After 14 days of cold showers, what happens?

 After 14 days of cold showers, what happens?

what would happen after 14 days two weeks if you took a cold shower every single day that's what we're going to talk about we're going to do a deep dive into this topic now you may have heard of this guy called iceman he's wrote a book he's done youtube videos he developed the wim hof method using things like ice baths cold showers to improve your health i'm going to talk about some of the benefits and the research revolving around using cryotherapy or cold therapy now before you click off and say there is no way in heck i am going to ever take a cold shower just hear me out because there are some seriously positive benefits from doing this and you can do it very very gradually so it's not very uncomfortable okay now 

I'm serious all right now you would think that going out in the cold when it's rainy and it's cold you would you'd get sick that's because your parents told you to stay out of that rain it's cold out there you're going to get a cold just stay inside where it's nice and warm well it just so happens that when you expose your body to the cold i'm not talking long term just a short term your immune system becomes enhanced you get more monocytes and lymphocytes these are white blood cells that fight off pathogens you have a boost of t helper cells the t helper cell is like the quarterback of the entire immune system okay you also get a spike of t suppressor cells that help to calm down an overactive immune system so they prevent too much destruction of the immune system so it's kind of a system where your immune system is fighting things off yet you have other factors that are making sure there's not too much collateral damage so your immune system is enhanced when you expose it to cold which is very very counter-intuitive number two you get a spike of noradrenaline noradrenaline is similar to adrenaline and when they tested people that have anxiety attention deficit disorder depression they usually have low noradrenaline so by using this amazing method of exposing yourself to cold you can spike noradrenaline and improve your overall mood so if you're depressed you can pull yourself out of that lower emotion if you have anxiety excessive worry things like that you it can elevate your emotion it can help your cognitive function your focus your memory you can become more alert so apparently our bodies have evolved over eons to adapt to things like cold hunger starvation so our bodies through this process have developed certain type of adaptive survival mechanisms to improve our health to survive better when exposed to cold and hunger and things like that it's called the hormetic effect and a hormetic effect is when you expose someone to a stress and then the body adapts and becomes stronger like exercise would give you a hormetic effect fasting would give you a hormonal effect taking a cold shower would definitely do it all right the next thing is that taking a cold shower is going to help you lose weight how well when you take a cold shower you're going to trigger brown fat another term for brown fat is brown adipose tissue so the sensation of cold is the main stimulus to stimulating brown fat so the more cold the more brown fat that you have now what's so significant about this brown fat versus the white fat or white adipose tissue well brown fat increases heat energy and metabolism your metabolism is going to be raised when you have more brown fat you're going to lose more weight and brown fat will also trigger more loss of white fat which is the storage fat that you have in your body okay so that's pretty cool in fact 100 grams of brown fat can burn 3 400 calories per day that's more calories than you potentially could eat in a given day so we want more brown fat on our body another reason why it can help you lose weight it can create an increase in insulin sensitivity okay if you've been watching my videos the more you improve insulin sensitivity the less insulin that's going to be produced because it's going to work now and there's going to be less resistance to insulin and the more weight loss you're going to have the better the blood sugars you're going to have so if you have diabetes your pre-diabetes and you take a cold shower you're going to notice that your blood sugars actually come into check much better and when that happens you're going to lose weight number five cold showers help with inflammation they are anti-inflammatory so if you have inflammation in your body if you have some type of autoimmune disease if you have arthritis bursitis tendinitis taking a cold shower would be a very therapeutic thing number six cold showers can increase your overall antioxidant networks okay more antioxidants the less dna damage the less risk of getting cancer and other diseases number seven neural protection okay cold showers help your brain and so apparently cold activates the regrowing of neurons okay so that's pretty cool and also as a side note when you're cold you have a much better sleep now this is within reason okay i'm talking about freezing i'm just talking about having the temperature a little bit cooler you will sleep a little bit better so another benefit i forgot to add on to this is sleep all right number eight longevity why because cold showers stimulate autophagy just like fasting stimulates autophagy autophagy is a condition that your body gets into where it's recycling old damaged proteins okay so if there's certain things that aren't working in the body like their proteins or enzymes or their mitochondria or they're they're plaquing in the brain as in amyloid plaquing or whatever your body's going to recycle all that and turn that into brand new proteins the other cool thing about taking a cold shower is that it will help lower cortisol that means it's going to reduce your stress okay also it's going to create better recovery so if you're an athlete okay and you're sore and you need faster recovery coal therapy is the way to go i remember long ago when my wife and i went to the dominican republic and uh i remember we walked off the beaten path and found this little oasis this little um like building and they had all these different uh little baths and they were like they looked like little jacuzzis but some were really really cold and some were really really hot they had like freezing lukewarm hot really hot and so on and that was a really interesting introduction to cold therapy because at first it didn't make sense to me why would anyone want to jump into some cold bath right but we both tried it out and it was freezing but then of course we went into the warmer bath and the hot jacuzzi and i remember feeling really incredible after doing that my body was just like feeling amazing and i slept great and then i kind of forgot about it for some years now coming full circle here i am talking about exposing yourself to cold so anyway here's the 10 benefits of cold showers and think about it if you can experience these benefits from just a cold shower i mean you're already probably taking a shower every day all you have to do is turn it to the cold for a little bit and then turn it back to the hot and i'm going to show you now what i would recommend i would do this when you're in the shower start with the hot shower okay get comfortable get really hot take the hot shower feel comfortable and then turn it to the cold okay i mean a nice cold shower not lukewarm but really cold for about 30 seconds now anyone can handle 30 seconds right and then turn it back to hot and then just have that as your introduction to the cold the next day you go in there start to increase the 30 seconds to maybe 40 seconds okay and then the next shower turn up to 50 seconds and gradually increase this to the point where you're taking a cold shower for 5 to 10 minutes but if you do it gradually it won't be that uncomfortable in fact the benefits that you're going to see are going to be mind-blowing and you're going to finally realize you should have did this a long time ago what's interesting you have all these feedback systems in in the body that when you expose your body to a very cold sensation it actually warms up the internal core of your body you actually get more circulation internally the flip side of that when you take a hot shower it actually cools down the inside of your core this is why taking a hot shower before bed might be a good thing because it's going to cool down your body and you're going to sleep better the body sleeps better when it's slightly colder but anyway this might be an easy way to approach this cold shower unless you want to just do a cold turkey and just jump right in now the other thing that i want to mention is infrared saunas okay use a lower temperature than a traditional sauna so they use like 120 to 140 degrees fahrenheit versus traditional saunas which are 150 to 180 degrees fahrenheit now this has nothing to do with a cold therapy but the only point of bringing it up is that it's not as hot as a traditional therapy and there's some real interesting hormetic effects to infrared which i will share in another video real soon but anyway as you can see if you did cold therapy for 14 days