Instant Mental Boost With Many Health Benefits for Everyone

This simple and natural health-hack made a tremendous impact on my success. You too can try and reap the benefits of this effective solution.

Image by Harald Funken from Pixabay

This story is about my personal experience and reflects my personal health transformation from multiple angles. For example, I gained energetic alertness, improved my mood, increased my courage, improved my immunity, reduced risk of depression, improved my sleep quality, enhanced my tolerance to stress, gained fast recovery, reduced exercise pain, reduced my body fat, and even increased my lean muscle. I gained these benefits with a natural hack based on an initially challenging experiment which turned to a daily habit.

From my experience, I believe that one of the best skills for entrepreneurs and leaders is to learn tolerating cold exposure starting with cold showers.

Yes, every morning and just before an important meeting or closing a new deal!

If you can handle cold showers, then you can handle almost any other challenges in your life. I experienced it and proved it.

Let me share my personal experience with this transformation.

I used to drink a lot of coffee with great enjoyment especially in the mornings.

With an epiphany, I replaced it with cold showers due to intolerance to coffee in my unusual diet.

Replacing coffee with cold showers resulted in more energy, more alertness, improved mood, increased courage, reduced body fat, and increased lean muscle.

Even more importantly and ironically, since I started cold showers over the last decade, I never had any cold, flu, and depression symptoms. Cold showers helped with my physical, mental, and emotional health and performance.

Perhaps it may not be fair to attribute not having a cold, flu, or depression symptoms to cold showers only as I had a number of immune-boosting, inflammation preventing, optimal hormonal and neurotransmitter balancing bio-hacks as mentioned in my publications. But I strongly believe that cold showers and cold therapy (ice exposure) played the most important role.

Making cold showers a habit is magical from multiple angles: simple, cheap, powerful, no side effects. What else could you ask?

My First Experience with Cold shower

It created some curiosity in me, though, as I kept seeing various articles and YouTube videos about the benefits of cold showers. After reading several testimonials, one day, I decided to take a cold shower myself. Oh my good lord!

It was the worst experience I ever had. My body reacted badly. I thought I was dying. I knew it was my reptilian brain putting me in the survival mode. However, knowing and doing are different things. As a trained cognitive scientist, I decided to tame this special part of my brain.

I watched several YouTube videos on how others did it. I learned a bit about the practical techniques such as starting slowly with legs, arms, then head and whole body. The techniques I learnt helped me take cold showers a little easier. My pre-frontal cortex was slowly overriding the rebellious reptilian domain. It was a progressive victory.

However, what I learnt about how to deal with the body’s response and the adaptation process was an eye-opener. Rather than approaching it scientifically, I preferred to learn it experimentally by leveraging the success by other people such as famous Wim Hof.

A wise friend said that I wouldn’t die in a few minutes of cold showers, even though the body feels like it. It is a survival mechanism of the body to react that way. In a few minutes, the body would get used to it and would start feeling good. Even though I knew it, hearing from someone successful was more compelling and convincing.

The best part was after the shower. It was a fantastic feeling. All lethargy and morning drowsiness disappeared in a few minutes. I felt as if I’d had three cups of strong espresso.

Not only was my energy level high, but also, my confidence increased incredibly. After 10 minutes, I noticed that my heart rate lowered considerably. Muscle soreness disappeared. It was a transformed state, like a newborn producing an altered state of mind. It was almost euphoric.

Nowadays, whenever I have a challenging day ahead, especially a difficult meeting or a complex lecture, I have a few minutes of a cold shower and feel ready for the challenges of the day.

When I take a cold shower in ten minutes before a public speaking commitment to a large group of a critical audience, e.g. group of opinionated academics debating in convoluted theoretical terms in industry summits, my courage increases, fear disappears, and my tolerance level skyrockets quickly.

After making the cold showers a habit, my coffee intake and caffeine dependence in the mornings disappeared. This naturally improved the quality of my sleep as a good side effect.

Whenever I feel lower energy, tired, and lethargic for any reasons, I just have three minutes of cold shower and boost my mental, physical, and emotional energy rapidly. So far, I have not experienced any undesirable side effects of cold showers. Wish my cold shower experience was patentable, I could have been rich by now!

After reading about the benefits of cold showers, one day, I discovered that having cold and hot showers together half an hour before bed can reset the circadian rhythm.

This was beneficial information for me, as I frequently travelled over the Atlantic and like many other travellers, I used Melatonin to overcome my jetlag issues.

Trying 30 second cold and 30-second hot showers alternately five to ten times half an hour before bed did wonders in resolving my jetlag issues. I’ve since stopped using melatonin, as it has side effects such as feeling drowsy the next day, especially if it is a cloudy winter day.

Image by Daniela Dimitrova from Pixabay

I also believe that cold showers increased my immunity. To re-iterate, therefore, I haven’t experienced any cold and flu symptoms over a decade. No, I don’t take extra vitamin C or don’t get flu injections at all because cold showers naturally boosted my immunity.

I read a lot about the thermal effect of ice water for body composition associated with burning fat without losing muscle. I won’t bore you with the science of thermal effect but can confirm that since I started the cold showers, expose myself colder study room and bedroom, and drinking ice water, my body fat percentage dramatically reduced and my lean muscle mass increased a bit.

To conclude, one of my biggest inspirational role models is the legend Wim Hof who broke several Guinness records in the field. He is not only a magical practitioner but also a science focused collaborator sharing his knowledge with universities and research institutes.

I urge you to try cold showers. Yes, it will be uncomfortable in the beginning but your body can adapt to it quickly. Once the adaptation happens, it can not only be producing healthy outcomes but can also be a joyful daily exercise for you.