Neuroscientist: "Cold Showers increase Your Dopamine by 250%" | The Proper Way To Use Cold Exposure

Deliberate

exposure

to

cold

has a very powerful effect on the release of

dopamine

in our brain and body. There are a couple of mechanisms by which one might experience

increase

s in testosterone as a result of deliberate

exposure

to

cold

. In other words, brown fat can

increase

overall central metabolism. the number of calories you burn per day temperature is a very powerful stimulus for the brain and body, which also means that it carries certain dangers if not done correctly. It is key to point out the word deliberate, if I do not say otherwise, at all times. In this episode, if I say cold exposure, I mean deliberate cold exposure, there are important effects of what we call mindset.

If we do something deliberately and believe it will be good for us, it can actually lead to a different set of physiological effects than if something happens to us against our will or without our control, meaning you are putting

your

self in a cold environment. purposely to extract a particular set of benefits and one of the most common questions I get when I talk about using cold for mental or physical performance, metabolism, etc., how cold should it be, how cold depends on

your

cold tolerance, your central metabolism, and a host of other traits that there's just no way for me to know or have access to, so I'd like you to use them.

This rule of thumb, if you are using deliberate cold exposure, the environment you place yourself in should place your mind in a waiting state. I would really like to get out of this environment, but I can safely stay in it. The second most common question I receive. The question of deliberate cold exposure is whether cold

showers

are as good or worse than neck-deep immersion in cold water. Immersion in water up to the neck with feet and hands submerged will also be the most effective. The second best option would be the cold. showering, the third best option would be to go outside with a minimal amount of clothing but of course clothing that is culturally appropriate and that allows you to experience cold to the point where you would almost want to shiver or start shivering, so let's talk about protocols for improve mental health and performance through deliberate exposure to cold what happens when we go into the cold is that we experience an increase in norepinephrine in the release of norepinephrine and a release of adrenaline epinephrine in our brain and body means that it is a very reliable stimulus for increasing norepinephrine and epinephrine, it's a pretty obvious statement, but that obvious statement can be leveraged to systematically build what we call resilience now, when we experience a stressor in life, whether or not something bad happens in our relationship or something bad happens in the world and we feel stress that accentuates the consequences of increases in norepinephrine and epinephrine in our brain and body, very similar, if not identical, to the types of increases that come from deliberate exposure to cold, so deliberate exposure to cold is an opportunity to deliberately stress our body and yet, because it is deliberate and because we can take certain steps that I will describe in a moment, we can By learning to maintain mental clarity, we can learn to stay calm while our body is in a state of stress and that can be immensely helpful when we encounter stressors in other parts of life and that is what we call resilience or determination, our mental capacity or strength, our ability to lean into the challenge or tolerate it while keeping our head straight, so to speak, so a simple protocol to increase resilience is to choose a temperature that is uncomfortable in a shower or cold water immersion. and then go in for a certain period of time and then go out, so the way to think about norepinephrine and epinephrine in this context of developing mental resilience is that you have two options: try to extend the duration of the time that you are in deliberate cold exposure, going from one minute to 75 seconds to two minutes and so on over a period of days or one way to approach this and the way I particularly prefer is to take We take into account the context of the day and the moment and we start to be able to feel the release of epinephrine, epinephrine, excuse me, and norepinephrine in our brain and body, and we see them as walls that we want to overcome to build resilience and get started. counting the number of walls we pass through and the distance between those walls as we do so, deliberate exposure to the cold.

Well, the next question I always get asked is what my state of mind should be while exposing myself to this uncomfortable but safe cold condition. You have two options and there are probably other options too: one is to try to calm yourself down to stay as still mentally as possible, the other is to lean into that challenge and thus overcome it, sometimes it is easier to calm down one way. that is, through double inhalations through the nose and long exhalations through the mouth or simply trying to control the breath and reduce the rate of breathing and increase the volume of the breath.

Another very common question is how often should deliberate exposure to cold be done. make a recommendation on this based on any peer-reviewed studies, although there are some Inhumans that aim for a threshold of 11 minutes total per week, so it's a total for the entire week divided into two or four sessions of about two or three minutes in deliberate cold. Exposure has a very powerful effect on the release of

dopamine

in our brain and body and this is one of the main reasons why people continue to deliberately expose themselves to the cold. Basically, it makes us feel good and continues to make us feel good even after we've done it. outside the cold environment, in fact, some people would say that they don't feel good in the cold environment, it's all stress for them, but afterwards they feel great, almost everyone who deliberately exposes themselves to the cold will say that yes, it was stressful, I didn't enjoy it. or eventually I started to like it, but I always feel better afterwards and then that feeling lasts for a very long period of time and I think it's almost certainly those experiences that people report are related to these increases in dopamine and in conjunction with the increases Norepinephrine also explains the other commonly reported effect, which is an improvement in mental acuity and the ability to concentrate.

Now I would like to focus our attention on the effects of deliberate cold exposure on metabolism. Deliberate exposure to cold converts a particular type of fat cell (white fat cell, which is a very low metabolic output cell, it is basically an energy storage site in the body's fat cells), to a different type of fat cell that is the beige fat cell, called beige because it is actually beige or slightly brown under the microscope or even the brown fat cells that are very dark under the microscope and dark because they contain mitochondria and are very metabolically and thermogenically active, so Beige fat and brown fat are very good for increasing our metabolism and help burn white fat.

Now, of course, they only do it in the context of a caloric deficit, but it can actually help create that caloric deficit. Having more beige fat and brown fat can increase your overall central metabolism, in other words, the number of calories you burn per day and therefore the number of calories you need. maintain or lose weight if you expose yourself to heat after or before or not at all and this is where we can point to the so-called Soberg principle to achieve the greatest increases in metabolism through the deliberate exposure to cold that you want to force yourself to. reheat on your own after deliberate exposure to cold, meaning you don't want to go from cold shower to hot shower or cold shower to sauna, rather if you're going to start with a hot shower or start with a sauna that will end the cold and then reheat naturally.

Deliberate exposure to cold that causes shivering in the muscles causes the release of a molecule called succinate from the muscles and that succinate plays a key role in activating brown fat thermogenesis, which Now you've heard about and understand that increases in metabolism caused by deliberate exposure to cold are critical to metabolism. So what this means is that if you want to increase your metabolism, end the cold, that's the sober principle and, the best thing you can try and get to the point where you are shivering when you are exposed to the cold or immediately after. I would now like to turn our attention to the use of deliberate cold exposure for the sake of physical performance.

Its main objective is hypertrophy and strength. It's probably best to avoid cold water. immersion and ice bath immersion in the four hours immediately following strength or hypertrophy training, there is now good data pointing to the fact that performing cold water immersion after an intense run, resistance training or even sprint and sprint training intervals or after weight training where your primary focus is on the performance of those movements or after skills training where your primary focus is on the performance of those movements, there is no reason to think that cold water immersion or Ice bath or cold shower would inhibit progress or the stimulus would. carry back to the progress that occurred during that training session If you are someone who experiences a lot of delayed onset muscle soreness, taking a cold shower after your workout or soaking in cold water after your workout, even if it's a few hours later, should help and if you are doing particularly intense training, then you will probably want to increase the number of cold exposure sessions you are doing, even if they should be done on separate days from your training due to many of the inflammatory effects of resistance training and of force.

They actually occur a few hours after the training stimulus, so it's not just that inflammation increases radically during training, which can often occur, but it can even occur in the days and even weeks after, depending on how intense and prolonged the training. Exposure to cold is very powerful as an anti-inflammatory tool. A final topic related to the use of deliberate cold exposure to improve health and performance. Using deliberate cold exposure to the groin, particularly the testicles, to try to increase testosterone. There are a couple of mechanisms by which one might experience increases in testosterone as a result of deliberate exposure to cold.

The first one is kind of straightforward, which is that every time you cool a body surface, if it's cold enough, you're going to have vasoconstriction, and then subsequently, you're going to get a rebound increase in vasodilation, which means the blood vessels in that area are going to constrict. area and then after the cold is removed there will be more blood flow to that area and of course blood flow relates to the health of the organs and tissues. In general, perfusing that region and those and the gonads to be specific with additional blood could be imagined in some way increasing testosterone.

The other probably more likely mechanism is related to the increases in dopamine caused by cold exposure that we talked about before whenever you have a somewhat stressful stimulus, but particularly with cold exposure, it seems that the catecholamines, norepinephrine, Epinephrine and dopamine increase and dopamine is known to be in the pathway that can stimulate testosterone, so while there is no direct relationship between dopamine stimulating testosterone, there is. an interesting pathway by which increases in dopamine can trigger increases in things like luteinizing hormone, which can trigger increases in testosterone and estrogen, in fact, you're going to do deliberate cold exposure, you're going to increase your core body temperature and that makes sense if you think about how deliberate cold exposure can increase metabolism by increasing thermogenesis, what all that means is that if you do your deliberate cold exposure early in the day, you'll get an additional increase in core body temperature that would be associated with wakefulness. ability to be alert that morning or throughout the day, etc., also means that if you do your deliberate cold exposure very late in the afternoon or evening, i.e. at 6 p.m. m., 7 p.m. m., 9 p.m. m., etc., will increase your body core. temperature and if you remember, a decrease in core body temperature by one to three degrees is not only beneficial but is necessary to achieve deep sleep and stay in deep sleep, so the bottom line from this is that deliberate exposure to the cold and if done correctly it will increase your core. body temperature and makes you feel more alert, so if you do it earlyin the day is probably great, since most of us want to be alert during the day;

However, if you do it too late, in the afternoon or at night, it can disrupt sleep by altering your core body temperature.