Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I wanted to chat a little bit about something I didn't think I'd be doing: turning cold water on in the shower!

Cold Showers for Sleep

If there's one thing that I and many others love to do, at least in the "western" world, it's taking a nice hot shower! There's something special about getting in there when there's all kinds of steam and getting nice and toasty. I know there are other important reasons though why we take hot showers such as raising blood pressure, clearing sinuses and likely a lot more but one of the things that I never really thought I'd be doing is flipping the water from hot to cold when I'm in there!

Years ago, I distinctly remember one of the guys that I used to work with told me that he takes cold showers. He was a really funny guy, really tall Haitian guy that was very friendly and loved to chat and crack jokes but sadly a fair bit of people didn't like him for whatever reason. It's interesting that 15 years later, one of the most prominent memories of the guy, Bob was his name, was that he preferred to take cold showers! Lol. Strange the things that leave an impression on us for so long.

Fast forward 15 odd years or so to this year and I've listened to a lot of different things on the Joe Rogan podcast but one of the things I've heard him say often was about how he takes ice baths and cold therapy. Ice baths may be a little too intense for me, I will rightfully admit that. He makes fun of people who won't admit they just can't handle an ice bath but will downplay the benefits and effects that it can have on the body at various levels. I'm not one of those people LOL I can't handle it for sure!

What I decided though to try one evening when I was taking a shower is that when I was finished, instead of just turning the water off and hopping out, I turned the water temperature down to cool off. For me, going to sleep at night I need to have my body at a cooler temperature. I've taken some showers before bed and I end up screwing myself as I'm too warm, showering raised my body's core temperature hotter than it needs to be in order for me to properly fall asleep. Listening to Rogan and one of his guests, the core body temperature needs to lower by 1 degree or so from daytime normal in order to properly sleep, and when we wake up in the morning our temperatures are I think 2 degrees cooler than it is throughout the day. The body is a remarkable machine, that's for sure!

I realized that showering at night was an issue for me but I couldn't help it sometimes, I was sweaty from the day doing various things like exercising, being out with the little man doing stuff etc. so I couldn't go to sleep smelly and with dried sweat. I usually can get home early enough to get in a shower at like 5pm which is fine but this evening I didn't get into the shower until around 8 which was super late! I took my normal shower but said fuck it, let's try this cold water business LOL. I for sure didn't love it but I was surprised that I actually did enjoy going from pretty hot temperatures down to cold. It was pretty refreshing!

The benefit of the cold shower at the end of it all is that I'm not wide awake when I get out, the cold water brings me down and actually has helped me sleep deeper and longer than I normally would have! That was a very surprising thing to experience!

It's been 7 or 8 weeks since I took that shower and I've been slowly working up to getting my full body in there. I've been just doing my arms and legs in the initial attempts. I recently started doing my head as well and that's a damn shock to the body hahaha. It feels exhilarating though, I must admit! It also likely is a pretty big factor that being the wintertime when I started doing this, the water getting pumped to my shower through the pipes comes from a considerably colder environment out of the public water supply, so in the summertime I wonder if I'll be able to manage to get up to fully submerging my whole body in the tap-cold water as it will be a fair bit warmer than the near-freezing temps that we are pumping in right now. Doing 50 degree water is a lot easier than doing 35 degree water, let me tell you! Lol.

I'm quite surprised though that I've enjoyed it but the Rogan podcast where he was talking about it with one of his guests, I think it was Brett Weinstein perhaps but can't remember off the top of my head, they said that there were a large amount of health benefits by doing the cold plunges and showers, particularly for men and testosterone. It has also been shown to have positive impacts on our mood, blood pressure, heart rate and a whole host of other things! I know that I'm not that old yet but as I get older, I know I could likely use any additional other benefits that I can get when it comes to these other parts of my body! I'm going to eventually work up to finishing my warm shower with the cold shower every single day. Right now I'm doing it 2 or 3 times a week which is pretty good but I've got a little bit of a personal goal to get up to daily. I wonder if I'll also be able to handle an entirely cold shower! That would be a feat for sure lol but I'm not the fondest person for cold water temperatures, so I won't promise to be able to do that.

It's a bit of a different flavor of a natural remedy for me, but having suffered insomnia after taking warm showers for many years, I was really pleased to be able to learn that switching the water to cold while I'm in there at the end will actually help me sleep, was a fantastic revelation for me!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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