Andrew Huberman· PhD
Cold exposure 3-10min, 2-4X weekly increases: baseline dopamine 2.5X, brown fat density (& thus may offset nafld) & mental resilience.
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
Cold exposure 3-10min, 2-4X weekly increases: baseline dopamine 2.5X, brown fat density (& thus may offset nafld) & mental resilience.
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Deliberate cold is a unique stressor w/unique adaptations- such as acute resilience and especially long lasting increases in catecholamines (dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine).
most stressors and in particular things that evoke stress or our feelings of stress internally that we don't like do not increase dopamine. They only increase norepinephrine and epinephrine, but deliberate cold exposure seems to cause a dramatic increase in dopamine.
And if you start to think of those as walls that you can tolerate and climb over while staying and calm and clear of mind, then you can really imagine how the ice bath and other forms of cold exposure are really serving to train you up for real life stressors.
So it appears that deliberate cold exposure can create what we call or what Hans Selye called eustress. In other words, it can create a condition in the brain and body in which we are stressing ourselves, we are training up resilience, and yet we are creating a neurochemical milieu that actually has many health benefits.
And that's the study from Srámek et al, entitled, "Human physiological responses "to immersion into water of different temperatures". I'm not going to go into this into a ton of detail for sake of time, but basically what they show is that putting people into cold water, and I should mention the water that they used in this study wasn't that cold. They had a bunch of different conditions, but they had people that got into, for instance, 60 degree Fahrenheit water for up to two hours, had them sitting there, had them in a lawn chair up to their neck, had very long sustained increases in dopamine transmission and dopamine circulation in their
As far as I'm concerned, the main function of the cold for most people is going to be the discipline of doing it, the sense of resilience that you can build up over time just being familiar with having adrenaline in your system. And then the fact that the dopamine increases are huge and long lasting, I mean, they're like 2.5x increases.
This is one of the reasons why if you've ever done deliberate cold exposure as it's called it often is uncomfortable when you get in but then when you get out you feel different you feel really good in most cases provided if you're me you take a warm shower afterwards yes I like to do that I realize if you want to increase your metabolism perhaps it's better to not warm up afterwards I like a nice warm shower or to get in the sauna afterwards that's just me but nonetheless deliberate cold exposure clearly induces a state shift of mind and body that most people provided they do it correctly and they don't go into water that's far too cold for them for too long they report as pleasant