It’s Cold

I’ve caught the cold-plunge bug.

For the unindoctrinated, this is exactly what it sounds like: plunging your body into really cold water and staying there.

I first heard about cold-plunging from entrepreneur, thought-leader, and a mentor of mine, Jesse Itzler. I believe he first discovered it through a man named Wim Hof.

Hof is considered a master of the cold. After his wife committed suicide in 1995, Hof was left alone to raise their four children. As he tells it, he didn’t have much money and he couldn’t stop thinking about his wife’s passing (understandably), and the only place he found relief was in really cold water. It was there that he invented his breathing technique: The Wim Hof Method.

Hof (and scientists) espouse the benefits of cold exposure. It makes sense as our bodies are mostly in static states. We go from our warm houses to our warm cars to our warms jobs back to our warm cars and back into our warm houses. By shocking our bodies with cold, we activate immune responses and a whole bunch of other stuff that people way smarter than me can educate you more deeply on.

That’s not my goal here. But to illustrate my point, Hof let doctors inject him with the E Coli bacteria. Through breathwork and cold exposure, his Cortisol spiked and the bacteria was essentially eliminated from his system. The doctors, believing Hof to be a biological anomaly, suggested he train others in his breathwork and cold exposure techniques. So he did, and the doctors injected them. And like Hof, they didn’t get sick.

The other day, during a five-minute plunge in 46 degree water (you’re not supposed to do more than five minutes as you’ll negate the benefits), a friend of mine uttered, through shaking teeth, “It’s cold.”

This struck me as being so unbelievably obvious. We signed up for this. I knew it would be cold. Did he not know it would be cold? It’s called a cold-plunge.

I wondered how many of us sign up for something and then are surprised when it’s not simple.

Starting a business is hard. Leading a team is hard. Being an entrepreneur is hard. Running a marathon is hard. Losing weight is hard. Being married is hard (to do it well).

Don’t be surprised by this.

I told my friend, “You’re fighting against it. Surrender to it instead.”

Look, I would never coach anyone to surrender to their problems or to poor employee performance or bad health. But I did coach him to surrender to the cold, so he could actually benefit from it. Instead, he was spending his time wanting it to be something it simply won’t ever be.

You may be doing the same thing. If you are, know that wanting something that’s objectively hard to not be hard is like wanting 46 degree water to be warm. It’s that futile.