The Cold Water Swim Cure
Episode Stats
Summary
Have you ever driven along the coastline or walked by a local pond or lake and thought about taking a dip but felt hesitant about swimming in what you know is cold water? My guest today, who argues that cold water swimming is one of the very best things you can do for your mental and physical health, will inspire you to finally take the plunge. His name is Dr Mark Harper and he is an Anesthesiologist and the author of Chill: The Cold Water Swim Cure.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast have you ever
00:00:11.240
driven along the coastline or walked by a local pond or lake and thought about taking a dip but
00:00:15.500
felt hesitant about swimming in what you know is cold water my guest today who argues that cold
00:00:19.600
water swimming is one of the very best things you can do for your mental and physical health
00:00:22.840
will inspire you to finally take the plunge his name is dr mark harper he's an anesthesiologist
00:00:27.500
and the author of chill the cold water swim cure we began our conversation with how mark's research
00:00:31.880
and the prevention of hypothermia during surgery led him to investigate the benefits of cold water
00:00:36.340
exposure and managing the body's overall stress response we discussed the effect cold water has
00:00:40.800
on the body and the potential mental and physical benefits this effect can have from reducing
00:00:44.760
inflammation to reducing depression caused by inflammation to improving conditions from diabetes
00:00:49.000
to migraines we get into how long you need to be in the water to get these benefits the temperature
00:00:53.320
the water needs to be which may not be as cold as you think and potentially makes depending on where
00:00:57.480
you live cold water swimming viable as a year-round practice mark also explains how to get started
00:01:02.360
with cold water swimming and do it safely and effectively including why you should start out
00:01:06.000
in the summer and how to best prepare your body before you get in the water and how to recover after
00:01:09.880
you get out we end our conversation with whether or not you can get the same benefits of cold water
00:01:13.600
swimming from taking an ice bath or cold shower after the show's over check out our show notes at
00:01:19.160
mark harper welcome to the show thank you very much thank you for having me it's a great privilege to be here
00:01:35.240
yeah i've followed the art of manliness since i came across your roadmap to manhood in 2014 it's been a great
00:01:42.340
inspiration for me okay so that's that's a big blast from the past that was a really long article
00:01:47.540
that we wrote so thanks for reading that and also thanks for listening to the podcast all these years
00:01:51.500
i i really appreciate that i'm excited to have you on the podcast today you are an anesthesiologist
00:01:57.260
but you've written a book called chill the cold water swim cure how did you get started with cold water
00:02:04.800
swimming really it was by accident i mean i've always swum in a swimming pool thanks to my mum
00:02:11.340
who used to drag me along as a reluctant teenager but ever since then i've swum maybe three four times
00:02:16.900
a week in the swimming pool training with the club but one summer i moved back to brighton in my mid-30s
00:02:23.700
and the pool closed for two weeks and i was complaining about this to a friend that i'd known since my
00:02:29.020
those teenage days and he said oh go and join the sea swimming section i didn't even know the club
00:02:34.060
had the sea swimming section and so i thought i'll just go have a quick swim around the pier
00:02:39.980
and do that for two weeks and i went around the pier i had a nice time and nearly 20 years later i'm
00:02:48.060
still swimming around the pier in brighton and and wherever i can get my cold water fix so you started
00:02:54.940
off doing this just as recreation something to do because you enjoyed it it's good for your health
00:03:00.260
you enjoyed the people but then you started making these connections that maybe there were some
00:03:06.020
real health benefits to swimming outside in cold water when did you start making those connections
00:03:11.440
well in a way it was that that first swim that gave me an inkling but i was only kind of to know
00:03:17.160
that later because i remember getting out of the water yeah having just gone for a swim and walking up
00:03:22.080
the beach thinking god yeah i feel really good yeah something i just didn't expect and that was
00:03:28.140
what kept me going back for more and that's why i continue to do it to this day but the other thing
00:03:34.840
that got me into it was my research at the time so my phd is in something called the prevention of
00:03:42.280
perioperative hypothermia basically what this means is when you have an operation if you get cold it's bad
00:03:48.240
for you and in fact this is a really important point because hypothermia is bad for you at any
00:03:53.520
time exposing yourself to cold what i'm gonna talk about today is potentially very good for you but if
00:04:00.320
you stay in the water too long and you become cold that's actually bad for you so i was researching this
00:04:07.180
and the thing is when you have an operation you have a real stress response you may not feel it because
00:04:11.960
you have a an anesthesiologist like myself stopping you from feeling that pain but it generates a stress
00:04:18.100
response in the body and if you get cold it increases that stress response so around this
00:04:24.680
time i started reading articles about the effect of cold water on the body and these effects this this
00:04:32.260
was a stress response as well and this stress response was exactly the same as the stress response
00:04:37.380
you get to surgery and then more than that i started reading about how you can adapt to cold and if you
00:04:44.540
adapt to cold it reduces that stress response and that reduction in the stress response would
00:04:49.960
potentially reduce the complications following surgery okay so you so you were this is a connection
00:04:56.220
to your work you thought okay as an anesthesiologist one of our jobs is to keep people warm during
00:05:02.560
surgery because their body temperature goes down so that's why you have like a warm blanket put over
00:05:07.100
you you had a hunch that maybe if we can help the body adapt to cold it will improve surgery outcomes
00:05:16.300
after general anesthesia is that correct yeah that's correct and there's a more general thing not just
00:05:21.620
in your response to cold but into your response to the whole stress of surgery gotcha okay so this is
00:05:28.700
this is basically thought that cold water exposure through cold water swimming could help develop the
00:05:35.100
overall stress response of the body not only the stress of you know being under anesthesiology but
00:05:41.120
also the stresses of just everyday life as well yeah well that's uh that's how things progressed yeah
00:05:48.540
i began to think well joy it was when i read an article a few years later you know i've done quite a lot
00:05:56.780
of work on on operation you know preventing hypothermia during operations and a few years later i came across
00:06:03.740
an article which in the newspapers on the medical article by any means about how inflammation have been
00:06:12.160
linked to depression now one of the main things like that we need inflammation is that it's the body's
00:06:17.380
response to infection to injury it's really important but like everything you can have too much of a good
00:06:24.440
thing and if you have an overactive stress response you have an overactive inflammatory response and
00:06:30.120
it becomes bad stress or bad inflammation rather than good or physiological inflammation and linking
00:06:38.540
it to depression and i thought well i know that if you adapt to cold water your levels of inflammation
00:06:45.420
go down that's one of the reasons it's good for you and potentially good for patients having surgery
00:06:50.640
so and i also knew how good i felt when i came out of the water without having depression
00:06:56.300
so i began to wonder well maybe then we could use cold water swimming to treat depression we're going
00:07:04.160
to talk about that today how it could possibly treat depression but so like let's talk about like what do
00:07:07.660
you think is going on about being exposed to cold water that has these you know again as you said being
00:07:13.900
cold usually isn't good that's something we think of as a stressor to the body but you're saying that
00:07:20.460
okay you can within small doses it can actually help you become more resilient to different types of
00:07:25.940
stressors so like what is going on what is when you expose yourself to cold what's going on in your
00:07:31.420
body that allows you to overcome or be resilient to acute or chronic stress so what goes on as i said
00:07:40.940
you get a stress response when you get into water but if you go in regularly and by the way cold water
00:07:45.540
isn't actually that cold it's anything less than 20 degrees centigrade has a significant physiological
00:07:52.400
effect on the body so when you get into cold water you have this stress response now if you do that
00:07:59.120
regularly and most cold or studies of cold water swimming they use a regime of about six immersions
00:08:07.420
at probably around 15 degrees centigrade and if you go into this cold six times you develop an adaptation
00:08:16.740
to cold and what this means is so the stress response is generated by the autonomic nervous
00:08:22.260
system so that's your sympathetic which is your fight flight and the parasympathetic which is your
00:08:27.340
rest and digest and what getting into cold water several times does is it reduces that sympathetic
00:08:34.840
response to stress so this means if you're running a high level of stress and consequently usually a high
00:08:41.120
level of inflammation your baseline goes down and also those peaks of stress go down so what you're
00:08:49.340
doing is you're keeping that stress and that inflammation in the good physiological zone rather
00:08:55.220
than the bad pathological zone interestingly on top of this if you put your face in cold water
00:09:03.420
you get stimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system so this is the other side of the autonomic
00:09:08.840
nervous system which is good and this actually directly reduces levels of inflammation in the
00:09:16.640
body and so you're having a kind of double effect from swimming in cold water in reducing inflammation
00:09:22.560
so it sounds like what you what's happening is you're when you get into cold water you're giving your
00:09:27.960
your nervous system and it's like it's an it's like a workout for your nervous system in a way
00:09:33.240
yeah completely you know you just think about you know if you go to the gym you work out hard you
00:09:39.440
can work out too hard and you you injure yourself but if you work out just right and you can work out
00:09:44.980
pretty hard without injuring yourself you become stronger it's exactly the same principle and so you
00:09:50.500
mentioned you threw out some numbers there for how cold the water needs to be it's 15 degrees celsius
00:09:55.000
that's what like 59 degrees fahrenheit and i think 20 is about like 68 degrees fahrenheit yeah exactly
00:10:01.400
yeah yeah that's about right so under about 68 you you get a really good effect and they reckon the
00:10:07.500
maximum effect is probably somewhere between you know 10 and 15 degrees centigrade so you know what's
00:10:14.860
that 48 to 58 degrees fahrenheit something like that and what you've done in this book too is okay
00:10:20.500
you've you've made this connection of to cold exposure to your work as an anesthesiologist about the
00:10:26.020
benefits of it but there's like a there's a whole history of doctors or thinkers or writers i mean you
00:10:33.540
can even say religious people touting the benefits of cold water exposure how far back do we of the
00:10:39.740
record do we have that shows like getting in the cold water outdoors can have benefits well i think it
00:10:46.680
goes back as far as medicine goes back hippocrates the father of medicine as he's known he wrote a
00:10:52.800
treatise called on airs waters and places and in that he invoked the power of water i think for me the
00:11:04.060
most significant figure is richard russell who was a doctor in my hometown of brighton on the south coast
00:11:10.180
of england who in the early 18th century started bringing people to the cold waters of brighton and
00:11:19.860
taking them in and using that and he is credited with starting a craze for sea bathing which in fact
00:11:26.520
the prince regent came to stay in his house after he had died and became and you know really started to
00:11:34.960
enjoy this cold water thing and that's why brighton built up from this small fishing village into a
00:11:41.500
a kind of sea bathing metropolis and he richard russell wrote a treatise on treating the diseases
00:11:50.780
of the glands including the king's evil leprosy scurvy all kinds of things that i i wouldn't say it does
00:11:57.120
help and but he also advocated drinking the seawater which i also wouldn't uh wouldn't advocate but for
00:12:05.240
many years this was one of the well probably one of the few effective treatments we had but come the
00:12:10.700
era of antibiotics and drugs and pharma it kind of got forgotten okay so these doctors they they knew
00:12:18.360
that they they put people in cold water they saw that it had benefits they probably didn't understand
00:12:25.120
why what was going on in the body they probably had theories about humors and whatnot but recent
00:12:30.600
research has really explained like what is going on in our bodies when we expose ourselves to the cold
00:12:35.340
and you highlight that and so we talked about these different nervous systems but i want to talk about
00:12:39.980
like what besides the the response that we have in our nervous system like what else goes on in our
00:12:45.640
body once we jump into that cold water i mean what's the first thing that happens like why is it that
00:12:51.220
we have that we want to gasp for breath you know our joints ache like sometimes when i get into cold
00:12:56.800
water i want to pee like what's going on our body well i think that the basis for this is the fact
00:13:03.360
that all the blood vessels to the skin immediately shut down so your circulation to your skin which is
00:13:09.520
what we call the peripheral compartment that closes down and goes straight into you know and it's just
00:13:14.760
used it's kept in inside the body so you have kind of more blood going around the main part of the
00:13:21.460
body this expands the heart and expanding the heart releases a hormone called
00:13:26.800
atrial natriuretic peptide which makes you want to pee it puts more fluid through the through the
00:13:33.140
kidneys but the effect of just the direct effect on the nervous system causes you to want to
00:13:39.920
hyperventilate take a big gasp when you get into the water you want you hyperventilate i mean it's very
00:13:44.400
much like a panic attack which can be a bit of a problem but the thing is it's yeah and this is
00:13:51.160
this is actually the most dangerous part of it so if your head goes straight under you cannot control
00:13:55.020
this but after a few times of doing it you can absolutely control it and that that really helps
00:14:01.360
you okay so yeah we jump in our blood vessels constrict so this is also a workout for our
00:14:07.020
cardiovascular system in a way uh yeah it is it's uh it's absolutely a workout it's kind of a in a way
00:14:13.040
it's an exercise free workout for the whole whole cardiovascular system because you know blood
00:14:17.440
pressure goes up your heart rate goes up but all this all these responses are still there when you
00:14:23.100
adapt to cold water but they're not as powerful you mentioned you know when you got out of the
00:14:28.580
water that first time you went did the uh swim swim around the pier you said you just felt great like
00:14:33.780
you kind of like almost euphoric is there something going on with our brain chemistry that gives us that
00:14:38.760
euphoric feeling there's there's certainly something going on in the brain but as to quite what it is i don't
00:14:46.140
think we really know and we might never know i mean the brain is phenomenally complex you know it's uh
00:14:52.720
it does something like a billion billion calculations every second so for me you know there are two ways
00:15:00.660
of thinking about it first is you know you get all this adrenaline and noradrenaline going around the
00:15:05.340
body and that is kind of what cocaine does to you and you know in fact one of the guys i've done this
00:15:12.680
with a doctor i mentioned the book chris van tuveken one of the things he said to me after i'd started
00:15:18.440
him on the cold water swimming was i said if this was a drug they'd make it illegal and and the other
00:15:26.420
thing is that i think it's something how it resets the brain yeah this is i can't explain it but as this
00:15:33.260
amazing woman jill bolt taylor who has a 25 million times seen ted talk and she had a stroke and she
00:15:42.560
had a let a stroke she's a neuroscientist and she had a stroke where she had a bleed into the left
00:15:48.700
side of the brain she was aware of this and she found while she couldn't do everyday tasks like ring
00:15:56.300
up someone and tell them that i'm having a stroke she didn't care she just felt at one with the world
00:16:03.020
and this her theory is that the left hand side of our brain gives us our sense of self a sense of fear
00:16:10.080
sense of time whereas the right hand side of the brain that is about empathy and feeling at one with
00:16:16.820
the world and this is this is the reset i get when i go into the water so i can't give you a scientific
00:16:24.320
explanation but that's absolutely how it feels to me okay you mentioned some hormones that are
00:16:29.820
released there's that peptide hormone from our heart that causes us to want to go pee there's
00:16:35.000
adrenaline any other hormones that are released when we jump in cold water yeah it's a it's a kind
00:16:41.040
of complex reaction but you get all the stress hormones come in things like cortisol and it also
00:16:47.840
affects insulin insulin is the main sugar regulating hormone in the body and you're really important for
00:16:55.580
many metabolic processes so when you initially go in you know kind of it has a bad effect on insulin but
00:17:02.940
again when you've adapted to cold water that effect on insulin becomes better and actually your body
00:17:07.600
becomes more sensitive to the effects of insulin which is a really good thing and this is why it
00:17:12.780
may be possible to help treat type 2 diabetes for example okay so when you jump into cold water
00:17:19.320
the lot's going on physiologically blood vessels constrict to keep the heat in our body inside that's
00:17:25.840
going to help your cardiovascular system there's this nervous response that can help us respond better to
00:17:32.000
stress there's hormones that are released is there anything that happens like what is it about cold
00:17:38.680
water that can help reduce inflammation is there something going on there is it just quieting down
00:17:43.460
the inflammatory response yeah so it's it's kind of a two-pronged attack so first is that you know
00:17:50.300
actually getting into the cold water will lead to some kind of inflammation but it will keep it in the
00:17:56.160
good zone so if you do it regularly it will keep that baseline of inflammation down so you have a
00:18:02.300
sort of long-term effect and you also have an immediate effect and that immediate effect is what
00:18:07.240
you get it's the diving reflex that when you put your face in the water it directly stimulates the vagal
00:18:14.060
nerve and that directly reduces inflammation so the long-term effect you know lasts a while so
00:18:20.140
you know you go in six times you know you have 60 of your response left 14 months later but you can
00:18:26.600
always boost it by going in and getting your face in the water and that gives you an immediate effect
00:18:32.900
all right so you want the water to be about 68 degrees fahrenheit to maybe 50 degrees fahrenheit
00:18:39.820
to get the benefits there's some famous doctor philosopher said the you know the the dose makes the poison
00:18:47.400
how like how cold is too cold and like how long is too long in the water uh when it starts causing
00:18:54.600
problems well in my experience there is if you're properly prepared i think there's no too cold what
00:19:05.160
it is is too long and as you say that the dose is the thing that the dose is in the timing really
00:19:10.880
and yeah i've been in water actually i measured it at minus 0.2 in the sea just as i was getting in
00:19:18.680
once and and it's fine because i go in warm i go in prepared so you know the thing is not to become
00:19:25.880
hypothermic so if it's really cold you're just in for a minute two minutes something like that
00:19:30.660
if it's warmer you can stay in for a long time well how do you know if you're becoming hypothermic what
00:19:35.980
are the the telltale signs well for me i think that the best sign is what's called clawing of
00:19:42.440
the hands and this this means when you you know to to do a stroke you you bring your fingers together
00:19:47.440
to to do a swimming stroke after a while when you begin to get cold you can't really bring your
00:19:54.140
fingers together anymore and it becomes difficult and that's quite a good sign that you're getting
00:19:58.960
too cold but it's an early sign so that gives you time to get back to shore and get back in and start
00:20:05.140
getting warm any other things i guess one one you mentioned is you start you can't think straight
00:20:11.060
like you have a hard time talking and keeping your thoughts together yeah i mean that's that's when
00:20:16.580
you're kind of going a bit too far i think that the thing is the fumbles the mumbles the tumbles you
00:20:23.140
know you basically you your hands your coordination goes your mental coordination goes at that point
00:20:32.060
yeah someone needs to look after you all right so if as soon as you experience those hypothermic
00:20:36.680
symptoms it's that's the time to get out of the water we're going to take a quick break for your
00:20:40.980
word from our sponsors and now back to the show so you did a uh you've done a study surveying cold
00:20:49.820
water swimmers in the uk about the benefits they've gotten from their polar plunges and this is you know
00:20:55.500
you're basically asking people tell us about your experience and you've got all sorts of great
00:21:00.580
responses in one area where you saw there was a lot of benefit was helping people with mental health
00:21:07.380
issues like anxiety and depression tell us about that story like how has how has cold water swimming
00:21:12.960
helped people with their mental health issues and what do you think is going on there
00:21:16.600
well that came about you know about you know i read this article talking about the connection
00:21:24.800
between inflammation and depression and and yeah maybe if we reduced inflammation therefore we could
00:21:30.640
treat depression and so i took this theory to a guy called mike tipton he's a professor of extreme
00:21:39.020
physiology in portsmouth and he was the guy who'd been writing all these papers i've been reading
00:21:43.220
on the effects of cold water on the body's physiology and he said oh that's that's a really
00:21:49.840
interesting idea there was no particular way forward at the time but then a few weeks later he was
00:21:55.460
contacted by chris van tilliken tv doctor who said i'm doing this program called the doctor who gave up
00:22:02.720
drugs is there anything we can use cold water swimming for and he said well coincidentally i've just met
00:22:08.580
someone who thinks they can use it for this so basically the bbc found us this wonderful young
00:22:14.400
woman sarah 24 at the time who was depressed and had been on antidepressants for eight years and just
00:22:23.520
wanted to come up off them because she didn't want her baby daughter growing up seeing her mum take
00:22:29.120
tablets so we took her down to mike's lab we put her through a cold water adaptation program you know
00:22:36.400
it was four dips in about 15 degrees centigrade in this special tank and then the next day we went
00:22:41.680
out for a swim in the lake she kept up with it afterwards and you know within a few months she'd
00:22:48.640
stopped taking her medication and when i spoke to her just a few months ago and this is we're talking
00:22:54.780
about five years later she's still free from medication still doesn't need medication still swimming
00:23:01.480
occasionally and and it really helps so next we had to do this in real life so what we did was i met
00:23:10.560
this guy mike who is with a coast guard and you know general outdoors person down in in devon in the
00:23:16.800
southwest corner of england and he said i'd really like to run these courses for you and we can do some
00:23:22.160
research so we gathered together in the end about 60 people all with clinical depression and anxiety
00:23:28.560
and put them through a basic course it's eight sessions eight 30 45 minute sessions that that
00:23:35.620
includes warming up having a cup of tea things like that and eight sessions in the water in uh summer
00:23:43.040
started summer went into winter so it was temperatures probably between 58 and 48 degrees
00:23:49.300
fahrenheit say and saw what happened and the results were were utterly remarkable you know we were getting
00:23:57.900
cure rates you know and this is total recovery rates of about 70 for anxiety and the same for
00:24:04.940
depression i mean if it was a a pill no one would believe that kind of results no this inflammation
00:24:11.280
depression connection is really interesting we've had charles rhizone i think is his name on the podcast
00:24:17.300
yeah he wrote a book about i've heard that one that was it was really useful that that really helped
00:24:21.780
you with my research if you see what i mean yeah and i think his takeaway is there so when you're in
00:24:26.540
when you have chronic inflammation it basically it disrupts how the brain responds and you start
00:24:33.480
acting like a depressive and so his idea is like if you can reduce inflammation you can reduce
00:24:39.380
depressive symptoms and he found that's the case but his way was interesting he used heat to use sauna
00:24:44.980
treatments to reduce inflammation what you're doing is using cold which is another way to reduce
00:24:51.220
inflammation yeah and it's really interesting because i i heard that podcast and then i went to a
00:24:58.420
conference which was on uh thermoregulation so it was you know both hot and cold and a lot of the work
00:25:04.920
from people using saunas and using heat stress so rather than cold stress does seem to have very
00:25:11.900
similar effect i think the advantage of the cold is certainly that it's you know certainly for us in
00:25:19.900
uh in the uk and probably in parts of the us it's just more easily accessible you don't need special
00:25:26.360
equipment for it you just need some cold water and one thing you point out in the book and then charles
00:25:32.020
pointed out in his work as well is that the inflammation depression connection it's only in some people
00:25:38.860
like some people have depression that is caused by inflammation it's like half and half basically
00:25:44.540
so i think the takeaway that he had i think the takeaway you have too in your book is if you have
00:25:50.980
depression or anxiety and you've tried treating it with you know medications or talk therapy and that
00:25:57.000
hasn't really done much for you you might have depression caused by inflammation so maybe you just focus
00:26:02.240
on reducing inflammation yeah i mean i think that's a really valid point i think
00:26:08.560
the thing about i mean the thing to remember about cold water swimming is that it's not just you know
00:26:15.380
the effect of the cold on the inflammation is one part of it there's so much more to it you know if
00:26:21.800
you're going outside being outside in nature we know that's good for you we know views of water are good
00:26:28.260
for you we know being with other people you know one of the important things is to do this with other
00:26:33.080
people and certainly you know when we've been running studies we've one of the things people have
00:26:37.280
valued most is that having that group dynamic so there's more to it and of course you're getting
00:26:45.320
exercise so there is more to it than just the cold and the effect of the cold on the inflammation
00:26:52.300
but you continue on this this thread of it's the cold's effect on inflammation you also found that
00:26:58.160
people who had you know inflammatory problems like chronic pain arthritis crohn's disease these are
00:27:05.140
all problems that are often associated with inflammation they saw reduction in symptoms as
00:27:09.840
well any can you highlight some of those things that you found yeah i mean yeah you you summed it up
00:27:15.880
really so our theory was that you know if it were if it has an effect on inflammation you know
00:27:21.520
depression is inflammation so we've been through that but maybe it'll work on other illnesses and so
00:27:26.740
we sent out a survey to see you know were people using it you know we wondered were people using it
00:27:33.020
against these kind of conditions and the responses came back with mapping exactly what we had thought
00:27:40.800
that you know type 2 diabetes is lifestyle illnesses it's the the modern lifestyle illnesses is what
00:27:46.840
we're looking at here and it was type 2 diabetes and there's as a guy i've been swimming with for years
00:27:52.440
in the sea rob who had bad crohn's disease and he kind of find out by accident yeah he started doing a
00:27:59.460
uh a thing for charity and he had to swim in the sea and he noticed that his crohn's disease had
00:28:04.260
become better and then also on the course we had one guy with chronic pain who came along because he was
00:28:13.000
getting really depressed and he just came for the depression part of it noticed his pain was getting
00:28:17.540
better another guy had fibromyalgia and similarly he came across he was more anxious but he found that
00:28:25.880
his fibromyalgia symptoms got got a whole lot better as a consequence well and so the theories there okay
00:28:32.040
there could be like an inflammatory reduction going on um with some of this stuff um but the also the
00:28:38.920
other theory again this is like it's very speculative like there's this is kind of on the cutting edge
00:28:42.720
of of research but another theory that's out there is that idea that uh cold exposure can somehow reset
00:28:51.260
our nervous system i mean i think a lot of times with um one of the theories of fibromyalgia or chronic
00:28:57.320
pain is that the brain's pain wiring has gone haywire so you're feeling pain even though there isn't
00:29:04.440
anything wrong with you but you just think it's there and the idea is that somehow the cold helps reset that
00:29:10.280
yeah and i i think that's that's it as you say this is this is very speculative but what you get with
00:29:17.140
these conditions are these abnormal circuits and these circuits and they reinforce the brain tends to
00:29:23.080
reinforce the circuits and what the cold does in some way is it resets these circuits it maybe it just
00:29:31.700
sort of overwhelms the whole thing overwhelms the whole system and it brings you right into the present
00:29:38.340
moment those loops just are broken up and you can start to produce new and less unhealthy circuits
00:29:46.760
well in another area we saw benefits of cold water swimming was reduction in migraines what do you think
00:29:54.560
is going on there uh again that's it's a it's a really complicated thing migraine is a is a terrible
00:30:01.440
affliction and we came across a girl beth who is you know she was yeah young in the 20s doing a phd but
00:30:11.920
had to give up a phd because she's having 28 migraines a month you know i mean that's virtually
00:30:17.980
every day and the who suggests that a day with a migraine is like a day being paraplegic and if
00:30:25.020
she she wanted to do something in nature and again found by coincidence that it helped the symptoms of
00:30:33.520
a migraine and you know i think again we're being speculative but i think again it's these things
00:30:40.100
that resets the mind it resets those electronic circuits and it just takes you out of things and
00:30:48.820
reduces inflammation so it's it's a complex thing and you know a lot of this you could argue that
00:30:56.240
we should be doing research starting from the bottom up saying you know why why does cold water
00:31:01.020
swimming work but for me i think i prefer to start at the top and say well does it work and let's see
00:31:07.900
who it works for and then we'll get their stories and we can start beginning to work out why it works
00:31:14.820
afterwards okay so it looks like there's there are benefits to cold water swimming so someone's
00:31:19.680
listening to this and they think well i want to get started with i want to give this a try
00:31:23.040
how do you find a place to swim in the first place um are there you found there like are there only
00:31:28.620
certain times of the year that you can get the benefits of cold water swimming is it like just
00:31:32.120
winter time no well it depends where you live if you live in tahiti you probably don't get much
00:31:38.600
cold water at all but for most of us in temperate climate you know really you can get the
00:31:44.440
benefits all year round and what in fact what i recommend doing is you start in the summer start
00:31:48.900
when it's at its warmest that's what i did and then you carry on for as long as you feel feel good
00:31:55.880
about it and you feel safe so yeah it's finding a place there's lots of uh there's more and more
00:32:00.940
wild swim maps and things like this but essentially the golden rule is find a place find some cold
00:32:07.020
water whether it's a lake a stream a bit of the ocean and but before you go in make sure you know
00:32:16.500
how you get out because there's the book this book the official rules which was popular in the 80s and
00:32:22.240
one of the my favorites from that is agnes allen's rule which is almost anything is easier to get
00:32:28.560
into than out of and that applies to all of life in my opinion and it's particularly true for
00:32:34.020
cold water swimming and then yeah and the other thing is you know take a friend along you know
00:32:39.200
always do it with someone else because they can you know having someone else out there even if
00:32:44.400
they're not swimming with you that that increases the safety and will help you get out of any trouble
00:32:50.460
well i think i'm sure they can probably tell if you're becoming hypothermic as well
00:32:54.200
yeah absolutely yeah and that's a really important part of it is that they can recognize that kind of
00:33:00.840
thing okay so look for oceans it can be done all year i think in the united states there's lots of
00:33:06.780
little swim holes where the water stays really cold if you live in mountain areas the rivers are
00:33:12.640
freezing because it's just the water's coming from snow melt so this can be an all-year thing if you
00:33:18.020
want let's talk about you want to do in a group for safety but you also think there's a benefit just
00:33:23.860
from being around people that's one of the benefits you think what's going on it's sort of social
00:33:27.360
medicine yeah totally i mean one of the biggest issues with the pandemic for example has been
00:33:35.400
the way the increase in social isolation and going and doing this with a group you know for a start
00:33:42.100
you're meeting with a group you're reducing social isolation but also it's just so much fun you know
00:33:47.900
when you when you go and do it with a group you have a laugh and you know that shared euphoria was
00:33:53.800
really one of the things that came out of our studies you know when people get to you know
00:33:58.880
comment on how it benefited them it was that shared laughter then going and having a cup of hot chocolate
00:34:04.760
or hot tea or hot coffee up together afterwards so i think there's a lot more to it that community
00:34:11.820
rather than just the safety aspect so you you found your place do you just jump in or do you
00:34:18.220
recommend doing a warm-up before you do get in the water i think it's really important to be warm
00:34:23.760
before you get in so essentially our body is very good at protecting our core organs yeah our core and so
00:34:32.760
but the outside bit of it the skin the muscles the the fat there which is also known as bioprene
00:34:41.180
in the in the cold swimming community that is there is kind of a heat sink and it's like a storage
00:34:48.580
heater and so if you think if you go into water when you're cold you've got nothing in your storage
00:34:56.140
heater you know so your core will cool down and your vital organs which you really need to preserve
00:35:01.980
will cool down really quickly but if you go into the water warm and you know you've got that
00:35:08.700
that storage heater totally full you'll be able to stave off that hypothermia a whole lot longer
00:35:15.520
and the other thing i think about going so so one going warm the other thing that is important is
00:35:21.220
certainly before you're used to it is that you go in you just put your body in first because you don't
00:35:28.260
want the signals the conflicting signals from the body which is that sympathetic fight flight response
00:35:33.840
going along with the signals from your face which is the parasympathetic drive and also when you're not
00:35:42.440
used to it you will get that gasp you'll get that hyperventilation which you cannot control and so you
00:35:49.300
know the biggest danger for newswimmers or people who are just pulled out the water you know in these
00:35:55.160
crazy things is that they their head goes under and they breathe in a whole lungfuls of water
00:36:01.820
okay so don't jump right in the first time so the warm-up is that just you're recommending people
00:36:07.880
exercise like you want to raise your internal temperature it's you're trying to treat your body
00:36:11.760
like a water bottle basically get the inside warm-up yeah and and the most effective way of doing it
00:36:18.660
is actually to warm yourself from the inside out so by exercise is a great way of doing it if you just
00:36:25.860
sort of warm on the surface and cold in the in the you know the next bit and then warm in the middle
00:36:31.160
you know that's that's actually worse than than being cold but if you do something like for example
00:36:38.120
as they have in the nordic countries for many years if you go into a sauna and you warm yourself
00:36:45.300
completely through that's fine that's good and you know the the fins particularly have been showing
00:36:51.340
that for showing us that for many years all right so you warm yourself up you get in the first time
00:36:56.040
you're going to get in slowly just your body get your body acclimated before you stick your face into
00:37:01.520
the water because you don't want that those two nervous systems crisscrossing each other and you
00:37:06.500
inhaling a bunch of water how long should a swim be is you said earlier just depends on how cold it is
00:37:11.240
correct a swim it's difficult to judge a swim should be it depends on the temperature so to get the
00:37:19.620
benefits i think i think the most important thing is to know to get the benefits you do not have to
00:37:24.660
be in very long you need to be in as long as it takes you to get your breath back you know you have
00:37:29.200
that initial gasp and hyperventilation and you feel oh my god this is awful and then after a minute or so
00:37:36.600
that passes and that is long enough so in the middle of winter what i suggest is maybe three minutes
00:37:44.660
put your face in three times that's it and you know when it's super cold you may not even need
00:37:49.840
three minutes beyond that it's how good you feel and you know the things we discussed about
00:37:54.760
you know clawing at the hands feeling cold you know get out there's there's no virtue beyond a bit of
00:38:01.380
extra exercise from staying in for a long time gotcha uh what about warming up are there any protocols
00:38:06.280
you recommend for warming yourself up after your cold water swim well again warming up afterwards
00:38:12.980
best done from the inside out so you know do some exercise go for a run get on your bike i you know
00:38:19.920
after my swim i get on my bike and go to a cafe and have coffee okay so you warm yourself up is going
00:38:25.560
into a sauna directly after a cold water swim okay because i've heard different things right i think
00:38:32.620
a sauna i think is a good thing again you know we've got so much evidence that it's perfectly safe because
00:38:39.680
we the so many people have been doing it in finland and sweden and norway for so many years
00:38:45.580
the thing is hot air air just doesn't hold that much heat it feels warm but it doesn't hold that
00:38:51.900
much heat so it's a very safe way of warming people and this is why we use it in the operating
00:38:56.900
theater because it's so safe and that you know i think you've got to be more careful about a hot shower
00:39:03.180
and you know if you start with a lukewarm shower i mean this is how i tend to do it i haven't got the
00:39:07.880
luxury of a sauna most of the time but you start lukewarm with the shower that's fine but if you
00:39:14.680
start with a hot shower you can damage your skin and things like this because the body isn't moving
00:39:18.940
the blood away from the from the skin you can damage it you could scald yourself basically yeah exactly
00:39:26.560
well here's a question i forgot to ask are there people who should maybe be careful with the cold
00:39:33.600
water swims because of heart issues i've heard that you jump in you have that that reaction and
00:39:40.560
it could cause a heart attack is there anything to that idea so yes of course there's some people
00:39:46.640
whose hearts are so bad that you just don't want to get them into cold water but really if you can walk
00:39:54.620
down to the beach or get yourself into the swimming place and get yourself out again you are probably
00:40:02.380
fit enough to go into the water you do yeah be careful if you have a heart condition but
00:40:09.640
it's a bit of a myth that it's the heart attack that kills people it's these hyperventilations
00:40:15.120
getting the face under the water and not being able to hold your breath under the water that's what
00:40:19.860
what kills most people rather than the the stress on the heart that stress on the heart is probably
00:40:25.460
no greater than walking up two three flights of stairs okay uh so what if you don't have access to
00:40:32.140
outdoor cold water can you get these same benefits by taking cold showers or ice baths you can get the
00:40:38.440
benefits but not the same benefits i mean there was one shower one study of cold showers which showed
00:40:45.460
that people who took a cold shower in the morning had less sick days the thing is the effect from the
00:40:52.340
cold comes from two main sources as it will there are two main determinants of it and that is the
00:40:59.380
actual temperature of the water and the rate cooling and in a shower it's probably not going to be as
00:41:06.040
cold it might be you know it's going to be room temperature or whatever and you you're not immediately
00:41:11.660
immersing yourself in cold water so you don't become cold quite so quickly an ice bath well yes
00:41:17.860
that will give you those benefits but for me it's just not as much fun unless you have a really big
00:41:23.360
ice bath with lots of people jumping in and out it's not as much fun as being with lots of people
00:41:28.520
jumping in and out to see but yes you would see benefits i think another point too besides the social
00:41:34.260
benefit of swimming outdoors like there's something about being outside that amplifies the these
00:41:41.060
benefits as well like there's been lots of studies done about the benefits of being outside in nature
00:41:46.560
to for depression and other sicknesses yeah without a doubt and that's yeah i like to think of cold
00:41:53.900
water swimming or outdoor swimming as a total package it's not just about the cold i think the cold
00:42:00.060
brings you some unique benefits but it's it's the community it's being out in nature we do know
00:42:06.220
that's good i mean just a view of water brings mental health benefits plus the exercise and everything
00:42:15.240
else that you get from it so it's it really not just about the cold okay uh somebody if you can't
00:42:21.360
have access to cold water for you live in tahiti for example an ice bath could you can get benefits of
00:42:28.760
for the cold uh yeah you you would get the the benefits of the cold and then maybe if you did
00:42:34.460
it in tahiti you could be looking out over the ocean in your ice bath and you get in and get out
00:42:39.640
and you're warm the whole time so fantastic you're living the dream you've you've you've won life if
00:42:45.620
you're doing that well mark mark this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn
00:42:50.260
more about the book and your work well i mean with the book the book go to your favorite local
00:42:56.840
bookshop and order it that's uh that's the thing with that i mean i send out occasional tweets from
00:43:03.320
the wild swim doctor about swimming but i think what i'd like people most to do is look at some of
00:43:09.300
the work that's being done by organizations to get people out and help people find the benefits of
00:43:15.500
cold water swimming and so this is mental health swims.co.uk or chilluk.org and seashore.org
00:43:23.880
three organizations i work with who do amazing stuff you know really bringing access to this
00:43:31.060
fantastic therapy well dr mark harper thanks for your time it's been a pleasure
00:43:36.160
absolute pleasure for me too thanks for having me my guest today is dr mark harper he's the author of
00:43:42.340
the book chill the cold water swim cure it's available on amazon.com make sure to check out our
00:43:46.280
show notes at aom.is slash cold swim we find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic
00:43:50.800
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:44:01.780
art of manliness.com we find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles we've written
00:44:05.480
over the years about pretty much anything you can think of and if you'd like to enjoy ad-free
00:44:08.460
episodes of the aom podcast you can do so on stitcher premium head over to stitcher premium.com
00:44:12.280
sign up use code manly set checkout for a free month trial once you're signed up download the strap
00:44:16.280
on android ios so you start enjoying ad-free episodes of the aom podcast and if you haven't done
00:44:20.380
so already i'd appreciate if you take one minute to give you a review and apple podcast or spotify
00:44:23.760
helps out a lot if you've done that already thank you please consider sharing the show with a friend
00:44:27.700
or family member you'd think we get something out of it as always thank you for the continued support
00:44:31.100
until next time it's brett mckay reminds you not to listen to the wind podcast but put what you've heard