I love warmth. Warm showers, warm baths, warm turmeric milk, a good warm cup of tea, and the list goes on. However recently, I intuitively stopped taking warm showers in the morning. Why? Well at first I felt it may help get me out of my comfort zone, and I wanted to shake things up a bit. I had heard Tony Robbins, David Wolfe and a few others talking about it, but I never took the time to investigate the science behind it. Until I noticed that taking cold showers was improving my focus and energy throughout the day. Granted I do a lot of other things combined that can help with energy: drinking enough water, exercising in the mornings, taking a multivitamin, reducing my sugar intake and more. Since those things are generally a part of my normal lifestyle, the cold showers did make a notable difference when I started.
Here’s why. Our brain and our gut are connected by the gut-brain axis; and therefore communicate with each other. Just in case you’ve never heard this, people describe it as the gut-brain connection. This connection and the communication in between the gut and brain happens through the vagus nerve, which is one of the longest veins in the body and has the ability to channel communication both ways. Most people don’t realize but communication from the gut to the brain impacts our emotions and mood. The other thing that most of us do not know is that not all vagus nerves are equal in strength! Those with strong vagal activity or higher “vagal tone”, are able to relax faster after experiencing stress. “Higher vagal tone makes your body better at regulating blood glucose levels, reducing the likelihood of diabetes, stroke and cardiovascular disease. Low vagal tone, however, has been associated with chronic inflammation,” [1].
Our nervous system is comprised of the parasympathetic, and sympathetic systems. The parasympathetic system turns on to calm us down, when we are relaxing, practicing mindfulness, and improves our ability to heal, rest, and digest our food properly. Alternatively the sympathetic nervous system is what kicks in when were are exposed to stress, trauma, or danger and is our “fight or flight” responder. The major issue in today’s society is that most of us are over stressed, and our “fight or flight” response is always on, and usually in response to stimulus that is NOT life threatening. Everything from morning road rage in traffic, annoying coworkers, to that epic to do list can keep us in sympathetic dominance. What is key to understand is that our body can only do one or the other: so we are either in rest mode or fight or flight mode, there’s no in between. Here’s the part that gets revelatory: in order to support healing, digest our food better, reduce inflammation and susceptibility to diseases we need to more often than not have our parasympathetic nervous system turned on.
Guess one thing that can improve vagal tone and activate the parasympathetic nervous system? You guessed it…cold showers or exposure to extreme cold. What happens at first is your sympathetic activity will increase, but after a moment when your body gets used to the cold, parasympathetic activity increases [3]. One random controlled trial had 3018 participants participate in hot to cold showers for 30, 60, 90 seconds for thirty days versus a control group. They found that the group that followed the hot to cold shower protocol had a 29% reduction in sickness absence at work [2]. Another study that investigated cold showers as a treatment for depression, found that the cold showers did have a beneficial effect on improving depressive symptoms, but their data and test group were not necessarily adequate to apply to a larger population so more study on this is needed [4].
If you need a completely FREE energy boost, immunity recharge, or just want to get out of a funk, I highly recommend a cold shower. We are conditioned to be comfortable, especially in the Western world, and it turns out that a little dose of discomfort can go a long way. So the next time your friend tags you in the ice bucket challenge, do it, and feel feel free to tag me, I’m so down! -Xo Raw Girl
References:
- Asprey, D. (2017, April 13). Here’s How To Tone Your Vagus Nerve to Hack Your Whole Nervous System. Retrieved July 22, 2018, from https://blog.bulletproof.com/tone-vagus-nerve-hack-nervous-system/
- Buijze, G. A., Sierevelt, I. N., van der Heijden, B. C. J. M., Dijkgraaf, M. G., & Frings-Dresen, M. H. W. (2016). The Effect of Cold Showering on Health and Work: A Randomized Controlled Trial. PLoS ONE, 11(9), e0161749. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0161749
- Mäkinen TM, Mäntysaari M, Pääkkönen T, Jokelainen J, Palinkas LA, Hassi J,
Leppäluoto J, Tahvanainen K, Rintamäki H. Autonomic nervous function during
whole-body cold exposure before and after cold acclimation. Aviat Space Environ
Med. 2008 Sep;79(9):875-82. PubMed PMID: 18785356. - Shevchuk NA. Adapted cold shower as a potential treatment for depression. Med Hypotheses. 2008;70(5):995-1001. Epub 2007 Nov 13. PubMed PMID: 17993252.