Cold showers… nobody likes them. Who in their right mind would subject themselves to the pain and the discomfort of a cold shower? The shower is meant to be a place of relaxation and comfort — it’s meant to be the one time throughout the day when you can forget about all the things you have to do and instead, relax as the hot water trickles down your body.

Well, I’m here to tell you to give it a try. If you’ve ever been on the “self-help” side of YouTube or listened to any Huberman Lab podcasts, then I’m sure, at some point, you’ve heard about the benefits of taking cold showers. But before I get into any of those, I want to give you the story of why I decided to take up this challenge.

Throughout high school and the first two years of college, I spent a good chunk of my time in the gym lifting weights. My motivation was that I wanted to create the most desirable physique so that all the gym bros could not stop ‘mirin. It wasn’t until midway through my sophomore year of college that I began drifting away from this mindset (I get into the reason here). I had a paradigm shift and this shift made me realize that I went to the gym for the wrong reasons — I didn’t care about my health, functionality, or longevity. What I cared about were the compliments I received and how much weight I could bench press.

When I had this realization, it made me reconsider the relationship I had with my physical health. I didn’t want my satisfaction to be dependent upon other people’s compliments, so I came up with a solution — the solution was to quit going to the gym, altogether. In hindsight, this definitely wasn’t the best solution to my problem, because for the next year and a half, I didn’t go to the gym nor did I exercise much. I would, occasionally, play pickup basketball but not enough to make it count.

Fast forward to the start of this year. When school started back up, on January 11th, I was at home attending my classes virtually. As I sat at my desk, listening to my professor discuss our syllabus, I became bored and decided to look through the photos on my phone. I ended up coming across some old progress pictures of me from when I was at my peak weight. As I was looking through these photos for the first time, it dawned on me just how much I had regressed in the past 18 months. I was immediately filled with disappointment, and this is the straw that broke the camel’s back.

After my class finished that day, I decided the time was now to stop being lazy, to stop making excuses, and to start to hold myself accountable. I wanted to punish myself for all the time that I slacked off, so I made myself do the one thing that I hated the most. I went for a run, without music, and without anything. All I had was the whining voice in my head telling me to stop, but I ignored it and kept going. When I got back after the run, I took a freezing cold shower. Little did I know this would be the beginning of my new challenge.

Now, I’ve gone through phases of taking cold showers in the past so I knew what to expect. But when I got out of the shower this time, it felt like I was a whole new man. It felt as if I had turned the page into a new chapter of my life, going from lazy to health-conscious. With this newfound surge of motivation, I decided I’d commit to taking cold showers for the next few months.

What I discovered during this time is that the mind is VERY weak and it tries to trick you, A LOT. It will try to convince you to make the shower hot because it doesn’t like to be uncomfortable. It will make up all sorts of excuses to stop you from stepping foot in the shower, but once you do, you’ll realize that it’s not nearly as bad as you had once thought.

Every time you step into the cold water, you’re putting yourself in an uncomfortable state and this goes directly against what your mind wants. It’s as if your conscious and subconscious mind are battling it out for control over your body; the longer you force yourself to be uncomfortable, the stronger the will of your conscious mind becomes. After some time, your conscious mind will begin to dominate your subconscious — you’ll still hear the complaints coming from your subconscious but they will be much less persuasive now.

Your inner/subconscious voice is the thing that’s stopping you from achieving all that it is you want to achieve, it’s limiting your growth. This can manifest itself in many different forms, such as: thinking you’re not good enough, never fully committing to anything, contradicting your own values, and having no self-control. Each is more nuanced than just that, nonetheless, they are still all derived from the inner/subconscious voice dominating the conscious voice.

Strengthening your conscious voice so that it can start to put up a fight against your subconscious can be done by more than just cold showers. But, I find cold showers to be the easiest and most effective way to do it because think about it, you probably take a shower 3–7 times per week for 5–20 minutes each time. That’s more than enough time. If you try it for one single month, then I’m willing to bet that by the end of it you will have more mental fortitude. This isn’t the only benefit either, subjecting yourself to cold temperatures for ~5 minutes a day has been shown to increase metabolism, improve sleep, reduce stress, and improve skin/hair among other things.

Taking all of the things that I said into consideration, I hope you give this challenge a try because it has been bountiful for me.