Cold Showers

The cold exposure for health and performance temperature is a powerful stimulus on our nervous system and indeed on every organ and system of our body and cold in particular can be leveraged to improve mental health, physical health and performance meaning for endurance exercise for recovering from various forms of exercise. For actually improving strength and power and for enhancing mental capacity in order to properly leverage deliberate cold exposure for sake of mental health, physical health and performance you have to understand how cold impacts the brain and body.

1.mental performance.

I'd like to detail what happens when we deliberately expose ourselves to cold, meaning that you are placing yourself into a cold environment on purpose in order to extract a particular set of benefits. When we talk about deliberate cold exposure, almost always that means getting uncomfortable.

-How cold should it be the water?

How cold should the water be? How cold should the environment be? I would like you to use this rule of thumb. If you are using deliberate cold exposure, the environment that you place yourself into should place your mind into a state of, whoa ‘’I would really like to get out of this environment, but I can stay in safely.’’ Now that might seem a little bit arbitrary but let's say you were to get into a warm shower and it would feel really, really, nice and you were to start turning down the warm and turning up the cold. There would be some Threshold at which it would feel uncomfortable to you. And if you were to continue to make a little bit colder than that you would really want to get out of the shower, but you were confident that you could stay in without risking your health. So the simple rule of thumb is going to be Place yourself into an environment that is uncomfortably cold, but that you can stay in safely.

2.cold showers are as good better or worse than cold water immersion up to the neck?

I'm going to make all of that very simple for you by saying cold water immersion up to the neck with your feet and hands submerged also is going to be the most effective. Second best would be cold shower, third best would be to go outside with a minimum amount of clothing but of course clothing that is culturally appropriate and that would allow you to experience cold to the point where you would almost want to shiver or start shivering.

3.what should my mental state be?

I'm exposing myself to this uncomfortable yet safe condition of cold well, you have two options and there are probably other options as well, one is to try and calm yourself to remain as mentally still as possible. The other is to lean into that challenge and so to grind it out sometimes, it's easier to calm yourself one way to do that is through double inhales through the nose and extended exhales through the mouth or simply by trying to control your breathing and reduce the pace of your breathing and increase the volume of your breathing. I have to say that everyone experiences a short turning a breath when they get into uncomfortably cold water, that is a universal physiological response everyone also experiences a 30 to 80 percent decrease. In cognitive function in particular of the frontal cortex the metabolism of your frontal cortex goes down the metabolism meaning the activity of brain areas associated with stress and panic goes way up and so anchoring your mind in cognitive activities as you get into the cold, can be very very helpful for maintaining Clarity of mind, this is teaching your mind how to stay online how to stay engaged while you have high levels of stress in your body.