Ice bath meditation
Ice bath meditation
The surprising psychological benefits of deliberate cold exposure
Mental health requires meaning, not comfort
One of the paradoxes of mental health is that seeking greater comfort in life seems to result in less satisfying psychological outcomes, rather than more.
The psychological theories of the early Industrial Revolution were dominated by reinforcement conditioning — the idea that human behavior can be shaped by consistent rewards and punishments. While such theories are convenient for manipulating factory workers, their effectiveness is unreliable.
In Drive (Pink 2009), Daniel Pink wrote about what really motivates workers, and it isn’t money. After their basic needs are secure, most workers are motivated by:
autonomy (freedom from control),
mastery (self-efficiacy), and
meaning (a sense of belonging to a mission greater than themselves).
That means the greatest acheivement of what American psychologist BF Skinner called operant conditioning was probably teaching pigeons to play ping-pong.
While incentive structures do help shape behavior, by the time American psychologist Abraham Maslow published his famous theory of human motivation (Maslow 1943), it was obvous that human beings are more complex than laboratory pigeons. Maslow, who began his career as a sex researcher after working as a doctoratal student under the supervision of Harry Harlow at University of Wisconsin, recognized human drives as multifaceted.
All three of Pink’s human drives are present in Maslow’s early work, which organized them in a heirarchy. At the bottom were basic needs like safety, shelter, and pleasure. After those were satisfied, a thirst for power, a sense of belonging, social status could emerge. Finally, Maslow postulated that the highest calling of humankind was something called “self-actualization” — a striving to realize our fullest human potential. Although Maslow’s original formulation for the hierarchy postulated the most basic (safety, pleasure) must be satisfied before more complex motives can be realized, it wasn’t long before that linear ordering was discredited.
At the time of Maslow’s original publication, Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in Nazi death camps. After liberation, three years after Maslow’s publication, Frankl chronicled his experiences in Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl 1946).
Rather than drawing on the autistic philosophies that enabled industrialization, Frankl built on the prior work of German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, who wrote “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
Frankl’s experiences helped him realized that pleasure is not the purpose of life. That is, our psychological state cannot be improved by eliminating suffering from our lives, but instead by giving meaning to the suffering.
“The primary motivation for living is to find meaning." - Viktor Frankl
The pyschological risk of comfort
In the The Coddling of the American Mind (Haidt & Lukianoff 2018) college professors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff bemoan the decline of the American University into a morass of comfortable lies and trigger warnings. In The 9 Cognitive Distorations Taught in College, I summarized the fallacies and misconceptions being taught in modern classrooms as I understood them from their book and my own experiences as a University Professor. They include:
emotional reasoning — confusing subjective feelings for objective reality.
catastrophizing — extrapolating setbacks into a disasterous imagined future.
overgeneralizing — confusing an example with some greater Truth.
all-or-nothing thinking — also called splitting, or black-and-white thinking.
mind reading — the belief that we have special insight into other’s thoughts, feelings, or motives.
labeling — ignoring exceptions to overgeneralized rules.
negative filtering — amplifying negative signals.
discounting positives — ignoring positive signals.
blaming and scapegoating — i.e., overlooking our own agency.
According to Lukianoff’s personal account of his recovery from depression, these cognitive distortions offer some short-term emotional succor at the expense of longer-term mental health. It was only by learning new patterns of thinking through cognitive behavioral therapy that Lukianoff was able to overcome them.
Ice bath psychology
There is no greater practical application of psychology than marketing. By mastering the complexities of human motivation, marketing geniuses seek to persuade us to make purchases, vote for favored politicians, or even support wars on distant continents. In his semi-autobiographical book on what works well in marketing, Oglivy & Mather executive Rory Sutherland writes that marketing “is not logical. It is psycho-logical” (Alchemy, Sutherland 2019).
In that pithy phrase, Sutherland contrasts the “conventional wisdom” (The Affluent Society, Galbraith 1958) that espouses the pleasure principle of perant conditioning with the reality of more complex human motivations.
Which bring us to the psycho-logic of the ice bath.
Why would anyone submerge themselves up their neck in freezing cold water for two minutes or more?
Like exercise, deliberate cold exposure is a systemic, hormetic stressor that stimulates the body to grow and strengthen — physiologically and psychologically — in reponse to stress. Unlike exercise, which is typically uncomfortable and exhausting, immersion in freezing cold can be painful, even when it is endured for just a few minutes.
Upon contact with the freezing water, thermoreceptors in the skin signal the amygdala to initiate a fight-or-flight response in sympathetic nervous system (Kanosue et al. 2002). This is the same response that is responsible for panic, and from an evolutionary perspective it causes a rush of hormones, neurotransmitters, and cardiac activation that prepares our body for life-saving action.
But something strange happens in the ice bath.
Despite the intial rush of dopamine, noradrenaline, blood glucose, and what feels inside our bodies like certain death, our brains involuntarily calm down.
The experience of Patrick Porter, PhD (founder of BrainTap) is illustrative. The video above records his first ice bath.
The water is at about 34F, and you can hear the panic in Porter’s breathing as he descends into the water. His guide, Jerame Mudick, is a Wim Hof Method certified Instructor who coaches him to take control of his breathing.
By structuring his breath, Porter is able to calm the sympathetic nervous system and strengthen the parasympathetic.
The result is relaxation.
Brain waves in the ice bath
The subjective experience of calm when confronted with panic can be measured in our brain waves. To test this hypothesis, I worked with two people who agreed to wear a Muse headset to measure their brain waves while in the ice bath.
Muse is a wearable, real-time EEG tiara that provides real-time biofeedback that may help users improve their mediation skills. To create a baseline brainwave for the purpose of comparison, I asked my participants to wear the Muse while they mediated in a warm, dry comfortable environment.
The first participant was an experience meditator. The results of his warm, dry meditation are on the left in the figure below. His brain is rarely in an active state. Most of his meditation is in the neutral zone, with brief periods in calm.
His results while submerged up to his neck in 34F water are on the right.
Unlike his warm, dry meditation, his brain plunges deep into the calm zone right away and mostly stays there. Despite activation of his sympathetic nervous system that is typically associated with deliberate cold exposure, his brain hardly ever enters the active zone.
The second participant was a young woman in her mid-20’s who works as a personal trainer. She had no experience with either meditation or ice baths.
Her warm, dry results (left, below) are more calm than the male with meditation experience. Her brain only briefly exhibits active brain waves, spending most of its time in neutral and calm states.
However, during nearly whole body freezing cold water immersion, her brain waves plunge into the most calm state, and remain there for the duration of the cold exposure (right, in the figure above). Her results are surprising, because despite being submerged in freezing cold water to a line on her torso above her belly button, her brain slides into a calm state and stays there for almost the entire duration of her mediation.
As far as her brain is concerned, she is more relaxed and meditative in the uncomfortable ice water on the couch.
The calming effect of whole body cold water immersion is immediate and durable. For those who are inexperienced at normal meditation, an ice bath practice may be a way for them to realize the benefits of meditation without the hundreds of hours of practice ordinarily required.
Ice bath meditation is different from any other kind of meditation. The first reaction of your body when plunging into freezing water is something called the "gasp reflex." It is an autonomic, fight-or-flight response that might convince you that you're about to die, and it is that reflex that prevents many people from trying it.
Ice bath motivation: wantings vs feelings.
It is now clear that the human body is evolutionarily designed to expect periodic cold exposure. Just like exercise, without regular cold exposure, the body suffers in several respects without it.
Joe Rogan recently quoted my work on his Joe Rogan Experience podcast with David Goggins.
In addition to improving insulin resistance, recruiting brown fat to dysregulated thyroid conditions, and promoting mitochondrial health, a regular ice bath practice followed by exercise can provide a big boost in male testosterone. In fact, regular cold exposure is one of the best things that men and women can do for sexual function and fertility.
The problem is that wanting the real benefits of a regular ice bath practice will always be in conflict with the terrible feelings that the ice bath creates. Despite the sense of calm that we can acheive in our brains, our fingers and toes might still hurt, and our bodies are likely to shiver uncomfortably long after we’ve gotten out of the freezing water.
That discordance between how we feel getting into the ice bath and the metabolic, hormonal, and psychological benefits we know we want by doing the ice bath is a reason why we might procrastinate or decline the practice. Too often, our uncomfortable feelings prevent us from doing what we know is otherwise good for us.
Mel Robbin’s talks about overcoming that discordance in her book The Five Second Rule (Robbins 2017). In it, she describes how she emerged from the malaise of depression and procrastination by initiating a “5-4-3-2-1” countdown as a prelude to action.
By counting down (instead of up) she was able to interrupt the process of rationalization and cognitive distoration that was keeping her from doing the things she wanted to do. In other words, she overcame her temptation to stay comfortable (e.g., in bed) and instead get something done that would benefit her and her family.
After the New York Times did an article on cold exposure and mental health referencing her, Robbin’s broadcast a 45 minute Facebook live video on how she uses an ice bath pra ctice to master her sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.
It makes a lot of sense to me, if you put yourself in a stressful situation that is medically safe for you… and you wish that you were not so reactive and triggered by everything around you, doesn’t it makes sense that it’s a muscle that you have to strengthen to not react?
Instead of being triggered by everything around you or having a panic attack… doesn’t it make sense that if you want to learn that as a skill, that it would probably help to train yourself to go from super stressed out, through your breathing and through your mindset into a set of being calm.
That’s exactly what ice baths are doing. It’s a controlled seeting to put your body into what your body beleives is a life threatening situation, and through your breath, to gain control of your body’s survival response and bring yourself to a state of calm.
Mel Robbins
Robbins example of using deliberate cold exposure as exercise for her sympathetic/parasympathetic switch is consistent with the Tim Ferris tweet at the top of the article.
The problem of comfort is not something our ancient ancestors were forced to confront. Without central air conditioning, or heated leather car seats, or fast food, our ancestors experienced more than enough voluntary discomfort and had plenty of practice calming themselves to overcome stressful situations. When opportunities for comfort came, our ancestors availed themselves of the respite so they could recovery before the next challenges was thrust upon them.
However, our modern, insdustrialized world offers few natural or environmental challenges, and our physiology and psychology suffer as a consequence. Without these regular challenges, our psychology will fall into malaise like Robbin’s. We will become depressed, lethargic and likely obese.
Thus, it behooves us to seek voluntary challenges that move us outside our own comfort zone. According to George Addair “Everything you want is on the other side of fear,” and if that’s true than it is only our unwillingness to confornt our own fears that is holding us back from getting more of the things we want.
For me, the brain wave data suggests two things:
We have more control over our experience than we might otherwise believe. That is, by structuring our breath we can influence physiological changes in our body that change our experience, and
Our feelings about our experience can be an unreliable guide to intepretation. Like the “emotional reasoning” cognitive distortion, the hard-wired panic response in our sympathetic nervous system may be design to encourage us to “catastrophize” about situations that are not only safe, but beneficial. If that’s the case, then liek Lukianoff we would do well to strengthen our skill at cognitive reframing of our experience to get a better understanding of what is real.
The next time you’re in the ice bath, and every cell in your body is screaming at your brain “We’re going to die!” try using your brain to gently tell your cells instead:
“This is what cold feels like.”