Are you ready to take the plunge?
Explaining the craze for cold water swimming and immersion — and why you don’t want to miss out.
David Beckham, Joe Wicks, Maddon, Lizzo, Lady Gaga, Joe Rogan — the list goes on and on. Celebrities and health experts everywhere are raving about the benefits of a dunk in cold water.
What are they so excited about? Should you be too? How can you try this most crazy-seeming wellness kick?
But WHY?
There’s rapidly building evidence that dipping in cold water is great for mind and body.
When it comes to mental health, there are strong suggestions it can treat depression and attention disorders, boost creativity and focus, and produce a powerful mood boost.
The benefits to the body may include delayed aging, protection against diabetes, heart health, muscle strength, weight loss and the reduction of the inflammation that plays a role in most disease.
Research on the benefits of cold water is only just beginning to pour in, but the roundup provided by cutting-edge health guru Rhonda Patrick is impressive.
And the fact is that in parts of the world where cold water is available, people have taken regular dips in it for thousands of years. From the nordic countries and Russia to Turkey and ancient Rome, the benefits of cold water were simply obvious. We don’t have research on the benefits of many things that we habitually do, like brushing our teeth twice a day, sending children to school, or wearing shoes, either. Once you have caught the cold bug, the benefits become absolutely obvious. It becomes impossible to doubt that the Turks, Romans and Fins who took the cold medicine over so many centuries knew what they were doing.
Many of the health benefits of cold seem to relate to circulation, metabolism and brain chemistry. Immersion in water at 14°C — that’s close to the temperature of the sea in summer around norther europe and much of the US — increases metabolic rate by 350% and the hormone and brain chemical norepinephrine by 530% and dopamine by 250%. When you consider that drugs used to treat obesity, suppress appetite, treat depression, mood disorder and ADHD often aim to increase levels of these chemicals — and generally fail to do so by anything like this degree — it’s clear why scientists are excited about cold water. Most recreational drugs, from heroin to ecstasy, also produce their high by boosting exactly these same chemicals. Dipping in cold water is a healthy habit that can also make you feel amazing.
Mentally and physically, choosing voluntarily to face the minor stress of cold water helps you build the resilience needed to face life’s big waves when they come.
The best way to try
Many of the celebs have their own designer cooled ice baths at home. But this is absolutely not the only, or even the best way to benefit from cold water.
The research we have so far does nothing to suggest one way of dipping in the cold is any better than another. It seems that the colder you get, the stronger the results. But you can achieve that cold either through colder water OR longer time in the water. Even thirty seconds in water near freezing produces dramatic results. But on the other hand, an hour in water the temperature of the summer sea appears equally beneficial. Your body can only bear so much cold safely, and can be pushed towards its limit in water anywhere below 18 degrees.
Fifteen minutes in a cold bath should be as effective as Joe Rogan’s four minutes in his ice tub. But a dip in open water is probably even better. Outdoors you can combine the benefits of cold water with the separate, synergic, proven benefits of exercise and time in nature.
But much more importantly — outdoor immersion is much more doable. Have you ever tried to get into a bath of cold water? If you have and failed, that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you, it’s means you’re human. I’ve swum in ice many times, and swim in cold water every day, but it’s still only in a heat wave, when my body is struggling to cool itself, that I can easily get into a cold bath.
Joe Rogan talks about how the distraction of talking helps him endure his cold immersion. The distraction of the outdoors are even more effective.
Swimming outdoors, there is so much to be aware of. The smell of the sea, or of lake or river water. The flow of ripples and waves. The sound of them, and of the tinkle made by your hands and shoulders as you swim. Currents against your skin. The sand or mud or stone beneath your toes. Places to explore. And the all-round view of place you are in, wherever that may be.
Swimming in an inland river or loch, I drink in the roll of the hills and the plunge of the cliffs and the tiered fall of all the trees drawn down towards the water. At the open coast I stretch my eyes to take in the breadth of the wide horizon, the dazzle of white sand. But at a city beach, the water makes me just as eager the watch humans at their most relaxed, the golden lichen on the harbor wall, the cormorant coming up with a thrashing strip of silver in its beak almost within my reach.
If you have never tried meditation or other mindfulness exercises, cold water in an unbeatable place to try. If, like me, your main object is not to swim long distnaces but just to be in the water, you will feel time flow and the moment open up to everything that is in it.
There is also the potential benefit of taking on the cold challenge with friends, family of a group. There’s nothing like minglingshrieks and squeals and hysterical laughter to make it easier to get in. Facebook will help you find your local wild swimming club. Such groups are marvellous for making friends and building confidence. The cold will distract you from your social inhibitions, just as being social distracts you from the cold. After the swim, you will bond with your companions as though you’d been through a minor emergency together. Swim groups are wonderful for body positivity — no one can pose while shivering cold — and wild swimming is the one outdoor activity where a thicker layer of body fat is a major advantage.
And swimming outdoors, if you begin between summer and the start of winter, provides you with a natural training regime that can gradually accustom you to colder water. The sea in the northern hemisphere will be at its warmest around late August and then keep getting colder all the way through to March. The easiest way to start cold water immersion is to swim in the summer or fall and then keep going — whether that’s once a month, once a week or most days. Research shows that every time you encounter cold water, your body deals better with the mental and physical challenge, even while the benefits remain the same. This adaptation lasts for at least a year, so every dip takes you closer to being able to face the coldest water, and gaining all its benefits, without flinching.
Cold water swimming need have no dangers if you know what you are doing. This post covers all you need to know to swim in saftety.
What it means to me
Like thousands of others who have taken to cold water in recent years, I’ve found it a life-saver. I took to it following trauma, when I might have resorted to drink or drugs instead, and have relied on it ever since.
I swim in the mornings and make a habit of thinking about any problem that is blocking my progress before I get in. By the time I get out, the problem will have untangled itself, just like a knot, thorough suspension in the water.
I also find it my cold water dips an indispensable part of my writing practice. Every piece of inspiration I have is generated or polished to perfection in the water.
I slip quietly into a loch, as if the ripples were heavy doors skirted in felt. And all I want is to be there. To take in the place, and be taken in by it. To float suspended in the water and the moment. A long, long moment — measured out exactly for me by the finite potential of my body to keep itself warm enough for life. A candle or a stick of incense burning down. Counted beads slipping through my fingers.
Meanwhile, the cold twists around my mind like Delphic mineral vapours: it pours a white cascade of norepinephrine across my brain, swelling a trickle into a torrent. As well as tightening my blood vessels to slow my cooling, this neurotransmitter increases alertness and arousal and floats my mood. My neurones bathe in five times more of it than before I entered the water, while dopamine is turned up two hundred and fifty percent, driving pleasure and reward, fine-tuning learning and cognition. My attention is sharpened to a needle, cutting the moment and the place into the waxy film across my mind. The chemical bath is like a mordant, etching memories deep along attention’s lines. It’s as though I have just taken a wrap of speed. But because I am used to the cold, my pulse barely quickens and my breathing is controlled. What once caused me something close to panic, so that I couldn’t bear to face it, is now something I can accept and gain strength from.
Beneath me, plunging stony vaults hold silently the liquid shade or flowing light. The mind is not lifted up, not encouraged to aspire, but rather to plunge deep, and settle down. Once I’m in the water, there is nowhere to go, nothing to do. There is no goal. I have arrived.
