Besides the many physical benefits of cold showers, this video dives into the philosophy behind it.
Video by Einzelgänger
Key Takeaways
Some people see taking cold showers as the panacea for overall health that will solve all our mental and physical problems, I’d disagree.
I’ve been taking cold showers since 2014 and doing so didn’t always prevent me from getting sick or getting depressed. But, I always do feel better after a cold shower mentally as well as physically and I’ve become more resistant to cold in the winter.
But most of the benefits I’ve experienced are mental and can be brought back to different philosophical ideas that I’ll share with you now.
The dynamic of desire and aversion.
Human beings as well as animals make a discernment between the things they like and don’t like.
This mechanism is valuable for survival: avoiding certain things that are life threatening can literally save our lives. That’s why zebras avoid lions, and also why you would avoid standing in the middle of a fire.
If we always avoid the things we averse, we’ll never be able to achieve certain goals.
- If we want a muscular body, for example, we need to train our muscles. And if we want to be heard, we need to speak up.
But what holds us back? The fear of discomfort.
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, but because we do not dare, things are difficult.”
“Remember that following desire promises the attainment of that of which you are desirous; and aversion promises the avoiding that to which you are averse. However, he who fails to obtain the object of his desire is disappointed, and he who incurs the object of his aversion wretched.”
In this context, the idea behind taking cold showers is that we deliberately expose ourselves to what we averse. We might desire nice, warm water on our skin, but we give ourselves the opposite instead.
By doing this, we train ourselves in becoming more resilient towards the things we do not like. It creates a mindset of acknowledging not liking something and doing it anyway.
The more we do this, the less wretched we’ll be when incurring what we averse.
When we do this in the morning, we prepare ourselves for the adversity we could meet during the day ahead.
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.”
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
- Examples of such experiences are telling someone bad news or a difficult confrontation at work.
The cold shower teaches us that, no matter how dreadful something is at first; we will adapt and it will become bearable.
Some hardships may be excruciating at first, but after a while they become integrated and we suffer a lot less.
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
Our minds make things much worse than they really are, which is basically the cause of our anxiety.
- Something interesting I’ve noticed about taking a cold showers for years is how mindful I’ve become in regards to the thoughts that precede it. I can tell instantly if I’m beginning to hesitate. And I know that when I continue hesitating, it’ll take a long time for I actually take the step. I’ve learned that whenever this hesitation begins; the faster I push through, the better.
“Take care of difficult problems while they are still easy. Do easy things before they become too hard.”
The most effective way to start a conversation is by approaching that person as quick as possible. Because if you don’t, you’ll start to hesitate, the anxiety builds up and so it becomes much more difficult to approach.
The experience with cold showers teaches us to trust that we will cope, even when our minds tell us the opposite.
Also, courage is a Stoic virtue. Taking cold showers is a way to build courage, by conquering ourselves in the face of discomfort, instead of going down the easy road.
Cold showers are daily victories over pain, and function as a metaphor for how we approach our daily confrontations with the things we averse, which are, whether we like it or not, part of our existence as human beings.