A Cold Shower A Day Keeps The Doctor Away?

This is Dutch extreme athlete Wim Hof, also known as “The Iceman”! He’s broken many world records mostly relating to the enduring the cold, for example:

• climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts
• running a half-marathon above the Arctic Circle barefoot
• standing in a container completely covered with ice cubes for more than 112 minutes

You might not want to do yoga in your pyjamas on an iceberg, but you might like…

• better circulatory health
• reduced risk of stroke
• a boosted immune system
• healthier skin
• more energy and alertness

…and things like that. Wim Hof’s method is not just about extreme athletic achievements; most of what he does, the stuff that can benefit the rest of us, is much more prosaic.

The Wim Hof Method

For Wim Hof, three things are key:

• Breathing (See: Wim Hof Method Breathing Exercises)
• Commitment (See: How to Increase Willpower)
• Cold therapy (See: Benefits of Cold Therapy)

Today, we’re going to be focusing on the last one there.

What are the benefits of Cold Therapy?

Once upon a time, we didn’t have central heating, electric blankets, thermal underwear, and hot showers. In fact, once upon a time, we didn’t have houses or clothes. We used to be a lot more used to the elements! And while it’s all well and good to enjoy modern comforts, it has left our bodies lacking practice.

Practice at what? Most notably: vasodilation and vasoconstriction, in response to temperature changes. Either:

• vasodilation, because part of our body needs more blood to keep it warm and nourished, or
• vasoconstriction, because part of our body needs less blood running through it to get cooled down.

Switching between the two gives the blood vessels practice at doing it, and improves vascular muscle tone. If your body doesn’t get that practice, your blood vessels will be sluggish at making the change. This can cause circulation problems, which in turn have a big impact in many other areas of health, including:

• cardiovascular disease
• stroke risk
• mood instability
• nerve damage in extremities

On the flipside, if the blood vessels do get regular practice at dilating and constricting, you might enjoy lower risk of those things, and instead:

• improved immune response
• healthier skin
• better quality sleep
• more energy and alertness
• improved sexual performance/responsiveness

So, how to get that, without getting extreme?

As today’s title suggests, “a cold shower a day” is a great practice.

You don’t have to jump straight in, especially if you think your circulation and vascular responses might be a bit sluggish in the first instance. In fact, Wim Hof recommends:

• Week 1: Thirty seconds of cold water at the end of a warm shower each morning
• Week 2: One minute of cold water at the end of a warm shower each morning
• Week 3: A minute and a half of cold water at the end of a warm shower each morning
• Week 4: Two minutes of cold water at the end of a warm shower each morning

How cold is cold?

The benefits of cold exposure begin at around 16ºC / 60ºF, so in most places, water from the cold water mains is sufficiently cold.

As your body becomes more used to making the quick-change on a vascular level, the cold water will seem less shocking to your system. In other words, on day 30 it won’t hit you like it did on day one.

At that point, you can either continue with your two-minutes daily cold shower, and reap the benefits, or if you’re curious to push it further, that’s where ice baths come in!

Can anyone do it, or are any conditions contraindicated?

As ever, we’re a health and productivity newsletter, not doctors, let alone your doctors. Nothing here is medical advice. However, Wim Hof himself says:

❝Listen to your body, and never force the practices. We advise against doing Wim Hof Method if you are dealing with any of the following:

• Epilepsy
• High blood pressure
• Coronary heart disease
• A history of serious healthy issues like heart failure or stroke
• Pregnancy*
• Childhood*❞

*There is simply not enough science regarding the effects of cold exposure on people who are pregnant, or children. Obviously, we don’t expect this to be remedied anytime soon, because the study insitutions’ ethics boards would (rightly!) hold up the study.

As for the other conditions, and just generally if unsure, consult a doctor.

As you can see, this does mean that a limitation of Cold Therapy is that it appears to be far better as a preventative, since it helps guard against the very conditions that could otherwise become contraindications.

We haven’t peppered today’s main feature with study papers, partly because Wim Hof’s own website has kindly collated a collection of them (with links and summaries!) onto one page:

Further reading: The Science Behind The Wim Hof Method

Wholesome Health

This is Dr. Sara Gottfried, who some decades ago got her MD from Harvard and specialized as an OB/GYN at MIT. She’s since then spent the more recent part of her career educating people (mostly: women) about hormonal health, precision, functional, & integrative medicine, and the importance of lifestyle medicine in general.

What does she want us to know?

Beyond “bikini zone health”

Dr. Gottfried urges us to pay attention to our whole health, in context.

“Women’s health” is often thought of as what lies beneath a bikini, and if it’s not in those places, then we can basically treat a woman like a man.

And that’s often not actually true—because hormones affect every living cell in our body, and as a result, while prepubescent girls and postmenopausal women (specifically, those who are not on HRT) may share a few more similarities with boys and men of similar respective ages, for most people at most ages, men and women are by default quite different metabolically—which is what counts for a lot of diseases! And note, that difference is not just “faster” or “slower””, but is often very different in manner also.

That’s why, even in cases where incidence of disease is approximately similar in men and women when other factors are controlled for (age, lifestyle, medical history, etc), the disease course and response to treatment may vary considerable. For a strong example of this, see for example:

• The well-known: Heart Attack: His & Hers ← most people know these differences exist, but it’s always good to brush up on what they actually are
• The less-known: Statins: His & Hers ← most people don’t know these differences exist, and it pays to know, especially if you are a woman or care about one

Nor are brains exempt from his…

The female brain (kinda)

While the notion of an anatomically different brain for men and women has long since been thrown out as unscientific phrenology, and the idea of a genetically different brain is… Well, it’s an unreliable indicator, because technically the cells will have DNA and that DNA will usually (but not always; there are other options) have XX or XY chromosomes, which will usually (but again, not always) match apparent sex (in about 1/2000 cases there’s a mismatch, which is more common than, say, red hair; sometimes people find out about a chromosomal mismatch only later in life when getting a DNA test for some unrelated reason), and in any case, even for most of us, the chromosomal differences don’t count for much outside of antenatal development (telling the default genital materials which genitals to develop into, though this too can get diverted, per many intersex possibilities, which is also a lot more common than people think) or chromosome-specific conditions like colorblindness…

The notion of a hormonally different brain is, in contrast to all of the above, a reliable and easily verifiable thing.

See for example:

Alzheimer’s Sex Differences May Not Be What They Appear

Dr. Gottfried urges us to take the above seriously!

Because, if women get Alzheimer’s much more commonly than men, and the disease progresses much more quickly in women than men, but that’s based on postmenopausal women not on HRT, then that’s saying “Women, without women’s usual hormones, don’t do so well as men with men’s usual hormones”.

She does, by the way, advocate for bioidentical HRT for menopausal women, unless contraindicated for some important reason that your doctor/endocrinologist knows about. See also:

Menopausal HRT: A Tale Of Two Approaches (Bioidentical vs Animal)

The other very relevant hormone

…that Dr. Gottfried wants us to pay attention to is insulin.

Or rather, its scrubbing enzyme, the prosaically-named “insulin-degrading enzyme”, but it doesn’t only scrub insulin. It also scrubs amyloid beta—yes, the same that produces the amyloid beta plaques in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s. And, there’s only so much insulin-degrading enzyme to go around, and if it’s all busy breaking down excess insulin, there’s not enough left to do the other job too, and thus can’t break down amyloid beta.

In other words: to fight neurodegeneration, keep your blood sugars healthy.

This may actually work by multiple mechanisms besides the amyloid hypothesis, by the way:

The Surprising Link Between Type 2 Diabetes & Alzheimer’s

Want more from Dr. Gottfried?

You might like this interview with Dr. Gottfried by Dr. Benson at the IMCJ:

Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal | Conversations with Sara Gottfried, MD

…in which she discusses some of the things we talked about today, and also about her shift from a pharmaceutical-heavy approach to a predominantly lifestyle medicine approach.

Enjoy!

Avoiding Burnout, The Active Way

This is Dr. Claudine Holt. She’s double board-certified, in Occupational & Environmental Medicine, and Lifestyle Medicine.

In short: preventative medicine in all parts of our life.

Hopefully, you are reading this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to take on another exciting day in this wonderful, beautiful world!

On the other hand, it’s possible that you’re reading this semi-focussed, looking for a crumb of dopamine as much as you are looking for information.

If you’ve ever had the “What a week!” / “It’s only Tuesday” moment, this one’s for you.

What does Dr. Holt want us to know?

You can recover from burnout without guilt

Sometimes, we overreach ourselves. Sometimes, life overreaches us! Sometimes it’s not that we overcommitted—it’s just that we were taking each day as it comes, but sometimes several days gang up on us at once.

Sometimes, even, we can feel exhausted when it seems like we haven’t done anything.

Note: if you feel exhausted and it seems like you haven’t done anything, then be aware: you are exhausted for a reason!

What that reason might be may vary, but contrary to popular belief, energy does not just vanish. It went somewhere.

This goes double if you have any chronic illness(es), even if you’re not aware of having had a flare-up, chances are you were just exceptionally busy (on a cellular level).

And it’s easy to think that “mere” cellular activity shouldn’t be exhausting, but that is 100% of where our energy transactions happen—whether or not we are consciously aware of them!

See also: Eat To Beat Chronic Fatigue ← yes, this also covers when you are too exhausted to shop and cook like a TV chef

Dr. Holt specializes in working with burned out medical professionals (and also specifically specializes in working with women), but there are lessons for everyone in her advice. For example:

Fiction: ”Medicine is my calling–it’s who I am.”

Fact: You are more than medicine! Remember that your career is just one aspect of your life. Don’t forget to create your big-picture vision and tend the garden of the other areas of your life too.

~ Dr. Claudine Holt

Read more: Dr. Claudine Holt | Burnout: Fact vs Fiction

This same thing can go for whatever part of your identity frequently follows “I’m a…”, and is somewhere that you put a lot of your energy; it could equally be a non-professional job like “homemaker”, or a relational status like “husband”, or a cultural identifier like “Christian”, or a hobby like “gardener” (assuming that is not also your profession, in which case, same item, different category).

Indeed, a lot of women especially get hit by “the triple burden” of professional work, housework, and childcare. And it’s not even necessarily that we resent any of those things or feel like they’re a burden; we (hopefully) love our professions, homes, children. But, here’s the thing:

No amount of love will add extra hours to the day.

So what does she recommend doing about it, when sometimes we’re juggling things that can’t be dropped?

Start simple, but start!

Dr. Holt recommends to start with a smile (yes even if, and sometimes especially when, the circumstances do not feel like they merit it), and deploy some CBT tools:

Two Hacks to Quickly Rise Above Burnout (Or Any Circumstance)

We’ve expanded on this topic here:

How To Manage Chronic Stress

With a more level head on, it becomes easier to take on the next step, which creating healthy boundaries—and that doesn’t just mean with other people!

It also means slaying our own perfectionism and imposter syndrome—both things that will have us chasing our tails 36 hours per day if we let them.

See also:

• Perfectionism, And How To Make Yours Work For You
• Imposter Syndrome (And Why Almost Everyone Has It)

❝Burnout is the culture of our times. A culture that expects us to do more and think our way out of everything. A culture that asks for more than the body can bear. Unfortunately, even though the situation might not be of our creation, burnout culture is our inheritance.

An inheritance we can either perpetuate—or change—depending on what we embody.❞

Source: The Embodied MD on Burnout with Dr Claudine Holt

That “embodiment” is partly our choices and actions that we bring and own just as we bring and own our body—and it’s partly our relationship with our body itself, and learning to love it, and work with it to achieve wonderful things, instead of just getting through the day.

Which yes, does also mean making space for good diet, exercise, sleep and so forth, per:

These Top Five Things Make The Biggest Difference To Health

Want to know more?

You might like to check out Dr. Holt’s website:

The Embodied M.D. | Burnout Coach

…where she also offers resources such as a blog and a podcast.

Enjoy!