![]() It is considered an up-regulation practice, arousing your sympathetic nervous system. The Wim Hof method is a series of breaths- inhales followed by immediate exhales, and then breath holds. Using your mind and body to overcome hard things. ![]() Now that we understand why we should get cold more often, let’s talk about how this relates to the Wim Hof method. Someone in the course had been doing cold plunges for 100 days and lost over 30 pounds. However, you actually want to increase the amount of brown fat you have.īrown fat increases your metabolism (therefore burning more calories at rest) and makes it so you can better adapt to the cold. The type of fat you gain in response to lack of exercise and unhealthy eating habits. You have two types of fat- white fat and brown fat. I was so happy and excited that I had just done that. When I got out of the ice bath, I had never felt better. Dopamine is known to increase mood, sharpen your focus, and better your attention. Because it is prolonged, you will be feeling its effects far after you get out of the ice bath. Elevates MoodĬold exposure also causes a prolonged release of dopamine. This can easily apply to other areas of your life like when your boss says something insensitive and you want to yell at them or when someone in line in front of you is taking forever and you’re in a rush. ![]() When you practice cold exposure, you are increasing your clarity of mind in hard situations. It involves the prefrontal cortex, which is the area of the brain in charge of repressing impulsivity. This is what you may think of as resilience.Įssentially, it is the ability to push through discomfort. A short burst of stress like this, however, increases something called top-down control. However, this is a “slow burn” type of stress, which can be quite detrimental to our health. In the modern world, most of us are stressed out all the time. When we take an ice bath, we are signaling the same thing. Because you sensed a threat, your body would release these same chemicals in order to make your mind sharper in order to develop an escape plan or give you the energy you needed to run away. If you were picking berries thousands of years ago, as our ancestors may have, and saw two gleaming eyes in a nearby bush, your body would go into a stress reaction. These neurochemicals exist to make us alert of our surroundings and help us to sustain focus, even after cold exposure. When you expose your body to cold temperatures, the body releases adrenaline and noradrenaline (aka epinephrine and norepinephrine). Some people may be reading this and wondering why the heck would I do that to myself? I will admit, it takes a special breed of person to willingly go into a bath of ice. Let’s start off by discussing the benefit of deliberate cold exposure.
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