A Few Things I Learned From the Wim Hof Method
“Breathe in, let it go”
When the coronavirus pandemic hit NYC, my family was fortunate to flee to a summer house in Pennsylvania, tucked far away into the woods, far away from any major cities or urban bustles. Everything there is less — less work, less noise, less stuff.
As school moved online and many obligations like my 2.5h round trip were erased, I was left over with a lot of free time. A lot. Granted, I took advantage of it.
The Wim Hof Method is a combination of controlled breathing, cold exposure, and body-focused meditation. Wim Hof (check his story here), an extreme pusher of human limits, promotes the method for its benefits on the immune system, mental health, muscular recovery, athletic performance, and personal enlightenment.
The method is most well known for the breathing technique, which is 30–40 deep breaths, followed by an exhaled hold, followed by an inhale held for 10 seconds — that’s 1 round. Usually, 3–4 rounds are done in one session. This deep breathing floods your body with oxygen and releases a cocktail of hormones and bodily sensations. It’s quite incredible how whole and connected with yourself you feel after a few rounds.
I stumbled upon the method in late 2019, after watching a Yes Theory Episode. Talk about a positive benefit from YouTube. But I only actually tried out the method during the pandemic at our summer house. Here is my experience with it and some things I learned:
My experience
My experience with the Wim Hof Method started with daily breathing sessions in the morning. I did 3 rounds of the breathing as a morning habit almost everyday between the Spring and Fall of 2020. It was my version of meditation and it just allowed me to start the day feeling whole and relaxed. To be honest, I also enjoyed the feeling of being psychedelically light-headed. Overtime, my awareness of my body and my sync with its feel and needs grew more comprehensive. This was the great return I wanted out of the method.
In the winter of 2021, I combined the breathing sessions with ice baths; I also did occasional hippy-like horse stands in the snow. So I did 3 rounds of breathing and then plunged myself into a plastic bucket of icy water on the house’s porch. Boy was it a deep pleasure. The initial shock to the ice eventually went away and the ice baths became nothing but another routine.
Today, I’m stuck in a beautifully inflated and claustrophobic city where an ice bath would cost me $40 worth of ice to cool the not-so-cold city water. I stick to doing cold showers after workouts and breathing sessions on the weekends. But of course the speedo winter olympics will be underway as soon as dunking myself in the frozen lake back in Pennsylvania is available.
While I’m not an advent participant of the method right now, what I learned from it and how I apply it to the other areas of my life is perhaps the most meaningful insight I can provide.
Introspection is Important
Many live a busy life. Many live a distracted life. Many live a stressful life. Many are clouded by the daily externalities imposed upon them. These externalities — whether it be work, school, family, addiction, or mainstream media — often bury our understanding of ourselves deeper and deeper. The voice inside us, our identity, and control over our minds can easily be lost in the modern day.
Which is why the answer to so many of today’s typical struggles can be found no farther than ourselves. Reconnecting with our mind and body is what I mean when I say introspection. Introspection is about having a more profound understanding of ourselves. Letting go and feeling every inch of your capillaries, heart beat, and prefrontal cortex through the Wim Hof Method has been mine. The Wim Hof Method worked for me because it broke down the fundamental values I have over my mind to the bodily reactions I face in discomfort. I got to know myself on deeper level through it. I’m sure there are many other forms of introspection, even non-physical.
There has been a new wave of mental health and mindfulness in standardized education recently. This I’m in complete objection of because a) it will never help students with poor mental health (a topic of its own) and b) is the opposite of introspection. For the sake of my article’s point, I will focus on b). The problem with standardized “mental health” is that such a system assumes introspection comes from the outside; that it’s an educational material that can be taught to or taken by students. It’s the opposite: introspection comes from the inside. Realizing your mind’s connection with your body comes from an internal reckoning on your own, not a list of instructions in a classroom. Mental health can’t be taught, it has to be invoked from within.
We Are Input-Based
The method extends beyond its micro physical benefits. It’s a framework for other solutions. Put plainly, a philosophy. Just as I said in the previous section, many of our person problems are external. But a lot of modern solutions are also external: pharmaceuticals for pain, vacation for happiness, and social media for entertainment just to name a few. The Wim Hof Method instead implies that many of our solutions can be found by looking at the big-picture and how we are treating our bodies.
Are you eating processed food like twinkies and Big Macs consisting of 67 ingredients or organic whole foods like grains, beans, vegetables, and fruits? How much color is there on your plate? Are you getting enough sleep and doing so at regular intervals? The circadian rhythm is one of the most powerful biological processes we have. Are you drinking enough water? Are you sitting indoors through the entire day or ever outside and moving your body? Those are examples of the body’s health, here is the mind’s: Are you in an office shuffling papers that you dread or taking in all 5 senses of a gorgeous greenery? Are you working on things you are actually passionate about? Are you taking prescriptions to cope or refocusing on the root of your struggles? Are you scrolling Instagram, feeling sorry for yourself, or out there interacting with new people and making new connections? How often do you tell your story to others? How often do you go outside of your comfort zone for a kick of adrenaline?
So much of modern life is structured around and confined to both mental and physical inputs that confuse and upset our bodies. From our senses, to our endocrine hormones, to our metabolic rate, to our circadian rhythm, we have largely descended from taking inputs from our environment — nature. If we’re hungry, we go out to find food. If we feel lonely, we seek mates or other human company. If it gets dark, our body temperature goes down and we feel drowsy prior to sleep. It’s easy to see that our natural responses don’t coincide with the artificial inputs of our modern world. Darwinian evolution is no longer relevant because industrialization has progressed too rapidly for enough generations of offspring to be singled out in their response to these industrialized inputs.
Which is why we may not be able to eliminate our natural responses to such artificial inputs (it’s literally encoded into our genes), but we sure can choose which inputs to intake.
Phrased another way, the human physiology has everything it needs to be healthy, happy, and strong. We just to need to watch how we treat it and tweak what inputs it receives accordingly.
Be careful: [you] aren’t smarter than yourself!
Our Minds Capable of Much Much More
I’m a runner and for me this method has gone beyond being healthy and happy in my mind. It has been about discovering the untapped potential of our minds and bodies — that if we let go from deep inside, there is a new capacity to push the body to another limit.
Pain is an inevitable part of running. The more of it that you can conquer, the faster you can race. No one likes lactic acid, 180+ HRs, or miles upon miles of crunchy gravel. But these are all elements to conquer in training.
With regards to my running, I have used the Wim Hof Method both as a health tool and an applicable philosophy. As a health tool, flooding my body with oxygen in breathing sessions and expanding my capillaries during 10-minute ice baths has been very relaxing for my muscles and superb in improving recovery. Of course, there are lots of other tools like the Theragun G3PRO and melatonin that are similar in benefit with that fashion standard.
But the real gem of the Wim Hof Method is the applicable philosophy: letting go from deep inside. I think I brushed upon this in a previous article, but there have been a few runs where instead of reciting some goal/motivational phrase, listening to a hype song, or thinking, I was able to let go of everything in my mind and embrace pain from within.
On such runs, I was able to lock into an unworldly stillness, letting the pain overcome every neuron of my body rather than resisting it. It is as if I joined forces with it. And being able to accept pain for what it is and inviting its worst standards to my mental weakness has in profit allowed me to work on my tolerance for it. I have been able to push my body further than I thought [note the word thought!!!] in such instances. But let me be clear: this is not some external mantra. There is no step-by-step how-to-guide for this. It’s a spiritual kind of awakening that takes practice upon practice to lock into. And I will continue pursuing these spiritual connections with pain in hope that I can move closer to my full potential as both a human and an athlete.
Which brings me to my final conclusive point: our minds are capable of much much more than we think. I believe that when we’re driven my fundamental forces of biological nature such as survival and pain, there is a true capacity to do amazing things with our bodies. The Wim Hof Method has opened me to this possibility. Running to sheer impossible goals such as breaking my school’s mile record is in fact my current application of this possibility.
I think I’m going to do this once a month as a type of newsletter:
A book I’m reading: Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku.
A habit I’m developing: Writing Medium articles at least once a week.
A thought I’m pondering: How wireless charging works through a plastic case.
