Cold showers

The internet is awash in exhortations to take cold showers, or takes on why that’s a bad idea. I guess it touches a nerve.

My goal is a little different: I want to explain the best way to try it and see if it helps you.

For background, I’ve tried cold showers a few times–in the mid 2010s I used to take a cold shower every night. I was originally inspired by William James’s quote to ‘do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it.’

This was fine, but I eventually stopped because when I started powerlifting, it felt like I’d already done a suitably hard thing and what I really wanted was a nice warm shower afterward. Maybe William James would scold me, but whatever. I don’t see him deadlifting 300 pounds. (Okay, he does look like kind of a badass.)

In any case, the rationale for this behavior was a bit abstract, so it wasn’t durable. I now have a more concrete rationale based on the actual experiment that pushed me into trying cold showers again. It happened while getting up after a night of choppy, broken sleep and a sense that the day was about to be a total waste. I felt like I needed some kind of shock to the system to snap into a better rhythm. So, I hopped into the shower, turned the dial to ‘cold’ and winced as the water hit me. It worked great. While I obviously don’t have a clean A/B test, we all know how those days go; it’s easy to tell if there’s an effect. In my case, I felt much better than the typical reference day.

I now take a very short cold shower every morning, and I find it very effective at dealing with a mix of grogginess and the sense of mild morning anxiety and discombobulation that comes from waking up. (Maybe this is a sign that something is wrong with my sleep, in which case this essay is your prompt to tell me that.)

So, that’s my recommendation: if you have a bad night of sleep, and cold showers have any appeal whatsoever, try one and see if it helps. I think you need approximately one minute, maybe two, to see the effect–basically, enough time to go from “body clenching up in response to cold” to a sort of warm relaxation.

If you like it, then you have a concrete reason to try cold showers more regularly. If not, well, now you know.