Neuroscientist: Cold Showers Will Change your Life [BOOST YOUR DOPAMINE]

Dopamine feels great being in Pursuit, motivated and craving things, it feels wonderful. There are activities we can do that

will

give us healthy, sustained increases in

dopamine

both in the spikes when they occur and to maintain or even increase our baseline

dopamine

levels, so how can we do it? What are some of these activities? In recent years there has been a trend towards more people doing so-called

cold

exposure, in part this was popularized by vimhof, the so-called Iceman, getting into

cold

showers

, taking ice baths, exposing oneself to cold water of In fact , several types can increase our levels of dopamine and the neuromodulator neuroepinephrine.

This is not a new phenomenon. In the 1920s, a guy named Vincent Priznitz was one of the first people to popularize and formalize cold water therapies. I advocate exposure to cold water to

boost

the immune system and increase feelings of well-being and in fact this practice dates back long before Vincent's popularized it and Vimhof is the most recent version of this, first of all, some of security parameters. establish which ones are the first to get into very, very cold water, you know, 30 degrees Fahrenheit or even 40 degrees Fahrenheit can put someone in cold water shock. I mean, people can die doing it, so obviously you have to approach this with some caution, but for the most part. people who immerse themselves in 60 degree or 50 degree water or if they are acclimatized and comfortable with it, you know, 40 degree or 45 degree water can have tremendously beneficial results on their neuromodulatory systems, including dopamine, it

will

depend on the water temperature you can tolerate. about how adapted to cold water you are and how familiar you are with the experience of getting into cold water and when I say comfortable I should mention that there is never a case where entering cold water does not cause a release of epinephrine, so the acceleration of breathing the widening of the eyes the feeling that you can't catch

your

breath and even some physical pain at the level of the skin that happens almost every time you get into cold water even if you're adapted to cold water, which What almost everyone knows and understands is that that wall, as I like to refer to it, is coming.

That is always the first experience of entering cold water. There's no real way around it now that this study that I mentioned earlier on human physiological responses to water immersion at different temperatures really interesting study that was done and published in the University of Excuse me, the European Journal of Applied Physiology. I can provide a link to that study in the program title. It's a really interesting study that they looked at in people undergoing it. exposed to water that was warm moderately cold or very cold it was 32 degrees Celsius 20 degrees Celsius or 14 degrees Celsius but those online and they do the conversion or you can do the conversion to Fahrenheit if you want but in any case what they looked at was the concentrations of things like epinephrine and dopamine, etc., and what they found was really interesting, first of all, upon entering cold water, the

change

s in adrenaline and norepinephrine, epinephrine and norepinephrine were immediate and rapid and these were huge increases. , so that's the beginning. cold water that everyone experiences these huge surges in adrenaline, but what's interesting is that they observed that dopamine levels started to rise a little slowly and then continued to rise and reached levels as high as 2.5 times above baseline , which is a remarkably high increase, remember if we go back to our examples of sex with chocolate, a doubling above the initial nicotine two and a half times above the initial cocaine, the increase in dopamine from an exposure to cold water This type was comparable to what is seen with cocaine, except in this case it was not a seesaw, it was actually a sustained increase in dopamine that took a long time, up to three hours, to return to the initial level, which is really remarkable and I think this explains some of the positive physical and mental effects that people subjectively report after exposure to cold water.

One question many of you are probably asking is how cold the water should be. They could mimic what was done in this study and make it 14 degrees Celsius, but for some people that won't be cold enough. When it's going to be too cold, they looked at the release of stress hormones like cortisol, as well as the release of things like epinephrine and adrenaline, and interestingly they noticed that in all cases, but especially at that colder temperature, there was an increase in cortisol, but that was temporary that over time people's cortisol, their stress hormone decreased a little bit.

There are basically two different approaches to staying in the cold when it's uncomfortable. One is to try to relax, try to practice slow breathing and try to dilate

your

gaze. I have spoken. We talked about this before in previous podcasts to get into Big Picture to essentially try to calm yourself down so that it's not as stressful in the cold that other people however take the approach of trying to increase your level of internal autonomic arousal, which means being really full. energetic and friendly. of leaning on the friction of the cold and find it easier for other people to be distracted, they recite the alphabet or do anything to try to distract themselves from the discomfort to be totally honest, it doesn't matter for the sake of dopamine release because dopamine The release is triggered and then continues even after leaving the cold water.

Now, in this study, it was a prolonged exposure to cold water, it was an hour, which is a long period of time and I warn you not to get into cold water, which is so cold. It will cause your temperature to drop and make you feel hyperthermic for an hour, which could actually be dangerous for many people; They may find it difficult to rewarm them and hypothermia is not a good thing. In these studies they had people monitoring the subjects and paying attention to their core body temperature, they were able to rewarm them afterwards, it is now well established that getting into cold water, whether it be a shower, an ice bath, circulating cold water, a stream, etc., can evoke the immediate release of norepinephrine and the long arc of that dopamine release, why?

It would be good? So far, I've basically said that getting spikes in dopamine is detrimental to your baseline. Well, this seems to elevate baseline dopamine for substantial periods of time and most people report feeling a higher level of calm and focus after getting out of cold water, so exposure to cold water turns out to be a

boost

. very powerful in changing the entire environment of our brain and body and allowing many people to feel much better for a substantial period of time after coming off the ice. bath or cold water of any kind before now you might ask how often to do this.

Some people do it every day. It can be very stimulating, so doing it early in the day will usually be best. I don't necessarily recommend it. do it right before bed, but some people do it in the afternoon and some people do it seven days a week, some people do it three days a week, some people do it once in a while, what I can say is that once you get used to the cold water, once it no longer has the same impact of novelty and it feels a little bit like a I don't want to say a shock to your system because you don't want to go into cold water shock, but once it's comfortable for you, you won't it will be.

To evoke this release, there really does seem to be something in the way of cold water exposure through the norepinephrine pathway and into the mesolimonic brainstem that causes this dopamine release, but it's basically zero cost anyway. I mean, you need access to some kind of water. cold shower etc, but basically a zero cost way to trigger a long lasting dopamine surge without ingesting anything, without any pharmacology, please approach it again with safety and caution in mind, but again it is a very potent stimulus, 250 percent increase in the baseline two and a half-fold increase compared to that of cocaine, which is really remarkable overseas.