Making a Habit of Discomfort - Parts 1 and 2

(Update from original post Oct 2019)

I write this from the warm comfort of my home. I have a space heater near my desk. It’s raining and cold outside. However, just an hour ago I woke up, meditated, practiced controlled hyperventilation, held my breath for 2 and ½ minutes and then went straight into a 3-minute cold shower. I’ve just started practicing the Wim Hof Method. You may have heard of the Iceman, Wim Hof. He holds numerous world records for enduring extreme feats in extreme cold. If you don’t know him check out this YouTube video https://youtu.be/q6XKcsm3dKs. Cold training via the Wim Hof Method, brings numerous physiological and health benefits, it boosts your immune system, and it makes you happier. All good reasons why I decided to try it. The physical and emotional benefits are so numerous that I think they belong in another blog (actually many blogs have been written so just google it). But the other reason I was drawn to cold training was because I became intrigued with the benefits of discomfort as a habit.

The whole thing began not long ago when I reflected on how comfortable I am most of the time. Not just me, but as a society how we have set up our lives for comfort. Cars with automatic everything, air conditioning, heaters, performance fleece, microwaves, fast food. How much I personally have set up my life for comfort. I work from home, I have a short drive to drop the kids at school, I live close to the gym. The only thing I routinely do that is uncomfortable is CrossFit. But even this isn’t that uncomfortable most of the time and also feels really good. I registered for the CrossFit Open, and in that brought some discomfort. Mostly anxiety about performing well, fear of failing or looking bad or incapable rather than anxiety about the forthcoming physical pain. I realized that seeking more opportunities for discomfort would be a good thing for me. Things like cryotherapy, cold showers, taking an ice bath, signing up for a Wim Hof workshop. I believe that repeatedly, daily, and routinely doing something uncomfortable is a good practice. Doing uncomfortable things gives me more confidence to do something else uncomfortable another time. I practiced hot-cold shower cycling which gave me confidence to try cryotherapy. And cryotherapy gave me confidence to do longer cold only showers and maybe try an ice bath at the workshop next weekend. I don’t even think it matters what you do. There is carry over in all parts of your life. Conquering the cold will give me confidence to conquer other scary things. I wonder if we can challenge ourselves to do a scary thing every day. Can we make it part of our daily routine? I suspect that if we routinely do scary things, we will come to find that doing the actual thing is less scary and hurts less than the anxiety you feel ahead of time about doing the thing. And that by doing these things more often we build more confidence and naturally experience less anxiety. I believe this confidence is transferrable. By putting myself in the cold (and progressively colder conditions) my threshold for discomfort increases in all areas of my life. So, it will be less scary to approach a stranger and say kind things, or less scary to reach out to someone and ask for help. 

I call this Part 1 because I’ve signed up for a Wim Hof Method workshop next weekend, where I will practice with a Level 3 instructor and other students of the method. I will likely sit in an ice bath for at least a few minutes. A new level of discomfort is coming for me. And I suspect I will have something to say about that. My gut tells me that once I become comfortable with my current practices of discomfort (i.e. cold showers) that I will need to find another challenge if I am to continue growing. I believe everyone is on their own path and at a different spot. I’m not suggesting you jump into an ice bath right now. For you, it may be getting to the gym, or fasting, or meditating. What’s uncomfortable for one person isn’t necessarily uncomfortable for another. But I firmly believe that in order for us to grow as human beings we need to continually challenge ourselves, push our levels of discomfort further. Just like in exercise, our bodies (and minds) acclimate to a routine, then become stagnant and stuck if we don’t change it up, add more weight, go a little harder, a little faster. My 3-minute cold shower was really uncomfortable and scary at first and now after 4 weeks it is less so. Now the ice bath seems scary and I anticipate it will be really uncomfortable. There’s some anxiety around that but its diminishing with each cold shower. It’s perfect. I’m growing. I’ll let you know.

Part 2 (2024 UPDATE): Well, I did that Wim Hof workshop. I sat in an ice bath at a temperature just above freezing for somewhere between 2 and 3 minutes. As soon as I started shivering, the coach instructed me to get out. It took hours for me to feel warm again. It was extremely uncomfortable, but I am proud of this accomplishment. I did something that was really, really hard. I don’t know that I want to do this thing ever again. For me personally, I find that if I push myself too far in cold exposure, I am completely wiped out the rest of the day, and it probably raises my cortisol for the next 12-24 hours which isn’t good for me. Being this fatigued isn’t even the point of cold exposure. The point is to do something hard, to build resilience and tenacity, so that I can do other hard things and worthwhile things in my life. As a bonus I reap the physical rewards of reduced inflammation, and stronger immune system. So, these days my cold exposure looks like a cold shower. If I’m feeling up to a big challenge, I will start the shower cold and stay under the cold water for 2 minutes or so. On regular days, I simply finish my normal warm shower with 30 to 60 seconds of cold. With either of these scenarios I get a nice boost in BDNF (brain derived neurotropic factor) which helps my brain and cognition, gives me a surge of the feel good hormone serotonin, and increases my baseline dopamine. I find it a great way to build motivation to get stuff done, including doing other things that are hard.

My challenge to you is this: Find something that is hard for YOU. Do it. When it starts feeling less hard, or less uncomfortable, or when you notice you no longer feel anxiety before you do it, then find something else that is harder. For example, let’s say ending your normal shower with 10 seconds of cold water is really hard for you and you don’t want to do it. You feel some anxiety about it. Great, then do that. After a few days or a week it won’t be as hard. Now you can increase the time to 20 or 30 seconds, and so on.  Do 1 hard thing, whatever that looks like to you, every day, and watch how you begin to grow. Watch how other hard things in your life become more approachable. How you feel more motivation to do things that you have been putting off. How you stop procrastinating. Try it for 1 week. As the famous Nike slogan says ‘Just Do It’.

Need an accountability partner? Drop me a message here. :)