The one thing about ice baths

One thing about ice baths is that if you’ve ever met anyone who does them, you’ll know, because they will not stop telling you about it.

So I won’t do that to you (see what I did there?).

Instead, I’m going to talk about it from the point of view of something I talked about in a previous post.

I had a friend that continuously talked about showers that he would take, which he claimed were the highlight of his day. He went on and on about the health benefits of doing the steam right before — vasodilation, then vasoconstriction with the cold water, and all the endorphins that came out of it.

There are obvious physiological and physical benefits to this, yes. But we’re not going to get into those.

Instead, what I’ve discovered is that forcing myself to do one of the hardest physical things out there first thing in the morning, before I am fully awake, really sets the tone for the rest of the day.

Meaning everything else is downhill from there.

Dousing yourself with ice-cold water early in the morning when you are half asleep is miserable. In some countries, it has been used as a form of torture, and in the army it has been used to test recruits and see if they break.

So if I can force myself to do something that is terrible, horrible, and physically challenging before the day has really started, most other things feel more manageable by comparison.

If I was not doing this, then maybe the hardest thing I’d be choosing between would be a latte and a macchiato, and what to get for lunch.

I’m a firm believer that when you do more hard things early and often, it helps you realize that not everything is an emergency and not everything is on fire, and helps you deal with everything accordingly — which is absolutely needed in our line of work.

I’m not advocating for cold showers, even though I’ve been doing them for the past year now, but I am an advocate of doing one difficult thing each day until you run out of things that make you shy away from a challenge.