Icy Resilience

Awesome.

In 1995, a Danish woman, suffering from schizophrenia, ended her life by jumping off a building. As would be expected, her surviving husband was beside himself in how to deal with the loss. Even with her mental issues, he loved her and had trouble navigating his far lonelier world.

When hit with tragedy, men will employ all sorts of coping mechanisms to work through the pain. Some will drown it out with alcohol, some will decide to wander the world for several months, some will see a therapist, and some will have a stiff-upper lip and just plow through life as normal. When dealing with psychological pain, the last thing most people would think of to cope is adding additional stressors to their life.

Wim Hof, her surviving husband, had a different outlook.

He always had a fascination with the cold, and recounts when he was young taking a walk around a frozen lake. He saw a portion not yet iced over, and was struck with the visceral urge to jump in, like the lake beckoned him. He jumped in. As the pain of loss grappled him, he thought back to that encounter, and made the decision to embrace the cold again. He deliberately jumped into freezing water again, and contrary to increasing his pain, the discomfort transformed his mindset, forcing him into the present as the pain of his loss receded from his consciousness. He did the same thing again and again and relished the experience. Later, as a meditation to implement on dry land, he learned to leverage aggressive breathing methods to put his body into a faux-panic mode and then hold his breath it for a prolonged period of time to soothe it.

His unusual strategy worked, and it simply would have been a strange one-off of an eccentric fellow if it wasn’t for his evangelization. He didn’t consider this a solution for one man, but a framework that everyone could derive value from. I can only imagine how the first years were, with this odd middle aged man telling everyone how the solution to psychological pain was to immerse yourself in cold water for a prolonged period of time, but travel it did, and he now enjoys a cult following of enthusiasts who insist his methods have changed their lives.

Cozy.

Last Winter I visited my brother-in-law who had just gotten into Wim Hof protocols. He led me to his freezing garage and proudly showed his tub full of ice-cold water. In the night air with little interior light, I looked at the water. Under the mild ripples the water in the black, plastic tub seemed to descend into the everlasting void. Trying to reassure me, he told me the water is reasonably fresh, covered under a mat when it's not being used. Okay, well, not being one to back down from his challenge, I went in. As the blast of cold hit me, my first sensation was life force leaving my body, like I was being drained and turned into a husk. As I recovered from the cataclysmic shock, hormones released, and my heart frantically tried to reassert its normal pattern. My mind went into survival mode. At first it pleaded to leave the tub, to escape the danger. After twenty seconds, the rational part of my brain took over, the panic turned into a calm, and the black nothingness of that tub becomes merely a discomfort, though my teeth are shattering and throbbing pain hit my hands and feet. It was brutal, but I'd survive. Leaving the tub, I was soaking in adrenaline and euphoria. Yeah, this was fascinating.

The United States is permeated in trauma-based culture, especially among the upper classes. Schools are terrified of causing negative experiences in their students, thinking that not only will it cause immediate pain, but the remnants of the experience will cause psychological damage that will take countless hours of therapy to repair. We are taught that we need to work through the pain of the past through talk and self-care, and failure to do so will repress the feelings until they bubble up and do real damage. We are taught that safe spaces need to be developed to work through these issues before we can come out as more secure and happier people.

This article isn’t meant to discount talk-therapy completely, as there are many methods taught that are helpful in developing a different mindset and separating one’s experiences from the event that bothers them. I’ve known soldiers who dealt with a massive amount of pain and guilt, not by what they did overseas, but by being chewed up and spit out by the institution they risked their lives for day in and day out. A few months of sessions separating their sense of worth from how they were treated went a long ways.

Also, a lot of what is said here doesn’t even contradict good psychological practices. The most successful strategy of the bunch, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, essentially boils down to “This is going to suck for a while, but you have to do this thing you fear more than dying time and time again. That’s the only way you’ll get better.”

Scientifically, its hard to develop a good study of cold therapy because of the difficulty in control groups. It’s pretty obvious when you’re not being plunged into cold water, and it’s also obvious there’s not a whole lot of money to be made in cold water interventions, so funding studies is difficult. Still, there are some promising signs in meta-studies as well as the discovery that a short time in cryogenic conditions have an astounding positive impact on mental health.

Institutional health authorities, as expected, are wary. The American Heart Association considers the practice unnecessarily dangerous. Health authorities have also pointed out that many of his feats seem to be genetic, as his brother who has done no such cold immersion has similar results. The guy is likely a genetic freak. While there is likely some mental health benefits to the practice, they argue it’s not worth the risk.

Safety Calculus

Aversion to risk has had a detrimental effect on the well being of the nation. In every aspect of modern life, there's an implicit calculus in dealing with problems in living whose main goal is to ensure the worst-case scenario never happens. For a quick exercise, we will make a crude measure of interventions consisting of Death, Terrible Standard of Living (SOL), Poor SOL, Average SOL, and High SOL.

Say a man is having issues with anxiety that is hurting his daily life routines. He goes to the doctor's to get an assessment of options. It's determined he has a terrible SOL and that continuing the current coarse for a year will result in the following probabilities:

Death - 2%

Terrible SOL - 30%

Poor SOL - 30%

Average SOL - %20

High SOL - 18%

The doctor tells him of a possible intervention, an SSRI that has some efficacy for the type of anxiety he is experiencing, but comes with the side effect of blunting emotion. The change in possible outcomes after a year is updated to the following.

Death - 1%

Terrible SOL - 20%

Poor SOL - 45%

Average SOL - %30

High SOL - 4%

In the doctor's eyes, this is seen as an improvement, even if the intervention GIVES A LOWER CHANCE OF HAVING THE BEST STANDARD OF LIVING. It lowers the risk of death and gives a slightly increased SOL.

Now say there is another intervention, a sort of extreme lifestyle change that requires him to make dramatic, life-changing alterations and potentially dangerous activities to get the adrenaline going and take his mind off his current malaise. The calculus of this update is the following:

Death - 4%

Terrible SOL - 10%

Poor SOL - 20%

Average SOL - %40

High SOL - 26%

To the practitioner, this is a worse intervention because it increases the catastrophic risk (death). Regardless of the probability it will allow him to have a more meaningful life, the risk is too high. You can read the headlines now, INTERVENTION X DOUBLES RISK OF DEATH! Note liability is rearing its ugly head here, and any doctor offering the second option is likely to open himself up for his life being ruined by a lawsuit. This also doesn’t take into consideration the bane of every doctor, compliance. The sad truth is most people would accept the first intervention that doesn’t require drastic changes or high risk, and it becomes the standard of care for the entire population.

What it Means to Heal

Clearly many elements are in play regarding cold-therapy. You get the physiological stressors on your body that create a reactive response in terms of revving up your body to cope with the perceived threat, and then the dopamine rush when you successfully survive. Psychologically, the shock forces a man out of his ruminative mental cycles and forces him back into the present. You're not worrying about your estranged friend when your body is telling you death is a possibility. After the ordeal, the sense of agency and power in completing a task gives the sensation of power, and one's ability to wield it.  Whether consciously or not, one's mind realizes that traumas of the past aren't life-defining, and may even be irrelevant.

A common refrain you hear regarding therapy is that if someone is depressed or anxious with no clear reason, that points to a chemical imbalance that requires medication. In the case of a phobia or event in the past that continually comes up and impacts one's life, what that patient need is a psychologist to work things through. There's an implicit assumption that talking, ruminating and working your past through is necessary for a healthy lifestyle. One's past becomes like a math problem that needs to be solved, otherwise it will linger.

The approach to deal with psychological pain by taking part in extreme exercises like shocking your body would seem to be a cop-out. After all, nothing was actually solved. It's argued that even if it is effective, it's just a physiological response from the dopamine and adrenaline coming from the simulation of putting oneself in harm's way. Even if it does work, how does this make you a more integrated person? Isn't this the same toxicity that our leaders argue leads to men being unable to bare their feelings, perpetuating the cycle in favor of "tough-guy" contests?

What they won't answer is if a guy ruminates for years about his abusive father, goes through therapy with little success, but continuous cold plunges finally let him unleash the emotional knots in his head over his ordeals, how is this suboptimal? Why is it assumed the passive, contemplative approach is better than more active and adventurous methods? If someone copes by going on an extreme backwoods excursion to break himself out of his rut, is this any worse of a coping mechanism than talking to someone for hours and making a new life narrative?

Misogi

100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats, 10km running, every single day, and never use air-conditioner, no matter how hot or cold

- One Punch Man

Michael Easter

wrote an interesting book regarding risk and perseverance called The Comfort Crisis. In it he examines the practice of Misogi.

Misogi comes from a ritual Ancient Japan and refers to an physical and spiritual cleansing. It involves some sort of extreme challenge one brings upon himself where the probability of failure is significant, but not immanent. The idea is to go outside one's normal routine and comforts and enter a situation that will test one's physical and spiritual mettle, and come out the other side a stronger and more resilient person.

Paradoxically, comfort is its own stressor, as it opens up the opportunity to develop unhealthy thinking patterns because there are no modern mechanisms in place to keep one grounded. Today, it's perfectly possible to lay in bed for months or refuse to leave the house because of crippling agoraphobia. In earlier times when survival was not a given, such behavior would quickly lead to starvation. Older times forced fears and anxieties to be overcome quickly before they reinforced themselves and grow out of hand, but today such negative cognitive loops are not only possible, but often rewarded.

Remaining the victim, sharing one’s truth, espousing one’s struggles is the most powerful currency of the modern age. Colleges accept candidates based on how well they espouse the struggles they endured. Contrary to what is commonly said, having a mental illness isn’t stigmatized as much as lionized, to the extent that total strangers will talk openly about the medications they take. The stoic type is seen as harboring uncountable amounts of neuroses while a middle-manager who goes to a therapist every week is seen as the paragon of self-care.  

In an age where everyone demands authenticity, everyone wants to advertise theirs to the world. The currency is pain and trauma, and if you don’t have any, you invent it. Over time, the increasingly shrill and whiny outbursts of the perpetually hurt begins to ring hollow. In purporting to be authentic, they became as predictable and mundane as everyone else. In trying to prove one’s authenticity to everyone else, they become a checklist of different neuroses and complaints as opposed to having a cohesive identity.

The new authenticity is refusing to pursuing it. There comes the realization that ruminating on a million different narratives to make sense of one’s life pales in comparison to aggressively keeping oneself in the present. One begins to realize that one’s authenticity lies not in one’s pain, but one’s strength, not in one’s one’s quirks, but in creating one’s future.

It’s been said that depression stems from being unable to deal with the past, and anxiety stems from trouble coping with the uncertainties of the future. There’s a case to be made that the main healer of the chaos the runs in our minds lies not in thinking it over, or extreme activities to test one’s mettle, but the slow, gradual movement of time. Quite likely a lot of the benefits of cold plunges and aggressive breathing strategies is not the actual performance of these rituals, but the ability of the subjects to follow through and keep their minds in the present.  This means being present in an active, conscious way, and not numbing their way through life. You wake up, test your mettle, and keep yourself tied to pushing yourself to the limit. The moments you spend not in conflict is spent preparing for the next Misogi. You leave yourself no option to get into a useless cycle of ruminating about the past or worrying about the future, but keep a consistent, near-religious focus on the task at hand. Then, when the time is right, you wake up one morning to realize the pain is mostly gone, and don’t celebrate as much as wonder why it ever crippled you at all.

Ancestral Roots

From what I’ve seen, Wim Hof enthusiasts are universally white. The fact the method was founded by a Dane is also not a coincidence. For thousands of years among the Nordics, Winter was a killer. Death by war was always a possibility, but the unrelenting brutality of short days, bitter snow, and relentless winds could take down the most stalwart tribal warrior just as easy an an enemy’s axe. To the Norse, the threat of the cold was greeting death at their door every day.

To live in such an environment and keep one’s cool, one has to not only learn how to cope with the cold, but learn how to embrace it. As a long winter never seems to end, fuel gets low, and death is looming over everyone with its icy sickle, the tribe needed to recognize at its plight, look at death, and smile. There’s a reason Ragnarok is proceeded by an everlasting winter, and there’s a reason for the implicit fatalism of the old Nordic people.

Danger and the real possibility of harm is woven into the consciousness of everyone since the beginning of time. We have developed with this framework for thousands of years, and only in the last few generations has it largely been eliminated for the West. The grounding mechanisms of survival have been eliminated, but out minds have not kept pace. There’s a very real possibility that overcoming dangerous situations are necessary, and lack of danger will make your mind make-up fake dangers, and the neuroses that come with it.

Misogi might stem from Japan, but its lesson is universal.

Likely, the danger you must conquer is the same as your ancestors. Maybe something deep in the psyche of Northern Europeans needs to feel that frigid blast of air. Maybe the sensation of bitter snow on a Nordic man’s bare feet isn’t an uncomfortable and painful experience, but a warm security blanket as his forefathers watch and guide his steps, giving reassurance that this is where he belongs, and unleash the warrior within…

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