What Happens After 30 Days of COLD SHOWERS? - This Will SHOCK YOU! | Dr. Susanna Søberg

we are overwhelmed our stress depression epidemic is just increasing so we need to change something this is preventing lifestyle diseases this is preventing depression this is preventing pain [Music] I've been looking forward to talking to you for many months now and I think over the past few years there's been a growing awareness of the benefits of deliberately exposing ourselves to the cult there's been lots of anecdotes I think vimhoff is absolutely popularized this across the world what I find interesting with you though Susanna is that you've actually gone and conducted some proper scientific research to actually help us identify what is really going on when we expose ourselves to the cold so right at the top given how reluctant many people are to expose themselves to anything called these days can you make the case as to why people should do it yeah there are so many reasons why people should do it so there is so much going on in the body when you go into the cold um so there's definitely physiological reasons why people should do this because it can actually benefit your health right away there's like this acute response that you will benefit from but also on the long term so this could actually prevent lifestyle diseases and also on a mental state you can say that you can use this as a way of increasing your stress threshold actually yeah and getting more confident actually that is one of the things that I discovered later on and not from the beginning so I started my research in looking into what happens in the body and since then I would just work my way around what else is going on yeah I think you've you've really touched on a few important things there for me like when I think about the colds and why I why my patients why the general public should consider you know intentionally exposing themselves to that cold I kind of put these benefits into three different categories the physical benefits so things like your metabolism potential benefits with weight loss taxi diabetes you know the immune system things like brown fat which we're going to talk about joint pain all all these things then I think about our mental health and well-being so exactly our resilience mood anxiety depression and then I think about Athletics and I think about recovery and endurance so it's quite incredible that one modality one thing cold exposure can potentially have so many different benefits right yeah yeah and you need to think about why it's actually this one thing why is it that it can do so many good things why is it that we cannot get appeal to do exactly all those things it can it cannot happen we we don't have that but you can go and into the cold and you can use it in very much very different ways so if you have pain you can go into the cold and you will have less pain and that will last for the day at least and if you are in a bad mood you can go into the cold as well and you will feel much better it's just you can use it in so many different ways you can use it for Recovery as you just said and I think that it's very difficult to find something else that is that great it can do so many good things you can have so many reasons to go and there is always something that the code can repair for you in your body so it seems like when I started my research I was pretty much looking into the brown fat which you just mentioned but when I met people out there swimming around and I asked them why do you use the cold and every time I got a different answer and every one of them seemed to have like one problem with this or one problem with that and help in different ways so it seems like maybe from an evolutionary point of view that this is something that we involved in of course but it's also something that we as human beings need to like reset our body in every way so it's like going into the cold that we just did just everything in in our system our mood our physiology so if you have pain that will go away so it just seems like it's gonna do everything good for us no matter what kind of pain or what kind of issues that we have yeah you say pain there yeah and I know when I hear the term pain now I think of physical pain and emotional pain and it's something I'll be thinking about for a while but I spoke to see this wonderful daughter a few weeks ago on the show called Dr Howard Schumer and he was talking about a lot of the research he's done on chronic pain and he was sharing how the body will have pain to a physical injury but also to an emotional injury and it shows up in the same part of the brain yeah and I think it's really great to connect that to the cold because as you say the cold is having these physical benefits but also these mental and emotional benefits as well yeah but it's also just our body and mind is connected of course so if we go into the cold it's going to change something physical right yeah and that will of course also connect with our brain and that's going to change something in the brain so the brain when we go into the cold there will be a release of neurotransmitters all these good chemicals in the brain and that will float around in your body as well and all these hormones so it's going to connect how you feel so if you can take away the the physical pain that is also what's going on happening in the in the mind this whole field of science versus anecdotes it's really interesting to me and one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you is because there is a lot of anecdotal knowledge and wisdom about the cult but I don't know anyone who studied it as much as you and it's it's really amazing to to say yeah you know humans have kind of known this for hundreds of thousands of years but you're now showcasing with your science what exactly might be going on so I'm definitely want to get into all of that I want to make this super practical for people as well but Susanna I thought near the start of this conversation I really want to address the issue that many people have which is I just don't want to get cold yeah like it's not for me if I speak to my wife about a cold shower or doing some cold immersion she will Point Blank reviews do that's not for me you know I'm not good with the chords exactly right so can you just speak to that at the start here yeah well yeah that is definitely the main thing the thing is that in our society we are now in a time where we don't want to get uncomfortable we are so used to seeking Comfort all the time and we we want that we want everything to be warm we want everything to be easy easy food fast food we want everything to be right at our hands and we have taught ourselves that the cold is not something that is useful for anything and I kind of understand why because well we haven't really for a long time known what does the code actually do for us is beneficial for us it's quite new that as you said that the science has kept up with this in intuitively good thing to do right so it's it's actually brand new that we know that this is good for us so that is why we're sitting here right we're talking about what is the benefits of this on a scientific level but for thousands of years we have known intuitively that this is good so if if we go back to um hypocritis let's go back to the the ancient times where they already knew that this is really really good so he said that using cold and heat actually for um these ancient philosophers from that time said that you should go into the cold water you should go into the hot water because it's good for your cardiovascular system and it's good for your heart so they already advised it back then yeah and people were doing this all over they called it thermalism so they were doing this everywhere and and and and it was something they everybody thought of as beneficial for them and there was no really proof of this but since thermalism and not until maybe today there has been Wars going on and also the Titanic uh disaster also kind of put a shadow over the cold water because then people found out that if you drown if you fall into very cold water you get hypothermic and you would die within 30 minutes yeah and that was not very good for the cold water and and and its reputation so no scientist at that time wanted to pick up this basic science and say well we need to study more on the beneficial sides of this because it really had this dark history now so then we actually not on so if you go back in the science literature you will find oh physiology studies but these are not that old actually they go back to the 70s or maybe the 80s and then up until today there are more and more studies on the the you can say the physiology of the cold but Up Until then people didn't want to really touch it because of all these accidents and and stuff that was going on back then but this is not this is of course accidents which we shouldn't compare to doing deliberate cold exposure so that is why we have catching up now but this was one of the questions I needed to have answered for myself why is it that we are so behind on This research why is it that I can come today and and and tell you about cold water exposure and brown fat and and the beneficial side of this and we are in 2022 so I think it's it's a bit late but we are picking up we are getting back to the terminal awesome yeah it's interesting to hear that historical kind of narrative I didn't know a lot of that actually um and when you mention the Titanic the first thing that came to my mind as you were saying that was that we don't not get in a car because there are car accidents and in a multi-car pile up on the motorway a lot of people may well die or get you know seriously injured yeah but we do it anyways but we still do it yeah we go no I'm still gonna drive or take a car or a bus here right so it's it is fascinating and I think I'm I'm really interested I always have been in terms of why a lot of the stuff that the science is now showing has been practiced by humans from all different parts of the world for years like you mentioned Hippocrates also said let food be thy medicine and Medicine bi food and now there's a growing recognition in the last 10 maybe 15 years that oh the food that you eat can actually be used in a medicinal way or a non-medicinal way and traditional Chinese medicine for years has been talking about that different parts of the body are more active at different times of the day yeah and you know I think Western science looked down on that for years and yeah you know in the last 10 years with Corona biology and this was saying oh yeah they were right yeah so I find I find that really really interesting do you think it's possible for everyone to start to embrace the cold or do you think some people like my wife for example if she says the cold is not for me is that something they should you know because the first time they go in they're struggling so they don't want to do it anymore is that a good reason for them not to do it at all no no not in my opinion because I mean the more the more they rejected the more they might even need it actually yeah because you need to you need to go into the cold multiple times to get at least just a little bit used to it so in the beginning it would definitely be very hard and that is something that you need to push through you can use it as a a way of also it's a it's the kind of training you can say just like going to the gym your muscles will be sore and going into the first cold shower or cold plunge will also hurt you in a way because the cold pain is there right but for every time you go to the gym or every time you go to the cold you can see that as exercise not only exercise in the code for your physiology but it's also a mental uh kind of workout that you're doing you're pushing yourself to the uncomfortable State and every time you do that you get a Little Bit Stronger not only in your in your cells but also in your mind so every time you can do that you push yourself a little bit you get more confident next time I can do this again yeah so going into the code this is in our DNA I mean we we're involved in the cold so if people say that well the code is not for me you can tell your wife well you're involved with the code the code and your ancestors did this all the time this is the reason why we are here so if they can do it we can do it and they get they they were healthy because they were living out there the code was just something that they embraced every day yeah and they would chase by lions and hunting all the time and then they relaxed so they also had this you can say going into the code but then they're also relaxed so this is called the eustress so this is the healthy kind of stress yeah so you stress your body in a very good way but then you also pause so you have like your calm maybe rest of the day or you're not too stressful at least but this modern society we're doing something completely different we have turned this upside down so now we are stressed all day and then we go do something that will also stress us and we don't find the peace in between so we have this kind of like dripful all the time all day of stress which then eventually would be chronic stress but going into the cold is uh is a very stressful it's it's very potent you know the temperature but it's very um it's very useful because you only do it at that time and then you're calm afterwards yeah so we need to learn what is actually stress it's such an important point you know you mentioned I guess comfort is killing us you know as as humans we've always been wired to make things easier to seek out Comforts but until recently even though we're wired that way we would have been exposed to discomfort pretty much every day you know I guess that the extreme of that is now where I don't know what it's like in Denmark but certainly here in the UK and I know in America you can literally sit on your sofa and on an app order whatever food you want and have it delivered to your door 10 or 15 minutes yeah later right so and often that food isn't let's say the most health promoting food that we could be eating that is an extreme version of how you know acquiring food is something we would always have required to put some effort into yes so hunt or to gather right and then even to cook it but every little bit of discomfort has been engineered out of our Lives movement escalators lifts right all these things now you don't have to move anymore you can still function I think the cold is just a brilliant example of that I totally agree with you that I think many people who struggle with the colds probably struggle with it because they're not exposed to it now I understand some people have got thyroid issues which can change your cold tolerance so I just want to be clear on that yeah I think for many of us we've narrowed our experience of Life everything's you know let's talk about temperature we've got heating or air conditioning at home and in the car and in the office so we're never being exposed so our whole world is coming inwards which is why presumably we have this low tolerance to anything low tolerance distress low tolerance to heat and I I absolutely agree with you that like regularly with these controlled doses of exposure to this form of stress will little by little start to widen that window so you know over time yes you're more tolerant to the colds but you'll also be more tolerant to the stress that you experience in everyday life yeah exactly yeah yeah I love that that taking the cold out of your everyday which we have done we have one close on we have very warm rooms we we sleep with big pillows and blankets and everything so we we are not exposing ourselves to something that we were actually born to do to to be evolved in in different temperatures and we actually know this from a very special organ that we have in our body nobody knows about this organ it's it's not something that we that we have explored that much but it's called the brown fat so the healthy Brown fat I call it healthy and it is healthy because but I just want to outline that it's healthy um so the the healthy Brown fat is quite opposite to our white fat and this special little bit Mystic organ that we have is is actually the temperature regulated that we have in our body and if we don't get exposed to temperature different temperatures changing on our skin then we are not using this organ in our body yeah and my many people were like well do we need it then because if we are not exposed to any different temperatures then we might not need it but then actually we have found out that this organ is not only controlling our temperature from the inside um it's actually also helping your metabolism so it has a huge impact on on our health and we can see in studies that if people don't have uh the healthy Brown fat we see that they have a higher they have more obesity they have their they have a larger higher BMI but I also have type 2 diabetes so there's definitely a correlation of less brown fat and and being overweight and having type 2 diabetes and have cardiovascular diseases and this is also increasing of course with age but we also see that if you have brown fat that your energy expenditure goes up and that you will have a lower blood pressure you will have less obesity and and not having um type 2 diabetes for example so people or scientists from I think it was about the Millennium actually so it's quite new that people are doing the all this research in it but we found out that if we can activate the brown fat it will not only increase our temperature from the inside but it will also use our glucose and it will use our fat from a bloodstream as fuel and this is really good for us because then we are cleaning up some of the stuff that we have put in and sitting out on our couch and eating all these very comforting food so we have too much of that this is why we have all these lifestyle diseases but the brown fat is not being used in our society because we are so comfortable all the time so if we can get cold on our skin we can activate the brown fat and they would do that immediately actually so as soon as you get in the cold or go outside actually just in a t-shirt you have code receptors on the skin sending a signal to the brain in the temperature regulating Center and that will release norepinephrine so or adrenaline you can also call it so this stressor will activate um your brown fat cells which will then take sugar and fat in as fuel to generate Heat so you actually get warmer by going into the cold so when your wife says I don't want to do this stuff for me because I'm so cold I would say well if you do just do it a little bit and you just keep practicing tell yourself that this is really good good so Center study have shown that winter swimmers get warmer by going into the cold then she will thank me at some time I hope yeah so she actually is the producer on this show so you know let's see when she hears this if she uh she keeps sitting or chops it out but I'm sure she'll keep it in Susan what you said that was fascinating right but let's just rewind a second you mentioned healthy Brown fat so by and large across Society the word fat has negative connotation absolutely for many years people you know have been fearing fats they don't want fat on their body they don't want fat in their food now regarding diet that started to change over the last 10 or 15 years where there's been a recognition that actually some fats are very healthy and you know certainly Health promoting for the body whereas certain fats are not right so yeah the narrative around fat when it comes to food and diet has started to change but I think it's really interesting to hear that even the fat in our body has you know for want of a better term kind of good fats and bad fats right so I know it's not a perfect term but this white fat that I think many of us are used to the fat under our skin by and large I think it's fair to say many people most people want less white fats yes but you're saying that we should all probably want to have more Brown fat in our bodies and one of the ways we can do that is with cold yes now across all ages water levels of brown fat like let's say in babies children adults as we get older so that's the first part of this question you know how does that change but then I'm also interested are we as a society losing Brown fat because we're in temperature control environments all the time therefore we have no need for it so I wonder if you could answer those two parts there please yeah really good questions and I think that we we definitely need to just talk a little bit about what is the brown fat and yeah and where where does it actually start so we are born with brown fat actually a lot of it so babies have a lot of brown fat actually on the back um and it depends you can say compared to the rest of the body it's quite a lot actually and that is because babies cannot shiver when they get cold because their muscles are not developed enough to to to generate heat so there are two systems in our body that could generate heat so it's the brown plant and it's also the muscles but the muscles are kind of too slow to to actually save us in in you can say in a dangerous situation where you are exposed to Coal so if you put a baby out on on the table without clothes it would definitely start a activating the brown fat immediately but yeah but but if it's less than six months oh it is not it cannot really shiver in the muscles so it it's really it's it's necessary for a baby to survive if it to have brown fat it makes you know his best no nature knows best exactly so but with age um scientists found that that it decreases with age but that also fits with you can say the time where we can actually use the muscles also to generate heat in our body so we maybe not we don't need as much Brown fat um as adults as we need as babies so probably that is why we get less of it but what we see is that um until the age of 40 the most people actually have brown fat and we also see that you can gain more Brown fat if you are exposed to stresses as cold which will then generate more ground fat so what we see is that after the age of 40 there is a decline and it's correlating with obesity and it's correlating with type 2 diabetes and and lifestyle diseases and we don't know really what comes first but if it's the Obesity and then less of the brown fat but it's also about the lifestyle right so if you are not moving if you're not exercising and you are not getting into cold you're not stressing your body in a healthy way you will get more of the white fat which is on our our stomach or yeah you want to get less of that but you also unfortunately the brown fat will disappear so there's actually studies showing from yeah I think it was some 2009 where they showed that people who sleep in a code room or people who sleep in a warm room for a month they measured on these MRI imaging they could see how much Brown fat do these people have and then they slept in the same in the in in a room at 19 degrees so colder at least not very cold but 19 degrees Celsius right that is okay cold and they saw that they increased the amount of brown fat but also that they get more insulin sensitive actually wow yeah so that is just one month sleeping in at 19 degrees they saw the increasing amount of brown fat and there's actually there's a picture in the book where you can you can see the brown fat that is some of my um research results actually in there so you can see where it's located um so the Imaging is of um the supracurricular bones where you can see the the largest Depot that we we have but it's also located down the spine wow everything is just the brown fat is close to the central nervous system which makes sense right because the cold is the main driver for activating our Brown fat yeah because it needs to save us as we involved as humans right so we can immediately when we get cold it can be activated and make this temperature control in the body and activate our metabolism because we need fuel to to to fuel these Brown fat cells who is taking up all this fat and sugar in our bloodstream yeah you know what I love about that that study you know a theme already which I keep bringing up is the reluctance of people to want to get cold I spoke to Dr Roger schweltz maybe a year ago or so on this podcast and he mentioned some of the research on the immune system and we'll get to that for sure in terms of what cold can do for the immune system which is really interesting really impressive to hear really helpful for people but you always get these comments yeah it's not for me you know the call but what you're saying there is just simply sleeping in a cool room so not a super hot central heating driven room even that alone will increase levels of brown fats that's probably quite achievable for people it is it is I mean it's so many people think that oh this Mystic new Brown fat you need to get into a cold top and you need to be there for 10 minutes or something like that it's very extreme I think it's very extreme that you go into a cold and sit there for a very long time some people do it for half an hour it's not it's not that that I'm trying to promote at least I'm just saying that try to get us try to get cold in some way if if it's a cold shower then do that if you like cold plunging then do that but you can also turn down the heater in your in your living room and just sleep very cold I mean if I ask my grandparents they would say I always sleep cold I have the window open and as a child I was like why why is why are you doing that and they always say because it's healthy for us yeah but I was brought up in another you can say time where we were trying to get more comfortable even more your grandparents knew it yeah they knew it but they didn't need your research they didn't need a scientific suddenly they didn't need PubMed they're like this is healthy we know it isn't it no you know funnily enough like we know from the Sleep research that cool the rooms promote better sleep yet as it gets cool I understand people don't want to get cold I understand I don't want to be very sensitive I understand that a lot of people are struggling economically they're struggling to heat their homes I do appreciate that um so I want to make sure we we're being super sensitive to that but at the same time I think there's many of us who are overly heating our rooms I know I you know the amount of times I've spoken to my patients about why don't you just reduce the temperature in your room at night and they come back say oh I went to bed feeling a little bit cold yeah but I had the best night's sleep ever exactly you know but again we're conditioned away from discomfort so we go to bed and we think oh it's I need to put the heating on I need to put the heater on because it's too cold yeah you're actually going to sleep better as well yeah exactly I also find it really interesting what you said at the above the age of 40 it looks as though we're losing Brown fats and then I think to all the public conversations around obesity metabolic child type 2 diabetes and people are talking about you know the lack of movement in society they're talking about how diet has changed and the sorts of foods many of us are eating and it's easy to put everything down to food and exercise then we're learning from the Sleep research how sleep deprivation increases your risk of obesity how are you going to eat more when you've not slept well etc etc and I think we're learning that it's multifaceted there may not just be one reason there's lots of different factors and you're now bringing up for me well what what is coming first are we you know could Brown fats be a huge player here you know maybe not causative in and of itself but maybe as part of the strategy like being temperature controlled all the time means we're losing this brown fat and I think did you mention it it's like a furnace it is you can call it like it's maybe it's you can call it a radiator so it's our inner heater and you can say the camera stat is our brain because the brain is increasing the the adrenaline the no adrenaline which is gonna activate the brown fat but it's going so quickly so our inner heater the brown fat will get activated as soon as you just get a little bit cold on your skin so it's kind of like balancing our temperature so so what we talked about before also you don't need to get into a freezing cold water to activate your brown fat um and you don't need to be there for a very long time to get any benefits from it so just getting cold from different reasons will keep your brown fat alive and what I mean alive is that the brown fat cells they need to get activated to stay alive it's like a muscle you can compare the brown fat to a muscle it is also another color from white fat actually so the white fat is more yellowish and the brown fat has its brown color from from mitochondria so in the brown fat cells there are these energy Fabrics called mitochondria and there are more of those in the brown fat compared to the white fat cells that is why we can activate the brown form by cold and that is taking up the sugar and the fat from the bloodstream as fuel but also you can increase the efficiency of these cells and one of my hypothesis from my studies was that could we get more efficient Brown fat cells meaning that could we generate more heat from the brown fat cells if we keep exposing the brown fat cells to coat um or will we increase the amount of tissue that we have with the brown fat tissue so that is actually why we did this study in Winter swimmers because I wanted to see if something um you can say and nice for some people at least for a princess swimmers it's nice to go and win to swim an activity like that could that be a way to keep our Brown fat alive to keep our metabolism up and keep us healthy because I think it's a bit underrated actually the brown fat it is Mystic but it's also underrated what is doing for us but we can definitely see in my studies and also in humans that if you don't have that much Brown fat that you will have more obesity more lifestyle diseases higher cholesterol levels and a higher blood pressure if you're Keen to get started with cold immersion but you're not sure where to start we actually film Susanna taking me through my very first cold immersion it's a step-by-step guide it's super practical I think you'll get a lot of value from it so if you want to take a look at that right now all you have to do is click the link in the first description box below so it's definitely something of a a joker you can say in the body but as you said it was works together with all the other things but it reminds us that if we go out use stressors as cold to activate our central nervous system and our metabolism it would definitely it's definitely an easy way I think to keep ourselves just a little bit more healthy it's a powerful image that the brown fats in our body is going to start sucking out the the sugar and the fat and start burning it yeah that's a very powerful image you know the amount of people across Society who are trying to improve their health lose a bit of their weight or more of that weight depending on you know their current state of health and this could be a relatively simple potentially free for many people part of an overall strategy maybe not the only thing they do but maybe it's part of everything else you just add this in it's another maybe 10 or 15 percent of the way who knows you know I find that really interesting I'm also fascinated by you know when did we first discover Brown fat do you know when that was 1531 the first time we discovered the brown fat was by this scientist who was exploring the physiology of hibernating animals and he caught up this animal he found the brown fat and he was like well this is a Mystic kind of fat or or tissue or muscle or whatever and he found out that this was activated by cold and that only hibernating animals actually had this so he found out that the hibernating animals needed the brown fat to survive through the winter because then they could use that as the inner heater during hibernation of course but later on they found out that the scientists found out that this is also present in humans and it's also not not hibernating animals which is quite fascinating I think if you look at squirrels for example squirrels are hibernating as well and they go down to two degrees when they're hibernating which is if they find it's super fascinating that they can stay alive and such cold in such cold and that's because they have brown fat and this this has been studied but this is many years ago but all these studies that have been that scientists have done in this have been like well they came to a new a wall where they saw oh we cannot really go further with this because we cannot get funding because now it's kind of like disproving that this is only for hibernating animals now humans have it as well we found out but that is not until the 1960s or something where we saw it by by coincidence actually that is quite fascinating that so many years we knew about this in animals but we were kind of like well we don't need this it's kind of like not not needed for people because we are living in houses now and what is this actually doing it's amazing that that it was first discovered in the 1500s and what are we now why 600 years 700 years later yeah you know something that we've known that's incredible I'm also thinking I mean this is brilliant Suzanne it's really getting me thinking about for potential implications across Society these scientific discoveries but we talk a lot about muscle right and sarcopenia and as we get older we lose muscle mass so arguably strength training is it becomes more important as we get older yeah and I'm I'm kind of feeling something similar with brown fat whereby we have it as babies and you're saying after the age of 40 we're starting to see less and less of it so arguably it's more important potentially I'm putting it to you that yeah we look after it above the age of 40. yeah but I'm also thinking I wonder if we had studied humans 200 years ago before all these modern comforts you know when people were more active when they weren't living in these temperature control environments I wonder back then would Brown fat have been lower after the age of 40. you know is this a modern problem it's a modern problem definitely I'm pretty sure it is because we if you go back we don't we didn't see people at age 40 and above being obese like today we we didn't see that so it's definitely from the from the 80s or something like that we see obesity and and lifestyle diseases increasing a lot and we also see that um that exactly around the same age we we see that people have less brown fat or it's getting inactivated in a way so what I actually think is that if we use the code AS prevention also you can keep your brown fat alive if you keep activating it it will be more efficient it will also no it's it's like any any other thing in our body if we use it then it's useful and then the body keeps it if you don't use your muscles they will they will also get smaller right so if you use your brown fat and you exercise it with always changing the temperature then you will also tell your body well I actually need this I need to increase my metabolism I need to I need to get cold I need to you to adjust my temperature so I won't die from hypothermia and and if you keep your your organ alive like that you also get healthier so that is actually what just practical what you're doing when you're going into the code you are telling your brown fat I need you and I need you to be very efficient so please increase more mitochondria and please disband so it's like across Society we've traded in our Brown fats yeah for white fats yes we have yeah you know another way of looking at it it's it's really it's really quite remarkable look we mentioned the potential benefits for obesity and type 2 diabetes and you know Brown fat is one of the key mechanisms there for us to think about we mentioned resilience and how you know deliberately doing something uncomfortable is going to make it easy for you to cope with that stress tolerate the cold and that's going to transfer to other areas of your life that's interesting let's go about the immune system a lot of people are always looking particularly at this time of year how can we look after our immune system there's a beautiful section in the book on this you talk about lots of different studies um I wonder if you could start off with a cold shower one because cold showers are probably one of the most achievable things for people across the world right they can probably get into a cold shower they don't have to go anywhere join a club somewhere all that kind of stuff so but that was a pretty powerful study I thought yeah actually too it's a randomized controlled trial which was done in um in Amsterdam I think it's in in Holland in the Netherlands but the study is about um cold showers versus hot showers you can say so every all the the participants in this study they were they were divided into different groups we don't need to go into the nitty-gritty stuff about that but the the thing was that they wanted to see what happens if if you end your shower your hot shower on cold what happens after 30 days if you do that and if you do it for 30 seconds 60 seconds and 90 90 seconds which is not very long right okay so people are having a hot shower they have a hot shower and they did literally that at the end they're finished with cold but it's either 30 seconds cold 60 seconds cold or 90 seconds cold yeah okay that's not long that's not long it but it's long if you don't like the cold so and it's also very stressful right so going turning the you can say if you turn to to the cold right away it's very stressful and then 30 seconds can be very long but you can build this up just like the cold plunge or going into the Seas it's just about training this but what they found I found very fascinating actually was that they saw that ending on the cold shower for 30 seconds 60 seconds or 90 seconds it doesn't really matter apparently so 30 seconds isn't off but they saw that they have less sick days from work so let's take days from work could be an outcome of maybe boosting your immune system and that way you also feel better because of the chemicals in the brain so it could also be that it's the whole package of like going into the code and getting this increase in all the brain chemicals but also a boost in your immune system so this boost has in a way kept them from being that sick that they needed to stay home at least yeah so compared to the control group so I find that's very fascinating so you don't have to go long it's just if you can build up to 30 seconds then you would boost your immune system that's the general point that I was going to make um whether we're talking about cold showers or cold plunge or winter swimming yeah was you know is it the law of diminishing returns so do you get most of the benefits right at the start like with the cold shower 30 seconds appears to be just as good as 60 or 90. yeah and you see now a lot of ego I think being brought into the cold immersion World which I want to touch on later because I think it's actually problematic where people are trying to out compete each other exactly yeah and I think just bringing it back to make it practical it's the first bit right that gives most of the benefit I think the reason why the first 30 seconds is just enough is actually that there's something called humesis and humesis is the the healthy stress healthy stress is when you you just shock yourselves right from the cold shower or going into the plunge and that is when the cell thing oh this is dangerous oh we need to do something to protect ourselves and then they built it builds itself stronger and that is kind of like phase two so the acute the shock and then it it makes itself stronger more robust in the second phase but there's also a third phase where you can exhaust the cells meaning that you overdid your stress you overdid the stress which means that it comes to be being chronic you can say even though you can say 90 seconds in the shower is not that long how can that be too much for the cells well it you need to think about temperature as something that is berries it is actually very stressful for the body so you don't need to do it for a long time you just need to awaken the cells and just you do it acutely so the acute response is what we need and that is called the micro stress micro stress is exactly what you you can say The Sweet Spot so you will have the the healthy the healthy stress and then you don't need to go further you don't need to sit in a cold top for 30 minutes because then you have exhausted your cells and you will definitely flatten out the benefits and we see that from Sona actually right yeah so there's this um Sona studies so you can say that temperature either going cold or going hot it's it's kind of like on it's on a scale right so and in the middle you have the neutral temperature but if you go very hot or you go very cold it's it's the body's going to respond to that in practically the same way because the the body will tell you well this is this you can have but this you but now it's getting too much too warm or too too cold for too long time and that's going to exhaust the cells so we see in these um Finnish sauna cohort studies which I find very fascinating they are so fascinating they are I think they are up to now 27 28 years where they have followed these 2 000 to 3 000 uh sauna bathers and in Finland they go into the sauna but they also go into the code yeah it could be a CEO it could also be rolling in the snow Yeah so different kinds of code exposure so they like go back and forth to the Sona but what they see is that if people go into the sauna um 19 to up to 29 30 minutes we see that they have all the good healthy benefits on the long term so this study is a cohort study so they follow these people for many years and they see that they have all these healthy benefits of a better cardiovascular system and and the lower risk of blood clots in in the legs and also less stroke and so on but they are also see that if you go further than 30 minutes in the sauna the benefits will flatten out or even actually increase the risk of all these this outcomes that they have looked at so you can you can definitely look at this as well heat is also a stressor and that is called also but cold is very much more potent than the heat is we have more cold receptors also on the skin yeah I read that you in your book you mentioned there's three to ten times more cold receptors on our skin than heat once yeah but why do you think that is well you are more you can say you would you would die definitely quick quickly from being too cold so from Nature's side this is very clever right it's really really clever because we need the code receptors to tell us immediately now something is really really wrong you can get hypothermic within 15 minutes in cold water and you will die yeah actually so we need more code receptors that is also why it's more potent so you cannot say well if I can stay in the sauna for 30 minutes or 19 minutes then I can also stay in a coat top with water that is zero degrees for 19 minutes it's not the same because it is 10 times definitely more 10 times more potent than the heat so there's a relativity it's like um relativity for athletes listening you can't you know you can't equate running a marathon 26.2 miles with cycling 26.2 miles no it's you know it's not the same it's not the same you'd have to cycle a lot more to have an equivalent effect and I think it's a useful way to think about cold and heat you you maybe you need a bit more heat exposure to get some of those benefits but you don't need much cold I think it's a wider Point here Susanna which I really want to just pause on for a minute because I think the research you've done is phenomenal right I think you are really bringing some solid scientific evidence to something that many cultures have known for many years but I think one of the things that puts people off is that they associate it with you know huge time commitments yeah I have to go in and dug my head in and go cold for 10 minutes in a in an eye sponge with ice in it and sure for some people they love that right and they go with their friends and they use it as a way to increase their exercise tolerance so I'm not I'm not criticizing that necessarily but I think what you're saying here is really really important you don't need much there are incredible benefits for your physical health for your mental resilience for your weight for your metabolism you just need a little bit and one thing I saw in the summer there's a there's this brilliant company in the UK called Brass Monkey so in fact they've loaned me a cold immersion it arrived yesterday and fantastic I know later on you're gonna you're gonna talk me through I'm a little bit nervous so we're gonna make a video of that and put it out there for people to watch if you want to see I'm a little nervous because I didn't do it um and I think they've made it really easy for people because it's electronic and you can just turn the temperature to where wherever you want it okay oh fascinating yes there's a cost implication to that for sure for many people it'll be something that they can't afford or don't wish to invest in I completely understand that but there's a lot of high profile people in the UK who have got these brass monkeys and what I saw in the summer is there was a bit of friendly banter between them saying um he's been up for seven minutes at this temperature I'm gonna go in for eight minutes now at this temperature and I get it it's a bit of friendly banter yeah but there is another side to that the other side to that is that I think a that can be dangerous potentially if people are really trying to muscle through with their minds and stay longer and ignore the signs I think the other thing for me is but this feels like quite an individual tolerance type piece where you know everyone's going to have a different tolerance for someone who's maybe never exposed themselves a cold in the past like 30 seconds might be the equivalent of someone who's super trained in four minutes exactly so I don't think you can compare you cannot I think I think potentially it's problematic yeah I think there's this is one of the things that I would like also to get to get across that is that going into a coal plunge or winter swimming is is not a it should not be a competition it is not a sport like that it is it is an individual thing that you do and you are tolerant to code in very different ways and so people people are more tolerant than other people and this this is this is because of very different things because there's body composition which will make it very easy for some or easier at least for some and somehow just actually more co-tolerant already because they maybe work outside so outside workers have more cold tolerance than people sitting in front of the computers all the time all day and sitting in an office but there's also um that people should recognize that some people just have a more sensitive central nervous system than other people have so for example if you suffer from anxiety or something like that then you have a more sensitive nervous system right but that should not only be the only reason I'm just saying that people are different and this should be done in a very individual way so you cannot compete and competing in this will definitely just trespass the the you can say um the the threshold for when your cells are getting too too stressed you can say but it's also uh it's a different thing if you want to sit in a cold top for a long time that is not about the benefits the healthy benefits then then it's about the mind control I think so if you go above two three four minutes in the in the code the top or in Winter swimming or whatever you do your cold exposure then it's about something else I think then it's about getting through something getting through the stress and try to see how long can you go and I I don't recommend that because you can do that with other things but I don't think the call should be there because then there are the the downsides of that and risks real risks yeah exactly and I don't dunk the head all the time and I'm like well you don't really need to do that yeah well we'll get to those practical things I think that's really interesting but you can get yourself into trouble here if you stay in really cold water for too long and stop paying attention to signals you know you you can presumably get frostbite and actually real damage as well I'm not I'm not saying that to put people off I think we're just trying to emphasize the point yeah don't let your ego get involved and start competing with other people maybe that's more of a problem with men than women I don't know I think so yeah yeah yeah I see that I see that do you see that yeah I see that definitely women do this for other reasons and I think it's very funny because I find wherever I go I just went to the around the Innovation Round Table Summit for corporates in Copenhagen amazing and more women have signed up to go and take the code plunged with me or not with me as a guided thing right but they seem to be a little bit I don't know if women are just more Brave in this sense but they they kind of like go to the cold for other reasons than men I think they go because of the experience but also of the health benefits and of the way they feel afterwards because afterwards you get this mental balance and better mood and I think for many women also during menopause and I think this is a way to like get this calmness in your body but for men they are driven by something else I think of competition but this is also just nature right I think it's good but I think it's what I want to say is that I want to emphasize why is the cold healthy for us but I also want to emphasize that that there's like there's also a threshold there's like we need to learn how much is good for us so not just right right now I think it's a jungle everybody's just oh doing everything and just staying there for 30 minutes and this is potentially very dangerous because they get hypothermic and and one of the things we know this from is something called the after drop um and that is your core temperature decreasing after you have been in the cold so it's not to put people off or anything this but it's just to tell that doing something extremely uh like staying in the cold plunge for a very very long time you need to know that your core temperature would decrease after you go out of the cold because when you go out your Your Vessel will will um dilate again and your blood vessels yeah exactly your blood vessels and the warm blood in your core will go through out through your muscles and tissue that is very cold and that will go back to your core again of course and then the temperature receptors will pick that up and send the signal to the brain wow now it's getting even colder and that is because the body is of course trying to heat itself up but it's getting a little bit colder it's not could that be then helpful for people in the evening because we know one of the key signals to fall into a deep relaxing sleep is core temperature yeah dropping yeah so I'm just wondering if there is this after effect could there be some potential benefits in doing it in the later parts of the day where you're sort of trying to assist that temperature drop well it's yeah so there are other things going on as well when you go into the cold you have a release of you you will activate your stress uh your stress system right and you don't want to get too stressed before you go to bed um but on the other hand as you said we get this decrease in in cold temperature and that is actually we can see that also in in we have seen that in in my studies as well that that our core temperature decreases and that is also what's what makes us sleep and pushes us into the sleep but um the stress that you experience from the cold plunge will probably also keep you a little bit awake yeah so but the funny thing is that when I started winter swimming I got very tired afterwards because I couldn't heat myself up as good as I can now of course because now I am already adapted to the cold so I don't shiver as much as I I did I used to but I got really I got really sleepy afterwards and I think that is actually because my core temperature went down and I must say that despite that I just said that um that maybe a cold plunge before going going to bed or a few hours before is maybe not that a great idea from a theoretical level you can say but but on the other hand when I have done it I don't feel that I am alert or anything I don't feel it afterwards I felt I feel the mental balance afterwards because we also activate the parasympathetic nervous system which is our relaxing part of our nervous system so if we can stay in the cold water enough time to get over the cold shock then we get into this relaxed mood you can say relaxed mode and I think that when I do that I could go home and sleep yeah I think for me that speaks to that the individual nature of all of us yeah exactly so it probably depends what's going on in your life right so you know if you're someone with huge amount of stress in your life that you're struggling to manage and cope with well maybe the colder a particular part of the day is going to have a different impact yeah compared to someone who's got you know maybe minimal stress in their life and I imagine some people will do a cold Plunge in the evening and can't sleep whereas others it'll probably be the best thing they can do exactly what defines cold like when we say cold water yeah is there a temperature at which we you know it's officially now cold water I don't I don't know if if stuff I say is anything official or anything but I I kind of like when I wrote my book when I started like researching to this uh to to writing this book I wanted to find out what is cold water I couldn't really find the answer but what I did then is looking at at what temperature have we Statistics and Records showing that people got hypothermic and maybe even ending out being an accident or some people actually dying where can we see that the temperature was actually driving that and what I found was that 15 degrees Celsius and Below you could get hypothermic from that but if you stayed in the world 15 degrees Yeah 15 degrees Celsius 15 degrees Celsius and Below yeah but it's all relative I think so if you want to activate your brown fat for example you can definitely do that by just going into water that is just a little bit colder than your skin so as soon as as soon as you go into something environmentally that is just a bit colder than yourself then you get an activation of uh in different degrees of course so if if you have 19 degrees in in a room you will activate your brown fat because that is colder than you're used to but it's also colder than your skin so you will have an activation so it's all relative I think you should think about it that way so cold water at 15 degrees will activate anybody's stress response so I think that is and also this is based on accidents uh from from also drowning accidents so fifth integration below you can say that is definitely cold water and I guess that speeds are the point we're sort of covering at the moment which is it doesn't need to be ice cold water with visible ice right because we often see that online people are in ice and again if you're trained for that yeah you want to do that hey cool but to make it really accessible to people you don't have to do that no yeah that's really interesting I have actually um I have looked into so um what I've been doing the last eight years is studying this of course but also the the relative difference of temperature and what what is the impact on on our body so what I did was actually I I've made these different programs and made a course so people can go and and you can say follow this and have a safe way to get started that is one thing but also you can say a course where you will that is individualized saying that they followed these principles and in that way they will get safely through uh starting out as as code launcher or winter swimmer or what you want to be yeah because that is what I feel that people ask me all the time so how do I get started and I can give them some tips how to get started but eventually people write me oh I I I kind of lost track because yeah I I couldn't find the motivation I couldn't find out what to do next and I see people do this with ice and do I need to do that as well but I think that um people should think about the cold as something that is very relative you don't need the ice as you said it's something that already happens as soon as your body temperature is just decreased just a little bit so you can build it up yeah and you can go to the ice eventually but you don't need to start there yeah that's super empowering look I think your book's got loads of practical guidance as well it's got all the scientific studies it's got some beautiful photos and illustrations I think it's great that it's really going to shine a light on just how many different organs in the body are positively affected by this I think an online course is great as well but we'll definitely put a link to that in our show notes so people can sign up and and find it and use it to help them I know some of those principles you're going to walk me through after we've recorded today yes in this cold plunge and it's a pretty cold day already today so in fact that's a good point when you're going in let's say winter swimming yeah or let's say a coal Plunge in your garden or at the gym for example how much does the air temperature versus the water temperature play a role so in the summer for example when people are super hot and they're like yeah I'm gonna go I'm gonna go and do some cold plunge or have a cold shower it feels relatively easier I'm guessing on hot summer days than on this cool autumnal winter day here at the moment outside you know do you know much about that is there is presumably there's a difference in our perception of cold depending on the air temperature yeah depending on the air temperature depending on what temperature your skin is already also what core temperature do you have if you are on the beach on the summer day you will have you'll probably be very warm but the relative difference of your skin temperature and then going into the water at I don't know about other places but in Denmark the water never gets really warm the scene is like it could be up to maybe 22 degrees or something like in the summer and if your skin is then burning hard from staying on the beach you you can actually go in and actually have a little bit of a cold shark okay in Denmark at least but so the the relative difference is very important here but as soon as you go into water that is 22 degrees you would you would it will only take a few seconds for you to get adapted to that temperature of course but you can use cold and heat all year around and I think this is something I think we should use this in our um daily Health practice I think we should think about temperature change as something that is super healthy and natural and cheap and even free for all almost all that we can use this in our daily life to to add on to our training to add on everything else that we do and it's so easy and it's so fast it's not very time consumable I think to do this it is very very easy quick and you can you can do it all year round also in the summer so I don't think that people should think about it only as winter swimming I know my book is called winter swimming but that is because we we name it that way but actually all year round we can do we can do this also if you have your your plunge for example you can use this in the summer and standing in the Sun for just a bit and going into the cold water I mean you would definitely have and more of a shock at a higher temperature water water temperature degrees in the summer because the relative difference of your skin temperature and the water is gonna be the outcome of that so basically what you're saying is that it's going to be easier for me today because it's already cold exactly so you can stand I'm feeling even more pressure now before before we do it it's basically survive well I've got this as I say I've got you know brass monkey have loaned me this uh unit for I hope a few weeks um so I'm looking forward to experimenting with it obviously we've covered my wife and let's see if I can get her into it over the next few weeks um my kids are similar ages to yours twelve and nine any kind of tips and advice as to whether I should be doing this with them anything to look out for I would very much like to I'd like to model certain behaviors to my kids all the time you know they're going to see Daddy very shortly going in every morning probably and I suspect they may want to have a go so what do you think to that safe to do so any guidance you'd give me for that yeah I think it's safe to do so because you are there um always think about everything cold plunging winter swimming as something social um I don't I don't tell I always tell people to always bring a swim body and it could be your it could be a wife that could be something you would tell well I need to have someone with me all the time but with your kids of course you need to be there and one thing that I looked into I think I also write about it in the book but um more and more people bring their kids um to Winter swimming and plunging stuff and I think it's a it's a good idea based on what I've found um but there is very it's very important to think about the children as they're very much smaller right they have a bigger surface area to relative to their Mass meaning that if they go into cold water they will be able to keep that cold temperature just as long as an adult I have found studies showing that but they will definitely have a faster decrease in cold temperature right after meaning because they have so much surface and that much less Mass to keep the temperature up so that means that what I advise people to do is go if they bring their children that they just do a quick dip a quick dip in the ocean because they will have the benefits of that that was you can say healthy stress their cells and they will get an an increase in all the good chemicals in the brain and get this mental balance the state and and calmness afterwards just like adults would but if they stay as long as adults they that this is really risky I think they will get hypothermic so in Practical terms and I know every child is different and depending which country you live and the air temperature and the temperature of the water it's all going to be a bit different but something like 30 seconds seems reasonable I would I wouldn't put a number on it I think I think yeah I think it's very important that people also kids are taught before they go in how to listen to their own body and this is something that nobody is actually very good at today because we have for many years in Western medicine been taught that if there's something wrong we will get we will get a pill or something we don't know how to listen to our own body we don't know how to concentrate or Focus or anything how can I feel a signal from my body well if you co-plunge you will at some point and that is what I think you should tell your kids at some point you will feel you you feel now this is too much you get a little bit of a chill yeah you can feel maybe down the spine or something or on on the arms I also hear that then you know okay this is enough and then you get up yeah it would take about a minute to get over the cold shock so as soon as you go in or maybe actually standing in the wind for for just a bit before you go in you will activate the code shock response um and to get you can say to the calmness and and full activation of your parasympathetic nervous system and getting this calm State of Mind you will need to get past that but I think that adults should do that and I think that if if you train your kids and they try this multiple times they can also get there but I wouldn't say that they should stay in there for multiple minutes just like we have so much research on on the physiology of of adults but we don't have that on kids yeah I I mean there's so much there that I love Susanna that speaks to my hearts one of the main reasons I would like to take my kids in is to teach them resilience to teach them that they can cope with hard things yes to teach them about the power of their breath and if they can control their breath slow it down they can change their experience of stress their experience of cold frankly their experience of life I always try and do things like this with my kids because I kind of feel across Society you know we're so keen on safety now and I get it I understand it okay I'm not trying to say we should expose everyone to everything and people get sick and people get hurt but I think we have I think we've gone too far everything's now trying to be so safe no element of risk I think it's sanitizing our lives and I think I think we all it speaks to this sort of idea of comfort doesn't it we we need to expose ourselves to discomfort we need to do things sometimes where there is an element of risk but we can do it in a controlled way I'm not talking about throwing the kids in the ocean when you can't swim it's like no no with me observing and some cold water what happens when they do it and I suspect and you know I don't know yet because I've not done it with them but even if they struggle at first and within a few days they're like oh you know I can now do 30 seconds I couldn't get in the first day exactly that feeling of self-worth and inner confidence it's worth it's Priceless yeah there's nothing better than that I think that's an important message you mentioned cold shock and we can even get it just standing in cold winds yeah and there's a few terms I I wonder if you could explain you you've mentioned the after drop so how after you've exposed yourself to cold you know your temperature can keep dropping afterwards there's also this term called cold shock response and Diving response I wonder if you could explain those terms please yeah so the cold shock response is when you so when you go into the cold water as soon as you step in you will activate the the co-receptors in your skin and that was sent a signal to the brain saying wow this is very very cold so norepinephrine will be released and that will contract your blood vessels so you won't have all the blood in your skin um as soon as you get more into the water and you submerge up to up to the neck you can do that you will also activate the diving response and that is actually activating your parasympatic nervous system um so you have like an activation of both the the stress response in your body but also the calmness you can say at the same time so the code shock on any part of your skin yeah activates the sympathetic nervous system which is the stress the stress the nervous system yeah exactly and if you get it what up to your neck so what covering your shoulders or is that is Are there specific receptors that we need to cover in code for this diving response to be activated I don't know if it's if you can get it from only submerging your legs but I think I don't know that but I think that if you go up to up to your neck up to your shoulders you would definitely have that activation and that's one of the fascinating things for me about cold from studying the research and reading your book is this idea that cold activates the sympathetic arm of our nervous system and the parasympathetic part of our nervous system and I to my knowledge I'm not sure of anything else I've come across that does both at the same time this is I think it's fascinating because that is exactly why when people ask me should I do um should I do cold showers is that just as good as going into a code doing a cold dip and I think exactly that with the activation of both part of your central nervous system is where you benefit more from doing the cold dip so when you have that activation of both sides you also have a conflict of course in the body and that is where you can say well it's also a bit of a stressor up for the heart of course because you have the fight and flight system going up making making your heart rate going up but also the parasympathetic nervous system trying to get the heart rate down and that will make that little conflict in the in your body yeah but I guess this whole thing this whole idea of a controlled form of stress is talking about you know exercising and working out your nervous system yeah exactly you know and that's training your brain to get to get more comfortable in a stressful situation yeah yeah you're training your body you're training your mind at the same time and it's it's kind I think it's it's kind of amazing and I I the more I research and this the more I dug into it the more I found out that this is not only this is of course not only from a physiology level a good thing but it's also as you said before it's like pushing your your confidence in yourself and we see that a lot yeah we see that all the time and I was I was like when I went out to uh to watch winter swimmers in the beginning when I started my research I was not a winter swimmer at the beginning I was like what is going on when they jump into the water they are a bit scared some of them and then when they come up they like dunk themselves on the chest like and saying like noises like Tarson they look like superheroes they looked so confident and I was like then I don't understand but I need to find out but it took me actually a while to figure out what was actually going on the confidence that people get from this short time you can say it's a success every time you go and I've been winter swimming for years now three years but I feel the success every time I go so it's kind of also a way to boost your your self-worth but it's also your confidence and when I can get across that stressful situation every time I go I know that I can also do that in all other situations for sure for sure you can you can tell that to your kids because when you push yourself in this way you can you can take this way of conquering a stressful situation in other other life situations and knowing that I could get through this then I can also get through something else yeah speaking about mood and depression and anxiety things which are rampant and increasing at the moment there's many ways to look at those conditions and it's becoming clear that there's so many elements so far modern lives that are contributing and if we can change various aspects of our lifestyle we can get improvements and you know I'm thinking about this idea of um a window of Tolerance you know being very narrow now for many of the reasons we've already mentioned and if I think about a lot of the patients who I've seen over the past couple of decades with depression a lot of the time they talk about you know apathy indifference this very narrow experience of life and I have just very powerful image in my mind at the moment about you know things like cold or even heat just almost like shocking them out of this kind of very narrow experience of life and broadening it and giving much more perspective yeah exactly does that does that sort of fit with your understanding yeah exactly I think the exactly that was what I found out when I was researching to my studies but also to my book I didn't know that I was going to write this book at that time I was just very keen on understanding what was actually going on in the body and I was very focused on the body because I was studying the the brown fat which is a physical organ yeah yeah but I was also very puzzled by the whole thing because then I went to the mind and I needed to read all about what is happening in the in in in our brain when we go into the code also when what happens when you go into to the heat in the sauna but what I couldn't connect was that feeling when people get into the cold and this perspective that I could hear people talk about and they talked about it in the same way and I know they didn't talk together about telling me this so everybody talked about it in the same terms of like feeling in this kind of like send mood afterwards and being in mental balance but also like this people told me that it's very difficult to understand completely what it actually does so but it definitely gives some kind of perspective in life and this perspective comes from getting out of your out of your body out of your mind a bit being shocked a bit but in a controlled way I think you know it's thinking about mood issues I'm not sure there's anything better than going in cold to immediately get you out of your head you literally you can't be in your heads you can't think about your anxieties and your worries and your email inbox and your shopping list you can't do it in the cold because straight away it brings you into your body doesn't it is exactly you cannot because you go into survival mode right so as soon as you go into the water the the sympathetic the fight and flight system will start and in that situation if you think about us back when we when we were hunters for example we could not think about oh what is actually going on back home or we are sitting in the water and think about what to shop next tomorrow or what I need to to buy you cannot think about anything else you are in the moment whether you you want to or not the code would get you there sorry since you're up if you are enjoying this content there's loads more just like it on my channel so please do take a moment to press subscribe hit the notification Bell and now back to the conversation immediately you cannot decide this you would definitely get there immediately so that is why it's good when you asked me before is this something we should tell anybody everybody should everybody do this and I think yes we are in a society right now where we are overwhelmed we are overwhelmed in a way where we can see statistics of depression anxiety and stress curves going right up you can go to the World Health Organization and see this Statistics and it's it's it's it's actually a bit scary I think and what what are we doing we are trying our best I would say we're trying our best to solve it in a way um making more medication but we have so much medication also we have so much and we are fighting to get more to help people but I think we are missing the point the point is that we are just working ourselves into this more and more and more and forgetting where do we actually come from yeah but can we do something completely different and take ourselves back to something we know this will actually work I love that where do we come from that that's kind of it in a nutshell isn't it this is who we are this is who we are and there's a there's a there's a beautiful section on page two 143 if your English version of your book let me just pull it up yeah do you mind me reading it to you no no please please um these are your words and I underline them so I really love them nature with its simple but harsh presence does not deceive as opposed to the internet and social media and their endless guides and advice nature is sincere it's neither for nor against us so powerful Susanna the way you wrote that I think is beautiful and for me if he speaks this idea that try it right you know sure listen to what I've said or you've said read your book right but that information is going to do nothing right it's going to do nothing unless you actually try it do it yeah and the code will be your teacher yeah it will it will probably showcase all these things that they're hearing about in our conversation it will teach them if they do it and I feel like a lot of the time these days and I don't know again I don't know what it's like in Denmark but I feel these days you know there's so much information everywhere online and loads of great people online who are sharing information for sure but I think sometimes we we're consuming all this information I think yeah that's great and we we drop a heart or we we drop a like on Instagram and we think that we've done something but all we've done is actually move our thumb yeah it's the truth all we've done is move our thumb like half a millimeter forwards yeah and we think yeah you know I'm doing something we're doing nothing where's I'm just trying to bring it back to the cold yeah it will get you out of your head yeah it will shock your system it will bring you into your body exactly and it'll remind us from where we've come yeah exactly one of one of the questions I often get is why why why actually why do this and do we need it that is also a question I get a lot why why are we talking so much about this or why are you talking so much about this why should we do this and I think one of the reasons is definitely that there is a need we also see that there is a lot there is a lot of like attention around this at the moment and more people are doing it which is great I think um but there's also very much many many people are asking these critical questions and I love that to keep them coming I love it that is what motivates me because I love questions but it's like also at the same time answering this must be because there is a need something a trend or a a new you can call it health Revolution doesn't start because of no reason yeah it's because we need it and we have looked everywhere definitely in the in the medicine field we have we have looked to to solve depression and anxiety and and we have tried to to keep people um you can say not keep people healthy but curing them from a disease but how what do we do to help people prevent a disease we don't have a lot right and we don't have many places to go so we need to do something different we need to do change something because our stress depression epidemic is just rolling on it is just increasing so we need to change something and I think this is definitely one way to to do it yeah I think this could definitely be a reason so this is your why this is this is preventing lifestyle diseases this is preventing depression this is the preventing um pain this is really helping people from this one kind of exercise that you do just going into the code you don't have to be good at it or good at anything actually this is just going in to the code is something everybody can do if you don't suffer from um heart diseases or unregulated heart high blood pressure I think that this is definitely something that we can we can tell people to do in a controlled way we mentioned nor adrenaline already one of these um chemicals in the body that gets released when we expose ourselves to colds I think we should maybe just explain what noradrenaline is what it helps with but also one of the things I love about the colds and the research is that yes nor adrenaline goes up dopamine also goes up and it's a sustained release isn't it it's not just for like 10 seconds some of the research I've seen it's it's ours right yeah I think it's so fascinating when we look at no adrenaline so no adrenaline is um both a brain chemical but it's also a hormone that is released from our adrenal glands so you get it from two places in the body when you go into the cold I have found out that I wanted to see where does it release first but it's definitely from your brain that is that comes first because it needs to activate the brown fat as well right so you don't freeze and and but it also comes from your um your adrenal glands that is increased within minutes up to 250 percent above Baseline that is a lot that is and is so rapid because it needs to save us right this is our fight and flight system so we need the fast response we cannot get that from the Heat we need to get that from the code so no adrenaline goes up 250 percent of our Baseline within a few minutes if you can build that up then you are good I think that is what you need but at the same time you also get that increase in dopamine and dopamine is something that is really really good for our Drive our motivation and for you know getting good habits as well as when you get this release of dopamine going into the cold I won't say that you will get addicted to the cold water but you will get a really really good feeling around going into the cold water because you get this happy Good Feeling Good Mood good drive good motivation and afterwards and this lasts for hours up to four hours afterwards but if you compare the dopamine effect the the increase from going into the cold if you can cook if you compare that with anything else that could be you also get that from cocaine for example or alcohol nicotine you also get this High increase when you do that but the difference is that you don't get the rapid crash afterwards so if you do drugs for example you have a rapid crash afterwards that is why people go out and want more and more and and more often also but if you go into the code you will have a natural increase in dopamine which will only make you feel better but for hours afterwards and this motivation and drive and good mood you have that for the rest of the day yeah I mean who doesn't want that like let's say you're well you're listening or watching this right now who doesn't want you know more noradrenaline so more attention and focus more dopamine you know more of that feeling of reward and motivation and drive we all want that in our lives but if you're struggling if you feel low if you struggle to get out of bed in the morning you feel indifferent maybe you've been diagnosed with depression whatever it might be you kind of want those things even more you know and I guess just to really Hammer home the points what you've been saying continuously throughout this conversation is that it doesn't need to be long no right so if that person is struggling at the moment with the the cold weather the dark low moods I really really from my heart would encourage them maybe get in that shower do 30 seconds Cole just get yourself the motivation to get in there yeah and just see what happens do it day after day for let's say three four days and just observe what happens do you know what I mean it's it's that simple but that it's very simple not offensive as well it's so effective but also I want to say don't give up because if you if you go the first time you will probably not get all the benefits from the first time because you cannot stay long enough to get the high release of everything good going on in your body you will have to get through the first three four five rounds I mean so you need also to keep to it and believe in it just stick to it because it's like it's like starting up exercising in in your in your training center right it will hurt the first five kilometers you run will definitely hurt more than when you do it five times right and you are you don't start with a marathon right you never do that so you don't start with 30 seconds in the shower you stop by five seconds and then you build up to 10 15. and maybe you can do 30 at from the beginning but that's because people are different so just just believe in it and just keep pushing it because at some point you will get you get so adapted to it it won't take long but it will definitely take a few times so that is why I'm saying no don't give try it first time and you're like oh that's not for me that only hurt yeah it hurts the first time running five kilometers after a long break also hurts yeah this is one point now for me and first of all thank you for making that point really really important now of course some people won't be able to control the temperature of the water so let's say they're winter swimming or let's say they're part of a local club and they go for cold depths I know that's very popular with Scandinavia I know it's growing in popularity in the UK you can't control the temperature there so you have to go into whatever temperature that is right but many people now or I guess a few people are either using cold plunger a gym or they're having you know things in their Garden where they're putting in ice and they're they're actually trying to you know as cost-effective way as possible replicate it at home now first time you go in of course you're not habituated yet so it feels difficult over time with regular practice like with exercise like with most things we become more tolerant and so let's say you go into 10 degree water right cold water something you're 15 right so 10 degrees first time you find it really hard you can manage 10 seconds let's say after a month of doing it regularly you can now do it for four or five minutes and you're like no problem right should one stay there or is there a benefit to dropping the temperature so going from ten to nine like let's say you're lifting weights and you know you're first of all struggling to lift that weight two times you keep perhaps you could do it five times you could do it ten times and then at some point someone will say well instead of lifting that weight 10 times why don't you go to a heavier weight and only lift it five times it's gonna have a different benefit in the body do we know yeah I know it's early days and all of this research do we know yet whether as you get habituated to a certain temperature there are additional benefits from lowering that temperature so we know that if you keep changing or that is you can say if you look at physiology just if you keep changing the temperature you will keep pushing um your central nervous system and you will keep pushing the activation of the chemicals in the brain so what I always say is that you should keep changing the temperature you can also start with 10 degrees that you just mentioned and and just try to get a habitrator to that for a while but then you need to also change the weight so the temperature could be the weight on your weight so go down you mean yeah you can go down but you can also go up a bit so as soon as you're changing it a bit then at some degree at some point you cannot get lower right but then you also stay Less in the cold water so there is a dose response um you can say yeah so as as it as the temperature gets colder you stay of course not as that long in the water but if you keep changing it just like nature I always say if you went to swim in nature in the sea or a lake or whatever you have the perfect temperature regulator right there yeah it would change it for you the seasons will change it for you if you live at least in a country where you have the seasons yeah exactly but if you don't have that then you can look a little bit to what temperature do we actually have here do we do we go below zero maybe not all the time right so changing the temperature will challenge yourselves and it will challenge your mind and in that way you will keep exercising your co-tolerance now you said you love questions a question that has been popping up for me as we've been talking and before I say I appreciate that you know you live in Denmark and a lot of the research you're doing is in Denmark we think about evolutionary nature where we've come from and how that might impact our tolerance to cold it might impact our levels of brown fat and then I think about myself you know my ancestors are from India so you know a lot of my ancestors I imagine would have pretty warm temperatures for most of the year yeah depending on where you are in India you you know it would never get mega colds right you're not going to get that sort of coldness in the winter that we're gonna get in Europe for example or certainly in northern Europe do you know yet have you been asked yet you know how different cultures um you know how different ethnicities you know affects levels of brown fat that we have and our ability to tolerate colds so we know there is a difference in in brown fat in how much Brown fat that we have across the world so we would definitely see that some people also living in the colder countries they have a bit more Brown fat we also know that women have more Brown fat than men um and I think it makes sense so if you are in a country where you would need the brown fat so it's just the environment telling us that well we need this but from nature size if you live in India or you're from India then you will maybe not need as much Brown fat as one who lives in a colder country women for example are you you can say we are smaller we have less muscle mass and we have a large um a body surface of course and that means that we get colder easily easier than men we get colder easier than men and because of that we we probably that is probably why we have more Brown fat than men has because we have the muscles who that can heat you up but for women we don't have that much muscle mass so we need more Brown fat to heat us up so it's always something about I'll come back to it again it's also about the request if we request the body to heat itself up because we live in a cold environment then you will also have more Brown fat but people from India or people from you can say warmer countries including myself I'm half at least Sri Lankan and half Danish so so I know I know India and I know Sri Lanka and it's very very hot um I know from myself and this is just from my side I can only tell from my own point of view that if I compare with my friends in Denmark who are Danish they adapted to the cold faster than I did and I would say I'm a cold and I think it's it's absolute I was a cold I was really I didn't want to become a winter swimmer I was definitely one of those saying well I study this do I really have to become one myself um and it took me a while to get convinced that I had to but what I wanted to say is that I went to the cold and I keep pushing it so I didn't give up luckily I didn't but it took me a longer time to to get code adapted than my friends yeah it's so interesting first of all I love the fact that you know you Dr Susanna soberg arguably one of the world's leading researchers in this area is calling yourself a cold water or a cold I think that's brilliant um but I think I think it's a I think that's a really important point that it speaks to that competition and ego piece from before that everyone's going to be different your ethnicity is going to play a role your sex is going to play a role I think many people Susanna will relate to what you said about women and men yeah experiencing cold differently I mean it is such a common complaint but in a bedroom the women want it warmer and the men wants it cooler I mean this is a you know a huge source of uh conflict time I would say in in certain households yeah what temperature you just set the the bedroom at um so I think that's really really interesting it also makes me think of my perception I once went about what I guess two or three years ago um we were staying with our friends in Bristol and my friend Jody is a member of a she goes cold plunging in the winter they she drives about I think 30 minutes out of Bristol to meet her friends and we were there I think a new year and one morning he said you want to come and I thought you know I'm game for anything so I went oh wow this is years ago I can't actually quite remember everything about it but I remember there was more women there than uh men number one number two a lot of people had hats on and mittens on it was freezing colds um and my perception of that and other experiences is that women I feel tend to tolerate the cold it almost speaks to the opposite of what you're saying here about cold tolerance I I kind of find a lot of time women can deal with the cold better than guys and I think is that just because as I'm coming to realize as I get older that women I think can tolerate pain and discomfort a lot a lot more than men can I don't know you know help me help me understand that I think you just answer it I think that might be it I think women are built to tolerate stress and pain childbirth child birth exactly so I think that's one thing and you I don't know if you call it the same thing here in in the UK but in Denmark we call it the man flu the man flew when when men have the flu it's just a little bit of pain and they're like oh my God and I mean I think half my audience is going to love that half of them might uh might not share the same perspective but that's okay oh no yeah but but I think that there is a bit of I think there is a difference here in how we pers um our perception of pain and perception of stress even actually because it's so linked the pain the stress it's so linked you can feel you feel more pain when you're stressed right and you actually also feel you feel more cold when you're stressed and it's also because of your veins are Contracting and you you feel it more but women are very good at like uh pushing a distressed boundaries I think because they also built for it I think but this is only something that we can speculate we don't have any real evidence for this so so regarding the different cultures then it it's fair to say that as things stand it's legitimate to think that people from different parts of the world will have different bass lines level of brown fats but we have no reason to believe at the moment that there's a limit for people like even if you your ancestors from a hot country even if you've grown up in a hot country you can increase the amount of brown fat you have if you start exposing your cells to cold exactly and it's really fascinating for me how this research you know I wonder have you have you any knowledge of research being done in hot countries you know do they even do this in hot countries in a way that they do in in Europe um in in kind of like cold plunging and no I don't I don't I don't know actually because sometimes we don't know what exactly is going on for studies in other countries we often we can we can go and look up ongoing studies if they are put into a certain database and we can look that up but often we only know it when it's published so it could be that right now some more studies are actually going on also in in hotter countries but we know that there is a difference in co-receptors in the skin across the world there was also a difference in in the brown fat amount across different countries hot cold countries and and and and regions you can also say but I think no matter what I think no matter what that you will benefit from going into the cold it's just the amount of time that you're in and what temperature you need to do that on an individualized plan one of the things that actually I wanted to do when I I kind of designed my study because as I told you I used to be a cold and I was like uh the the main topic the main thing for my research in my PhD was to find out if I can activate the brown fat in a way where we can actually use this is make some kind of way that we can increase our amount of brown fat or the efficiency and I wanted to do that because I wanted to do something applied research um something that is useful there's it's been driving me always doing something that we can we can use for something and it and it's not supposed to be a pill that was one of the things I wanted to do something that prevents also diseases because we have a lot of like curing stuff curing diseases and we need it and we need it it's not critical against that we just don't have enough knowledge about our physiology and where to address it in preventing our diseases our lifestyle this season so I wanted to do something like that so what I did was to think about how can we activate the brown fat in a way that is um accessible for most people and I found research showing that going into a cold room and sleeping for a month will increase your amount of brown fat and increase your insulin sensitivity but sleeping in a in a room that is hot again the next month then decreased it so that kind of like confirmed that the cold is activating the brown fat and increasing and it gets more efficient in that way but that is not very that is not something everybody would like to do sleeping at 19 degrees but also there were studies showing that wearing a cooling vest for 10 days um eight hours will also increase your insulin sensitivity and you will have more Brown fat so hold on you're going about your everyday life you've just got a cooling vest on yeah and you can you can buy these but but I was like well it's I like the the proof of concept here yeah I love it because that proved that if you expose yourself to cold but this was quite a long time and wearing a cooling vest then you will increase your brown fat and I was like well that's very cool but but I mean who wants to wear a cooling vest all the time I don't know I mean that's that was just not the study that I was going to to use not um so I was like what can we always do so that is why we came up with what about the cold in Winter swimming because we live in Denmark so many people went to swim you mentioned a bit of research in your book where I think in Denmark when people were asked about a list of things that they'd love to do winter swimming came up third yeah at that time when I started my research um and when I did that questionnaire I did a questionnaire when I was writing my book I had talked a lot in also the media about what am I doing because I was doing something completely different I was studying winter swimmers and then people were like we're studying winter swims why that is just something that some people do but it's kind of like a little bit Yeah Niche right um but they were very interested so I did this research around it and so many people actually answered that what they love to do is when to swim and eat chocolate so it's like on that level in Denmark and I loved it because that was like okay I got at least support from people I love that they love it as much as they love eating chocolate yeah I mean again for that person who's skeptical like give this a go yeah you know when did you start researching about eight years ago yeah right so I'm guessing but then it wasn't cool it wasn't fashionable it wasn't like taking over all the wellness Instagram accounts not at all right what was it like for you when Professor Andrew huberman talked about your research called it the so big principle right on the biggest Show podcast on the planet The Joe Rogan podcast Joe Rogan Experience like what happened what was it you know how did you find out what was it like for you what emotions came up I was well he told me in person that he was going to to do that he was going to talk about my research on The Joe Rogan okay so he told you he told me right before but and he said that the I I know that you're ready you you can talk about this you are ready and I was like am I ready about For What and and I was quite surprised and then when he went down I was like man he's doing it he's talking about this and and promoting it he's promoting the cold yeah and he's also promoting my research and now I'm just so grateful I mean so grateful that I'm doing something that actually makes sense and that is useful for people that is what I wanted to do back then when I started my research I really wanted to do something that was useful something that you can you can go out and give advice around right so when human contacted me when my my research paper came out I was like yeah okay hi yeah and you you would like to talk to me about this research and I was like yeah okay we can talk we can talk about that but I had no idea that he was so much fan of the code I didn't know that and I also didn't know that a lot of his followers were a fan of the cold and I think that kind of like yeah that kind of like I was so honored I was I was so honored I mean this has been so important to me I love that it was so important to me I'm so happy and grateful that I am doing this and I'm I'm so grateful that so many people are supporting and that huberman is supporting and he has this great podcast I mean yeah it's insane it has just been skyrocking the last year I think it's yeah he's he's great he's such a nice guy and it's it's just so wonderful that important research like yours which has got so many implications for individual health and societal health is being elevated by people with huge followings you know and to have it spoken about by Andrew on Joe Rogan I imagine must have been quite a special moment that's really special yeah fantastic I'm so grateful to both both of them really it's really it's really made an impact in my life definitely change everything oh fantastic one thing I want to talk about is culture yeah and we just mentioned that that bit of research you conducted in Denmark where Winter swimming is a thing that you know a lot of people enjoy and want to do you also touched on sauna in your book there's a whole chapter on sauna and what's really interesting to me is that certainly here in the UK we associate sauna and cold with Scandinavia if I remember this is how many years ago now I remember when I used to work in temporally which is you know a little village in in the northwest of England I was I used to go to the gym on the way to work in the morning this is pre-kids okay uh I think I went about half six when it opens and I'd do about half an hour in the gym and then I finish off in the pool and always be this there was this Danish guy who I got to know I can't remember his name now but he would always he was there for like an hour literally going sauna cold crunch sauna Colbert remember chatting to him this is years ago right so I I knew nothing about the research I said hey what's going on he goes no no it's great it's really good for my circulation so again an anecdotal kind of yes you know just a comment yeah and I thought yeah sounds good I'm gonna try it so I you know I tried it for what now and again or a few weeks whatever I don't actually remember but this whole cultural phenomena like are you finding that certain cultures are more willing to accept the information and act on it than others I don't I don't know you know do you feel in Denmark is this message Landing in a particular way compared to let's say the UK have you got any experience with that yeah so it seems like in Denmark because we have this culture around we it's also called in in the UK so we have about the same you can see um a temperature wise air and and water but in Denmark there is definitely a culture around a winter swimming and we don't really have a sonar culture in Denmark we don't really have that but we have at we have like borrowed stuff from Finland and we have borrowed a bit from from Germany where they do the the sauna Goose which is like putting pouring water over the stones and then swinging the towers around and then putting essential oils on and stuff like that and also maybe sometimes listen to music inside the sauna it has different cultures coming in and in Denmark we have been practicing this for a while now maybe 10 years or something like that but it's mostly cold in Denmark isn't it it's mostly cold yes exactly but but the sauna culture is very new in Denmark as well but it's starting to pop up more and more and we like apparently we are a culture which where we like going back and forth um to doing the contrast therapy uh for for blood circulation we adapted that quite easily I would say we we take that in as a culture because we are yeah I don't know Scandinavia close to Finland and Germany where they already are doing this so we adapted that so I think when I did my study I wanted to one I wanted to find out eh an easy protocol with how low dose can we get health benefits from the cold yeah that was one thing and also I wanted to I wanted to um also I wanted to study a method which was already very much used in Denmark and that is going into the sauna and going in to the cold so my study results are based on the contrast of um activating your code response but also activating your heat response yeah you know having spent quite a bit of time in Scandinavia over the past few years when my books have been released there um you know Sweden Norway Denmark even um what strikes me is that you know the culture tends to be a lot more equal than we often see let's say here in the UK or certainly in America I would say and there's a lot of research on Denmark and happiness oh yeah you know I read about the culture there and how you know in certain organizations it's culturally the CEO one will only earn a certain percentage above what the lowest paid um it's going to get so it's not going to be like huge differences where the lowest paid in the company is on you know this amount and the CEOs on a different amount I've heard that a lot of the social activities whether it's golf or whatever you can have like a CEO of a company playing alongside someone who cleans toilets in an office building yeah it's always fascinating me and of course that must be a contributory factor to happiness and general well-being but then if I look at the cold through that lens and I think about culture and what's really interesting for me is that you know going in the cold in clubs in community with other people like you're Stripped Away Your any status any money any Sue any nice everything Stripped Away it's just you and a swimsuit and your body and I don't know if you could share with me but it it seems to me that that kind of thing foreign the kind of acceptance of that sort of thing feels to be more of a Scandinavian thing it feels like in the UK people have got huge Hang-Ups about their bodies you know and I'm not criticizing that right I understand that But ultimately we've all got bodies maybe that is exactly what is actually going on we we have packed ourselves so much up we we never we never see each other really in in a bathing suit we don't expose our bodies to temperatures anymore we if we go that is only in the summer right so I think that actually meant you mentioned the the culture difference also so in Denmark I think we have been winter swimming for many years I know that there's only it's only a new trend also in Denmark that more people are winter swimming and it's not only for the the wild and crazy ones anymore it's just it's just for everyone and people have finding out but the culture around going into the cold is definitely something that um also builds in Denmark around our way of being social together so I think you're right on that we we have a way of also trying to keep ourselves our clubs and we have a social life that is like very engaging we try to have that I I think we are struggling to keep it up because loneliness is also increasing also in Denmark and and happiness is also decreasing just like the rest of the world so it's stress anxiety and depressing are going up also there so we see in an effect all over so we definitely need this we need places where you can go and be social where you don't have to think about status and you don't have to think about how you look or we're just human beings and when you go into the sauna and if you have someone out there has tried that then you know that you are not looking at the others bodies or anything you don't you are just there you're being either you're being very mindful sitting in there and just actually releasing everything of your stress just let that out of the sauna eventually you will learn to do that and find it at peaceful room but you will also find it very social if you go with your friends that is a place where you probably don't have to discuss any heavy stuff but you can if you like to but you can also just be there be together and that connects people the fascinating is I think of how this movement is growing and where it's coming from how all these things play out Suzanne honestly I could talk to you for hours honestly that's I think it's it's so fascinating this whole area to try and sort of bring this conversation towards a close in terms of practical recommendations we mention a few already wearing a hat are people going winter swimming or going obviously in a shower you're probably not going to wear a hats but winter swimming or going into a cold plunge yourself let's say it's outside there's benefits to wearing a hat isn't there and then if you could also speak to do you need to get your head underwater I think that's really really important so I think that if you you can wear a hat if especially if you think that that you get too cold too easily um and if there's a wind there's a strong wind that could actually determine how long time that you're going to sit in your coal plant and if you can if you can pass the code shop response so wear a hat because they're also protects your ears from the wind and especially if you I have like my ears always get super easily coat and then I get a bit dizzy yeah so cold ears and ear infection if you are like prone to that then wear a hat because that will protect you also a lot of heat is coming out of your head right so I think that is around 80 of our body temperature is actually coming out of our head so if you put a hat on then it's more you can say control to the rest of the your body and so wear a hat is definitely a good thing if you you have those kind of issues also I always take my hands above the water because my fingers hurt and I don't think that should hold people back so if you if you think that that will help you then take your hands up or wear a gloves if there if it's icy then do that because then you can stay in the water for a little bit longer so you can get the benefits oh yeah even without your hands in yeah even without your head in yeah that's that's great for people to hear actually I think that this is also really important that you you can get the benefits from just putting a hand in the water or hands or feets or in the water you you can get some code adaptation actually from that wow there's actually studies showing from it's it's Fishermans who have their hands a lot in cold water shows that nice research has happened on on these fishermens and it shows that that they are called adapted all over their body about only their hands were actually in in the in in the cold water and I think this actually tells us that the body is like one system it's not the hand is one thing it's it's the whole system it's all connected so if you get code adapted from submerging up to your neck and you don't put your head under you will get adapted anyways I love it so just in the washing up in cold water where we're sort of getting getting all these benefits no I think I think that's fantastic yeah okay and just to finish off then what Andrew was named the so big principle was based on a paper I think he published in 2021 which has got a like a conclusion for people isn't it in terms of for people who are like okay Susanna you convinced me right I don't do it I'm in you have some recommendations for the cold in terms of duration and also heat like sauna so I wonder if you could just share those for people please yeah so based on my research where as I started the conversation telling you that I wanted to find the minimum threshold for where can we get benefits and not have to stay extremely long so I wanted to do some kind of research where we know from this kind of you could say micro stressing the body we will still get benefits and what the the study showed was actually that and this is shown in in Winter swimmers who are adapted to to Winter swimming they have been winter swimming for two to three seasons before I studied them for one season um but what we saw when you are code adapted and you will get that really quickly if you are new but when you're cold adapted you can increase or you can you can do your cold exposure 11 minutes per week is actually enough and this is in total I just want to underline that 11 minutes in the cold water in total per week but divided on two to three days and on each day you can do three dips so you can divide that up in minutes at probably around it everything from two to four five minutes or so per dip so you don't have to go across that you don't have to be in the water for many minutes to get these benefits this study shows so 11 minutes per week divided on two to three days and up to three dips oh so once you're adapted 11 minutes is all you need a week yes exactly so you can build as when you are new you you just have to when you are new you can look at the 11 minutes as a protocol for a method for getting there and when you get there you know well this is about 11 minutes it could be 12 for some and it could be 10 for some it depends on again it's the individual but if you're new yeah and you're not an experienced when something it's reasonable to think you don't even need 11 minutes no you don't no well you I need to underline that as well because you will get benefits the first time you go right you will get benefits already from the beginning but what I studied was to see what happens if you went to swim a season and you already adapted what can we see on the outcomes of uh activation of the brown fat on your temperature what can we see from um your metabolism how is that changed how is that better or compared to a control group who will not winter swimmers and who didn't get into a sauna who didn't get these kind of healthy natural stresses to to to the body and um I think it's very important to say that this is also like an increasing health so every time you go even just for 30 seconds a cold dip or going into the cold shower you you will have benefits already from the beginning but when you go up to 11 minutes that is definitely something that we can say this is healthy and we can see that in in my study but um yeah so you can try and build that up and there's also some recommendations for sauna use as well right yes it is yeah and it's one of as you answer that I just want to also clarify a lot of the benefits or perhaps you could you could explain a lot of these benefits we've been talking about happen if you just do cold right you don't have to also do the sauna is that right you don't have to do the sauna but this study is is performed in the contrast of going into the cold and going into the heat as well so in the sauna and the funny thing is actually that the brown fat is also activated by heat oh wow sorry about that but it is and that is also why I was like well in theory it would be that the brown fat is not only activated by the cold to make it warmer it's actually trying to regulate your temperature and trying to make you warmer when you're cold but also trying to make you colder when you are hot yeah and that is also uh proven in in studies that the brown fat is activated by heat so we know that so that is why I had the sauna with it so 57 minutes per week in the sauna also divided on these two to three days it's actually also enough to get these health benefits and what I think is funny is that if you look if you divide that on minutes per per time you go you would see that that quite fits well with what we see in the finished cohort sauna studies where we see that if you go um up to 19 minutes or with a maximum of 29 minutes you see health benefits and when you go longer than that or sit longer in the sauna than that you will see a a decline or you can a plateau of the benefits right yeah but if you go um two to three times per week in the sauna and you stay under the 19 to 29 minutes then you will have a a profound I think very very uh profound health results from that because we see that two to three sauna days a week actually decreases your risk of dying by 27 and if you go four to seven times per week in the sauna that will decrease your risk of dying by 50 and I think that that is really strong that is strong like even though it's a cohort study but they have followed these for 27 28 years I think and the minutes if you look at that and you compare that with my results it kind of fits it fits with the results that we see in my study as well so if it's a sweet spot it's definitely a sweet spot I think yeah but if we can go a little bit more uh I I don't know about that but I think that future research will find out yeah it's super exciting I love it that your study has shown concretely what are Scandinavian ancestors have been telling us for years I think it's a beautiful kind of way to finish off this conversation um I think those recommendations of 11 minutes of cold and 57 minutes so three 19 minute sessions of sauna for people who have access is very very achievable and for people who don't have access throughout this conversation we were talking about stop with a cold shower yeah we mentioned the immune system benefits of a 30 second cold shower right so I think it's absolutely brilliant Susanna it has been such an honor and pleasure to have you in my studio to talk about all of this I know it's the first kind of long -form conversation you've had I feel very honored that you've you know come over to talk about your work you definitely teased us a lot of the end there with more work that's going to be coming out so I hope at some point you'll come back onto the show to talk about some newer research that no doubt you'll be conducting this podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of our lives so I guess right at the end of this conversation just to sum up do you have any final words final words on how people can use temperature how they can use colds to get more out of their lives so I think that the if you don't have access to do a cold Plunge in the sea or in a lake or something you can you can definitely use a barrel or you can definitely use some kind of plunge some kind of device where you can just jump in um but you can also use the cold shower because the cold shower is also going to activate your immune response but it's also going to activate your metabolism and also your brown fat so you will definitely get some benefits from that not the same as the cold plunge but you'll get some of it at least um yeah I think for the cold that is that is what I would suggest at least so but you can try and build up to the courage to get some kind of device where you can jump in or you can go driving a little bit to get to the cold water yeah fantastic Center thanks for coming on the show thank you for all the research you're doing and I hope to see you back on the show at some point in the future I would love to thank you for inviting me and I'm really honored to be here thank you if that conversation resonated with you here is another incredibly powerful one that I really think you're going to enjoy we are able to shoot people to the moon but we are not able to regulate our own mood in our schools rocket sounds yes history mathematics but to be happy we don't know

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 885,508

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: 5udactTA5IY

Length: 131min 9sec (7869 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 04 2023