What I learned from taking a cold shower every day

Jason Berek-Lewis
3 min readMar 7, 2018

--

For the last month, I’ve been taking cold showers. Not cool showers. Cold showers; yes, the tap is turned all the way to ❄️COLD❄️.

Why?!

My personal trainer may have mentioned something about cold showers to me, or maybe I read about the benefits on a website like Lifehacker,or… I don’t really remember where the impetus came from. We are just coming out of Summer in Australia, so perhaps the time was just right.

I have osteoarthritis; the condition affects my fingers, hands, knees, ankles, feet and toes. In the last year I’ve taken significant steps to change my lifestyle and diet, to start exercising, to lose weight to help manage the joint pain and mobility issues that come with living with OA. I’ve sought out some radical, unorthodox treatments so I had an open mind about cold showers as a tool for managing pain.

This is a different pain

When you go from having long, hot showers, partly because they are awesome and partly because warmth/ heat can also help with joint mobility and pain management, to having bone-chillingly cold showers there is a level of pain involved; imagine being instantly jabbed by hundreds of icicle needles!

There is the imagined and anticipated pain as you stand just outside the reach of the water and build up the courage to step into the scalding stream…

Then there is the actual and lived pain as your early morning nerves are lanced with stinging pinpricks of precise chill, your eyeballs feel as though they are crystallising and your skin is stretched taut over jittery bones.

Again, why?

This started as a challenge; could I actually do it? Could I step out of my comfort zone; my 15 minute really hot shower and tackle something the polar opposite?

At first, the answer was “No”. I couldn't stand under the water, I would shrink (not that kind of shrinkage!) from its chill caress, breath coming in rapid pants, as I sought to find the valour and the strength to take on this monster of ice.

But, I pushed on.

I'm flat out crap about being pushed out of my comfort zone; I'm a creature of habit. I needed something to help me snap out of it. Out of what?

Out of everything.

You can make a change!

I needed to take a cold shower, to snap out of old habits. Across this last year, I’ve been trashing old, bad habits left, right and centre: I've mostly junked junk food, I no longer drink soda, I try to eat smaller portions, I'm getting (a little) more sleep, I'm exercising daily, I'm (working on) managing my anger, I'm (working on) developing new and more productive writing habits.

But, along the way, others tell me and I tell myself that I'm not good enough; that I just can't do it. Some people say the key to making changes is to eat the frog, for me it was to take a cold shower… Every damn day.

The funniest thing about the cold showers is that, once I got over the shock and the pain and the cold, I started laughing. That's right, every morning I'd step into a chill-cold shower and laugh my head off at the absurdity of it all; how cool is that?

Starting your day with a laugh is epic, cool.

So, join me for a cold shower tomorrow morning?

--

--

Jason Berek-Lewis

Writer/ Reader (Sci-Fi, Healthcare, Politics). Survivor of 3 heart surgeries. Lover of coffee & the stars.