I have become the sort of person who is going to participate in an ice bath challenge. They have been going on about chlorine floaters for months, exchanging pictures of their outdoor tub, and tipping each other off when B&Q has a flash sale on water butt. Five minutes a day in the 12C glug is the prescription, with a 100 press-ups bonus round and no-booze rider. In January.
I won't be taking part. There is some evidence that ice baths reduce inflammation, but that may be counter-productive if you want to build muscle. If it is applied to all the hairless areas, it might improve your 5k time or bench press.
If I want to improve my life, I won’t do it by disrupting the school run because I’ve gone full manatee
If I am going to be motivated to top up a wheelie bin with ice cubes and wince my way into it every morning, I need to be less Statistically Significant and more "instant Captain America". I don't want my neighbours to know that I'm not sleepy in the late afternoon. There are a lot of things I could be doing to get faster, more proven benefits, but I am not doing any of them. I shouldn't disrupt the school run because I want to improve my life, it's where I should begin. Ice baths aren't a plaster on a gunshot wound, they are an magnetic resonance image.
This kind of self-flagellation, especially during the worst part of the year, doesn't do anyone any good. According to research, we humans preferitive solutions tosubtractive ones, such as stabilisers over pedal-free balance bikes, productivity plans over streamlining, and sticking extra bits on the Lego tower. We seem to prefer the former. "no pain, no gain" rhymes better than "no strain, moderate gains over an appropriate period of time"
I tried to immerse myself in cold water in the form of icy showers. It was fine. For a dozen mornings, I took care of my body with cold, cold water. When you go from doing something horrible to doing something good, you always feel better, and I might have been slightly more productive, thanks to being immediately and extremely awake. I felt a bit calmer when I wasn't sluicing myself down with 10C water because cold shower fans claim they can reduce anxiety.
There is a set of regions of the brain that kick in when we are not distracted by our surroundings. It is this network that facilitates shower thoughts, those moments of creative connection that occur in the five minutes a day you aren't staring at a screen, and it is that network that I switched off by turning every shower into an unpleasant experience.
I stopped having cold showers and ice baths because of that. Instead, I'm going to take a month's worth of steamy soaks, where I can drown my mind in 40C water. Join me? This could be the beginning of something really special.
He is a writer and self- improvement enthusiast.
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