could cool down. But having cold showers is not a win. A win is when you do something that will advance your life to your chosen destination.

A cold shower may have its benefits, but it doesn’t advance your life. And neither do all of the other morning routine activities.

So, why are there so many videos telling us how cold showers are changing lives?

The point of productivity porn

So you go on to YouTube and search “How to be more productive”. The top of the list is something like “This morning routine changed my life and 10x my productivity”.

Of course, the thumbnail features a shower. Which we know will be cold.

Now, when you click on a video, what happens?

Well, the video plays and you watch it. And the creator gets a view. Or, you decide not to watch it and the creator doesn’t get a view. And if you watch, what do you get?

Well, you’d hope something useful. Something that will teach you how to be more productive, to get more done and complete your tasks, which will help you to move further towards your goals.

But what do you actually get?

Porn. Productivity porn. Morning routine porn. Cold shower porn.

From the ttantalizing title promising that this video will change your life in just 30 days, to the jump-cuts every few seconds to keep generation TikTok on message, each of these videos has the potential to reveal many and more great secrets.

But they never do. Because they can’t. No video can do that. No single video on YouTube can deliver on such a promise. You know it, and I know it. But we watch them anyway. And we implement what we are told to implement. And nothing really changes. Because cold showers can’t really change our lives.

So, if all of these routines and cold-water immersions can’t change our lives, surely they have no point?

Well, from our perspective, you’re correct. They have no point.

From the creators perspective, there is a point. And that point is money.

Remember, when you see a promise that a video, an article or a Tweet will change everything, change who you are, change your bank balance and your life, you can be sure of one thing; that the claim is bullshit, and they want the click.

So, before you commit your precious time to another morning routine video that promises the world, think to yourself, should I watch this guy talk about having cold showers?

Or should I decide what matters, and JFDI.

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