The Right Way to Do Cold Exposure for Resilience & Longevity

You are basically getting better [music] at controlling your behavior when your brain and body are flooded with norepinephrine and epinephrine. Some days just getting into the [music] ice bath or cold shower represents a wall. Some days it doesn't. Some days you get in and you feel like you [music] could go 10 minutes. Now it's important to understand that people will experience different levels of norepinephrine and adrenaline release [music] when getting into cold water. Some people because they dread the cold so much showers. [music] So let's talk about protocols for enhancing mental health and performance using deliberate cold exposure. What happens when we get into cold [music] is that we experience an increase in norepinephrine in noradrenaline release and in adrenaline release. The fact that cold exposure deliberate or no increases norepinephrine and epinephrine in our brain and body [music] means that it is a very reliable stimulus for increasing norepinephrine and epinephrine. That's sort of an obvious statement, but that obvious statement can be leveraged [music] to systematically build up what we call resilience. Now, when we experience a stressor in life, whether or not it's [music] something bad happens in our relationship or something bad happens in the world and we feel stress, that stress is the consequence of increases in norepinephrine and [music] epinephrine in our brain and body. very similar if not identical to the kinds of increases that come from deliberate [music] cold exposure. So deliberate cold exposure is an opportunity to deliberately stress our body [music] and yet because it's deliberate and because we can take certain steps which I'll describe in a moment. We can learn to maintain mental clarity. We can learn to maintain calm while our body is in a state of [music] stress. And that can be immensely useful when encountering stressors in other parts [music] of life. And that's what we call resilience or grit. Our ability or mental toughness, our ability to lean into challenge or to tolerate challenge while keeping our head straight, so to speak. So, one simple protocol for increasing resilience [music] is to pick a temperature that's uncomfortable of shower or cold immersion and then to get in for a certain duration of time and then to get out. Now, it's important to understand that people will experience different levels of norepinephrine and adrenaline release when [music] getting into cold water. Some people because they dread the cold so much will actually experience norepinephrine and epinephrine increases even before they get into the cold water or under the cold shower. Now you may have experienced this. I've certainly experienced this. I'm dreading it. I don't want to do it and I have to force myself to do it. And indeed [music] epinephrine and norepinephrine and its surges can be thought of as sort of walls that we have to confront and go over. And [music] I'd like you to conceptualize them that way because it allows us to build protocols that [music] can be very objective and can allow us to monitor our progress [music] in terms of building resilience. So one option is to simply say, okay, I'm going to force myself to get into the cold shower for 1 minute. How cold? Again, uncomfortably cold, but you can [music] stay in safely. Or I'm going to get into the ice bath for 1 minute. Ice baths are very cold, uh, inevitably. [music] And what is also inevitable is that when you get into the cold, you will experience a surge in epinephrine and norepinephrine. That's non-negotiable because it's mediated by cold receptors on the surface of your body and your skin. And the way that they trigger the release of norepinephrine and epinephrine, not just from the adrenals, from the adrenal glands above your [music] kidneys, but also from regions of your brain like the locus ceruius, which cause increases in attention and alertness, and from other locations in your body where epinephrine and norepinephrine are released. In other words, cold is a non-negotiable stimulus [music] for increasing epinephrine and norepinephrine. Even if you are the toughest person in the world and you love the cold, that increase in epinephrine and norepinephrine is going to happen. So the way to think about norepinephrine and epinephrine in this context of building mental resilience is that you have two options. You can either try to extend the duration [music] of time that you are in the deliberate cold exposure. So going from 1 minute to 75 seconds to 2 minutes and so on over a period of days. Or one way to approach this and the way that I particularly favor is to take the context of the day in the moment into [music] account. Meaning we have different levels of grit and resilience on different days and depending [music] on the landscape of our life at the time, even the time of day that we're doing these protocols and start to be able to sense the release of epinephrine, epinephrine, excuse me, and norepinephrine in our brain and body [music] and see those as walls that we want to climb over in order to build resilience and to start counting the number of walls that we [music] traverse and the distance between those walls as we do deliberate cold exposure. Let me give you an example of the timed protocol because that one is very straightforward. Although I do not think it is [music] as powerful for building mental resilience. The time protocol would be Monday I do 1 minute of deliberate cold exposure at a [music] given temperature. Wednesday I extend that by 50% and Friday I do deliberate cold exposure for twice as long as I did on Monday. And if I were to continue that every week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I would continue to either increase the duration or I would lower the temperature and reduce [music] the duration. This kind of thing, very much like sets and reps in the gym. Now, that option is very objective, right? You could even log it in a book. And as you develop the ability to stay in cold temperatures, [music] even progressively colder and colder temperatures for longer and longer periods of time, you will become more resilient. What do I mean by that? Well, my operational definition of resilience is that you are able to resist escape from the stressor, the cold by virtue of your willpower, which is really your prefrontal cortex [music] causing top- down control on your reflexes and your lyic system and your hypothalamus, which are basically telling you to get out of that cold water, get out of that cold environment. And in doing so, you are basically getting better at controlling your behavior when your brain and body are flooded with norepinephrine and epinephrine. That's a very reductionist way to explain resilience or grid or mental toughness. But it's a reductionist way of explaining it that is very closely tied to the biology and to the psychology. And it is a fact that norepinephrine and epinephrine [music] release in the brain and body are the generic universal code for stressor. There is no unique chemical signature for different forms of stressors. That is the only one. Although of course there are other chemicals involved as well. So you could go for time and you could try and reduce the temperature and increase the time over a period of days or weeks. Now that's an attractive way to approach things. But the problem is that you don't [music] have an infinite amount of room with which to lower temperature because eventually you will get into temperatures that are [music] either so cold that they are dangerous or you have to stay in cold temperatures for [music] such long periods that it becomes impractical because presumably you also have to take care of other aspects of your life. You can't just sit all day in the ice bath. Now for that reason I favor a protocol in which you build [music] mental resilience and mental toughness through two different types of protocols. The first one involves counting walls. Now [music] what do I mean by walls? I mean the sensation of no, I don't want to do this and the idea or the sensation in your brain and body that you actually want to leave that environment and go warm up. Now again for some people that will be even before getting into the ice bath or cold shower. So if you are feeling very resistant to getting [music] into the ice bath or cold shower and you manage to do that, that's going over what I would call one wall. Okay? Then for some period of time, you might actually feel comfortable in the ice bath, cold water [music] or cold shower. And you feel like you could stay there for some period of time that you [music] could stay there for a minute or 2 minutes, but inevitably the next wall will arrive. And I would encourage you to pay attention to when that next wall arrives and actually having an awareness that [music] so-called interosceptive awareness as we call it of when that next surge in adrenaline epinephrine comes or whether or not it reaches a certain threshold in your brain and body that you feel you want to get out [music] and you're able to stay in for even just 10 seconds longer. That means you've traversed yet another wall. And [music] if you continue to stay in that cold environment, you will find that the next wall will come and the next wall will come. Now eventually of course you will get very very numb depending on how cold it is and you could also place yourself into [music] danger. So you have to maintain cognitive control counting these walls traversing these walls but [music] getting out at some point of course. So my favorite protocol for building mental toughness aka grit [music] aka resilience is to take into account that some days just getting into the ice bath or cold shower represents a wall. Some days it doesn't. Some days you get in and you feel like you could go 10 minutes. Other days you get in and you feel like you could only go a minute. And setting a designated number of walls before [music] you start the protocol is going to be very beneficial here. So you say, as long as I can do it safely, I'm [music] going to do three walls today. The first wall is getting in. The second wall will arrive when it arrives, and the third wall will arrives when it arrives, and I'll get over that wall, and then I'll get out. The next day, you might do five walls. [music] The next day you might do three walls again, but you might lower the temperature. This gives you tremendous flexibility and indeed it gives you much more latitude to be able to use the same temperatures in different ways or to reduce the temperature only a little bit and still get a lot of stimulus meaning [music] a lot of results out of a given protocol. Whereas people who are just going for temperature and time eventually become cold adapted. They get very very good at doing 3 minutes or 6 minutes or even 10 minutes [music] at a given temperature and so then they feel like they have to lower the temperature even more and even more and eventually they just bottom out. There's nowhere else to go. [music] There's no way to get improvements out of the protocol at least not in terms of mental resilience. Of course there's still the positive effects on inflammation and metabolism etc that we'll talk about in a little bit. But the key thing here is to design protocols that are going to work for you over time and for you very very hardy, very, very tough guys and gals out there that can get right into an ice bath or a very very cold immersion and you can just grind [music] it out for 6 or 10 minutes or you can even do that by remaining peaceful. Well, more points to you. But guess what? That's the equivalent of already having loaded up the barbell with 600 lb and done your 10 reps. there's not a whole lot more variable space with [music] which to get benefits from that stimulus. And in the weight room, people understand that you can adjust, for instance, the speed of the movement or you can start [music] combining that movement with pre-exhaustion, etc. With cold exposure, you don't have as much variable space to play with. So if your goal is to build resilience, either go for [music] time as a function of temperature or what I suggest is to start recognizing these walls as an experience [music] of resistance in you and going over those walls. Set a certain number of walls that you're going [music] to go over on a given day and do that at a given temperature. and then to mix it up. [music] And ideally, you might even throw in one more wall at the end if you're really feeling bold and brave because that's going to build out further resilience. But if you want cold exposure to work for you for sake of building up resilience and mental toughness over time, you're going to want to vary this parameter space in some sort of way. And you don't have to be super systematic about it. That's the beauty of this kind of approach because you're relying on the fact that those walls really represent times in which you are forcing your top down control, your prefrontal cortex to clamp down on your reflex and you're learning behavioral control in the context of your body having elevated levels of these catakolamines, norepinephrine and epinephrine. And that translates to real life in a much more realistic way, I believe, because in real life, you're not really engaging in stressors [music] for a given amount of time that you know how long it's going to last and you know the context. No, most stressors arrive in the form of surprises. We don't like, text messages that deliver [music] bad news, information about the outside world or real world and online interactions that send our system into a state of increased norepinephrine and epinephrine. And if you start to think of those as walls that you can tolerate and climb over while staying calm and clear of mind, then you can really imagine how the ice bath and other forms of cold exposure are really serving to train you up for real [music] life stressors.

Cold exposure has become a modern ritual for athletes, high performers, and those seeking longevity, but most people are doing it wrong. This episode breaks down the real science behind deliberate cold exposure and how to use it to build resilience, sharpen focus, and increase your ability to handle stress. When you enter cold water, your body releases norepinephrine and epinephrine, the same stress chemicals that flood your system during difficult life moments. Learning to stay calm under that biological storm is what builds true grit. It’s not about how long you can last in an ice bath — it’s about how you train your nervous system to stay composed when every cell tells you to quit. We explore how to structure your cold exposure sessions, using time, temperature, and what speaker calls “walls” moments of internal resistance you learn to overcome. This is the key to using the cold to enhance your mental toughness, emotional control, and physiological resilience. If you want cold exposure to truly work for you, not just as a recovery hack but as a tool for long-term mental strength, this episode lays out exactly how to do it right. Join #1 men’s community for strength, fitness & longevity. Ask questions, share knowledge, and get support to stay strong for life https://www.skool.com/theory-of-man-5968 Subscribe for more practical, science-backed tips to improve your health and well-being: https://www.youtube.com/@UCgT9oGaVMnQovXUCLPMJu_A Podcast Host: Andrew Huberman YouTube: @HubermanLab #coldexposure #resilience #mentalstrength #longevity