I kind of hate how effective this is

Cold water exposure is trendy AF. And normally, this would be enough to make my hipster brain reject the idea altogether, but I have to admit:?this shit works. I'd be a bad scientist if I didn't share this tool with y'all.

Cold therapy has a whole bunch of purported benefits. Increased energy. Reduced anxiety. All sorts of improvement to mood and demeanor. And research shows it's one of the most effective tools for creating sustained increases in baseline dopamine, which is why it's so powerful and intoxicating to those of us with wonky dopamine.

Let's look at why cold exposure is so damn good, even when it feels so damn awful.?

It all comes down to our bodies' desire to maintain homeostasis.

We have specialized temp-sensing nerves that are constantly collecting data on how hot/cold we are. If we get too hot or too cold, Very Bad Things happen, so this is mission-critical hardware/software. Just like Goldilocks, our bodies want things to be?just right.

When you exposure yourself to cold, your nerves start noticing "oh crap, things are getting chilly" and kick off specialized processes in your autonomic nervous system designed to warm you up. Stillness is the enemy when you’re cold, so these systems are essentially trying to get you to move and generate heat (hence shivering). Your nervous system floods your body with dopamine and noradrenaline, which are the neurochemicals that get you?doing?and?moving. And because our bodies really, really don’t like to have our core temp out of whack, this is a very powerful response.

Dopamine motivates you. It moves you. It makes you want things. And it feels GREAT.

Cold water is particularly effective in eliciting this response because it transfers heat away from your body much, much more quickly than air. More immersion = more cold. Rose surviving the Titanic and Jack ending up a popsicle illustrate this concept nicely.

Interestingly, cold water therapy does NOT trigger the pituitary-adrenal axis stress response (cortisol etc), which is why I suspect it feels especially good. The research on all of this stuff is fairly new, so I'm sure we'll learn more about what's happening in the next few years.

So there you have it, nerds: why ice baths/cold showers are annoyingly effective at making you feel better and why I try to turn the temp down in the shower sometimes even though it feels like dying.

Give it a try if you can stand the lack-of-heat, and let me know how it goes.

And please share this if you know there are folks in your network who need some nervous system knowledge today!

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