Starting your day with a cold shower has a number of benefits for your physical and mental health. It’s an easy way to noticeably feel more positive, productive, and focused, and it only takes a couple of minutes out of your day.
Take a quick break from researching a private jet to Cayman Islands, and let’s look at 6 surprising benefits of taking cold showers.
Boosts Your Immunity
Taking cold showers can actually help keep you from getting sick. The shock your body gets from the cold water hitting your skin causes the release of helpful blood cells that protect you from infections.
Improve Circulation
When you take a cold shower, your body essentially goes into survival mode as it’s trying to prevent you from getting hypothermia. This process involves a large increase in your blood flow circulation. After repeated cold showers, your body eventually becomes more capable of moving blood throughout your body faster.
Aides Weight Loss
Exposure to the chilly water from a cold shower or a bath in melting ice (Wim Hoff style) has been shown to increase your metabolism. During a cold shower, your body is trying to get its temperature back to baseline. This results in your body burning calories and an increase in metabolism. While cold showers alone won’t move the scale too much, it’s certainly helpful in aiding weight loss.
Relieves Muscle Aches & Pains
The cold temperature from a cold shower will cause your blood vessels to constrict, making them smaller. At the same time that your blood vessels are tightening, your blood becomes filled with nutrients and turns to oxygen as it’s rushed to your body’s core organs. Once your body starts to heat up again after the cold shower, your blood vessels start to expand again, and then the nutrient-rich blood goes back to your tissues. During this process, it essentially gets rid of inflammation which helps to relieve muscle aches and pains.
Helps with Mental Health
Taking a cold shower can actually help you to feel happier and experience fewer symptoms of mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression. When the cold water hits your body, it sends a signal to your brain to release a hormone called endorphins which are known to make you “feel good.”
Increase Productivity
Cold showers are often recommended in the morning. This is because they’re known to help wake your body and mind up with a surge of energy. Cold showers also cause more oxygen in the brain which wakes it up helping to improve your clarity, focus, and productivity levels.
How Do I Start Taking Cold Showers?
When it comes to making cold showers a part of your regular routine, you’ll want to start off slow. We recommend that you start by taking a cold shower for 30 seconds and slowly increasing the duration over a period of days or weeks. It’s not necessary that you ever extend your cold shower past 3 to 4 minutes.
