I did thirty days only cold showers, minimum 5 minutes, in December 2014. I found the experience rewarding so decided to continue, but not every day. I did them every fourth day for a few years and dropped down to every fifth in 2018. My spreadsheet says I've taken 538.

I coordinate them with my cardio days, since I find they go well with being hot and sweaty finishing rowing or running.

You know how lifting (or any exercise) develops more than just what you work -- things like discipline, resilience, grit, self-awareness, etc? Cold showers gives all that benefit but at zero cost in time or money and no risk of injury.

Also look up Joel Runyon's TEDx talk, which inspired me to start.

David Sinclair, one of the researchers in the longevity field, takes cold baths and goes to hot sauna. His theory is that this kind of stress on tissues kicks the self-repair mechanisms into action.

https://notunhealthy.com/david-sinclair-the-researcher-who-w...

I've seen some clips of his interview on the Joe Rogan podcast. I didn't catch the cold bath part.

I imagine a cold bath means immersing most of your body in water. So another variant.

Theory sounds plausible. Curious if you happen to know any actual research that backs it up?

There is some research on effect of sauna on health. It seems that going to sauna is associated with lower mortality.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

Thanks for the link. Also found this on cold showers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5025014/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25705182

cold showers are some of my earliest memories as a child. "zakalka", or "tempering", is well known in slavic culture. i can vouch for them being one of the keys to including mood and mental state, immune function, and overall wellness.

Huh, never associated that with Slavic culture. Cool word, "zakalka". In Polish there is "hartowanie" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hartowa%C4%87), same meaning and also used in the context of exposing yourself to cold or difficulty. Related and a bit funny: people who swim in the winter are called "morsy" (walruses).

I keep hearing the secret to longevity is exercise.

Maybe cold showers would help you look younger though. But a lot of things will help you look younger.

If you're 104 and takes long walks everyday that's the more extreme element rather than cold showers. But sure a great morning routine with the adrenaline boost from cold water might give you the edge to actually take that morning walk.

yeah, definitely it works like this; it has a stimulating effect

in many ways better than a coffee, although not pleasant

like a slap in the face

helps you locate your socks, to quote a classic

but yeah, no reason why just taking cold showers alone and then sitting around should have any magical effect

so perhaps it should be seen as a catalyst to being active; that's already significant

there is no secret to longevity, at least not one "the secret" key to everything.

the real secret to longevity is recreating the conditions are bodies function best at and upholding those conditions. because our environment is so radically different from the past, this requires a lot of discipline, pondering, and paying attention most of all.

our bodies evolved for a certain environment, and recreating that environment would do us good. (i believe that careful people lived long lives pre-industry.)

some of these conditions are regular exercise, occasional starvation, following environmental queues, supporting a healthy biome, and avoiding stress.

our approaches to health today are comical in their attempt to simplify and reduce a billion-year-old continuously-evolving system down to one or two simple concepts while ignoring all the harm we do to it at the same time.

to use a car analogy, it's sort of like throwing away your automobile's maintenance manual and saying, "i heard the key to car longevity is changing the oil often", and filling up the engine with olive oil.

There's a premise here that deserves scrutiny -- that longevity (beyond reproductive age) has evolutionary benefits. Nature may well prefer that older individuals die off.

longevity has many evolutionary benefits, the biggest one being that older generation can pass on survival-essential knowledge and skill to the younger generations.

this process exists not only in humans, but in most animals, and the improvement is continuous, it never stops.

furthermore, the longest-surviving individuals (with the tightest bonds) are able to pass on the most survival knowledge to their descendants, creating an exponential effect.

Fair point. But it has evolutionary disadvantages, too. If food scarcity has been a challenge across evolutionary scales (which seems reasonable), then the utility function might prioritize scarce resources for the reproductively fit.

My point is that it's challenging to make a watertight argument that "we should do X, because evolution suggests that we should."

> Fair point. But it has evolutionary disadvantages, too. If food scarcity has been a challenge across evolutionary scales (which seems reasonable), then the utility function might prioritize scarce resources for the reproductively fit.

That's typically how it has been prioritized, if food scarcity was an issue.

> My point is that it's challenging to make a watertight argument that "we should do X, because evolution suggests that we should."

Sure, but most of the time I would bet dollars to donuts that environmental variables we evolved in will be better for us than new ones, just like in well-aged software time-tested inputs are more likely to work than new stuff you've never tried before.

A great example that's relevant today is that people in the West over 60 yo remember society pre-Social Marxism.

There's a lot of their Youtube videos on how successful families are constructed for the benefit of individuals and society, which is a "lost art" today.

Suzanne Venker (Traditional Family Counselling)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt29HUEqVF2pB5yb_KZRebg

What benefits are you noticing at a few months in?

Stimulation, increased energy, elevated mood and self-confidence, a nice toasty feeling afterwards, quicker cooling after exercise, optimum alertness achieved faster in the day if done early.

Definitely lots of psychological benefits.

I do combine it with meditation and exercise. All three seem to have mutually-reinforcing effects.

I've found the best habits reinforce each other. Diet, exercise, better sleep.. they all interact and make each other stronger.

I have also found that a brisk morning walk in the cold (deliberately wear just a hoodie and shorts in near freezing temps) has helped as well. Maybe it's the sunlight, maybe it's the exercise, maybe it's the cold but I feel like it gets my hormones into better shape and I have more energy (specifically referring to T, and for example I have had very mild acne, which I hadn't seen in about 15 years).