Managing misery. Is the cold a powerful psychiatric medicine?
The joy of hormetic stress and managing the madness of sadness. Quackers? Or not?
"The cold is one of the most extreme forms of therapy available.” Will Van Zyl
Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of my dog, Wolfy, being put to sleep. At around 7pm on Wednesday 16th March 2022 he was injected with something to make him sleepy, and then as his eyes receded into a dopey distance, he was given an overdose of barbiturates. This was done by our lovely vet who is old school in that on arrival and experienced in what was coming, he took two fingers of Irish whiskey with him into the allocated dying room.
Wolfy’s end came with me lying next to him on a dog bed and a blanket in my home office, study, spare room, Kate’s shit pit, whatever it is variously called it’s the room of my own where we had spent many many days, weeks, months and years together, my beloved scruffy old lurcher boy and me.
For the over seven years we lived together he would be snoozing beside me on the sofa, on my feet in the nest under my desk, or sighing contentedly behind my chair on the thick Turkish rug or sat nosing my elbow in an effort to make me leave my desk and feed, stroke or walk him.
And this is where Wolfy spent his last day. It was excruciatingly sad, but in that weird way of exceptional days still humdrum things went on. I cleaned my teeth. Some new cleaners came because my boyfriend had fallen out with our fantastic old one. I had to take the other dog for a walk. I had to ring the vet, be polite as I arranged a time for him to come and put Wolfy to sleep and of course I had to work. On this very day that my dog was scheduled to die I had to interview Wim Hof for a Sunday Times story about his BBC TV show.
I could never listen back to the tape of our conversation, I just worked off my notes instead, because I didn’t want to hear the sounds of Wolfy there. Still not ready for that a year on…
It was not my first interview with Wim. I’d interviewed him a few times already. My knowledge of cold therapy had been growing steadily and it frustrated me that every story I wrote about it felt cursory and insubstantial. Hence why so many chilly words are going to land up here on Substack to be read or not by my tiny stack-o-sphere.
By the time a dying Wolfy and I had Wim bellowing down the Zoom screen I had already leant heavily on and off on the strengthening powers of cold for a couple of years, through some relationship issues and increasingly during Wolfy’s last months.
In the run up to Christmas 2021 I picked up the habit in earnest because I knew I needed some help, Wolfy’s life was coming to an end, I was sick of being broke, life felt rough, I felt quite hopeless. I leant on what means of escape from the dark abyss I had available.
My dopamine levels were fucked. Trying to jack them up as I wrote at my desk I drank wine and snarfed crisps and they briefly lent me a dose of good vibes, until the inevitable dip when the delicious dope(-amine) runs out and you’re left down, dypepsic and depleted, worse.
The cold shower gave me free dopamine. Not just free dopamine, but elevated dopamine levels equal to that of snorting a line of coke (around 220%) according to science but unlike cocaine no comedown and that high lasts all day.
In brief, Mother Nature does not ask for the all the extra dopamine back after a cold shower.
If you’re keen to know more about the science of cold, I can’t recommend Dr Andrew Huberman’s 2 hour 15 mins podcast on the subject. I’m going to share some of the science but it will be flawed and filtered through my not very sciencey brian. But roughly it’s the truth, and in a post-truth age that’s a win.
At this painful time, vigorous exercise would probably have been the best option, weight training and some physical jerking, but by the time I’d done some work, made the bed, cooked some food, tried feebly to manage the unruly beast that is domestic mess and walked two dogs with wildly different needs, one plodding and limping the other reaching speeds of 25 miles an hour, I had neither the motivation nor the time to mince off to the gym for a cheering dose of human growth hormone and endorphins. All I wanted was…wine.
I chose to do the bare minimum of the Wim Hof method, which I had learned just before the pandemic in December 2019 (more of this later). For years I’d done a bit of cold lake swimming on and off like every middle class peri-menopausal woman in Great Britain, but I didn’t have time for that any more.
My morning routine included three rounds of energising breathing exercises, often done in bed, or sitting on the step with a cup of coffee, all of which took less than ten minutes, and a cold shower for as long as possible, which rarely went over two minutes. When I had to go away for work I filled the hotel bath tub with cold and just lay there for up to five minutes because the bath is easier thanks to the little layer of water warmed by your body that forms around your skin like an invisible liquid wetsuit.
Believe me, this was nothing worth boasting about on the Wim Hof subreddit - r/BecomingTheIceman. It’s the bare minimum really. But it was quite hard enough. Someone once asked, “What’s the screaming,” when my boyfriend was on the phone during my frigid ablutions, and he said, “It’s just Kate. Having a cold shower.”
“Why?”
It’s a good question.
In my next post I’ll itemise some of the cascade of physiological benefits in ‘deliberate cold exposure’ and ‘cold water immersion’, but for now, I am just going to describe the mental health benefits that prompt the statement in my header.
I needed a sustaining habit that I could do in a matter of minutes in the mornings. Enter the breathwork and the cold shower. My saviour. At the time I thought of it as palliative, something to get me through a tough period, but as we will go on to see, perhaps the cold has the potential to be an actual cure.
There are no major studies on this, but there are credible published case studies out there. Like a woman who weaned herself off anti-depressants with cold water immersion, and the guy in Dopamine Nation Dr Anna Lembke’s book about how we can live in a world full of endless easy sources of dopamine who trades the high of Class A drugs for the similarly high high of cold water and successfully treats his addiction. Wim Hof himself turned to the CWI when his wife kissed his children goodbye and jumped out of the window of their 8th floor apartment.
Is the cold a powerful homemade psychiatric medicine?
Cold exposure has several big impacts on mental health. One is it causes a free whoop-no-come-down increase in your base dopamine levels. Two is the impact of hormetic stress: using cold exposure and mastering our response to it we can learn to consciously regulate our physiology including our emotions.
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