Dopamine levels rise during ice cold water immersion and remain elevated for hours afterward.

“Nothing comes close in terms of the degree of dopamine and adrenaline increase, the speed or the duration of response.”

“In large part due to the adrenaline increase and the dopamine increase that lasts for a long while afterwards.”

“But nonetheless, it's a basically zero cost. I mean, you need access to water of some sort, cold water shower, et cetera, but basically zero cost way of triggering a long lasting increase in dopamine without ingesting anything, no pharmacology whatsoever.”

“When you're in the ice bath, your dopamine levels are high. When your dopamine levels are high, your experience of the discomfort of that ice bath is at higher resolution.”

“but deliberate cold exposure provided is done safely can create similar if not greater increases in dopamine that are not just fleeting, that don't just occur during, say the consumption of some deleterious drug or activity, but that are very long lasting and that can be leveraged toward activities other than deliberate cold exposure.”

“So the use of cold water for increasing dopamine is a real tool. It's, I would say, a power tool. In fact, it's the kind of thing that if you want to increase dopamine for sake of motivation, it might be your first go-to provided you're also doing the things to maintain dopamine baseline like sunlight exposure in particular, making sure you're getting sufficient amounts of tyrosine-containing foods and so on.”

“that you don't need to expose yourself to that cold water for nearly as long. So perhaps even as short as one minute or even 30 seconds exposure to really cold water, can lead to these potent long-lasting increases in dopamine.”

“For instance, will a cold shower suffice? Very likely, yes, if your shower gets cold enough.”

“In fact, I am actually not aware of many things besides love and delight that can create this long, slow arc of dopamine lasting many hours.”

“And that's the surge of dopamine that we know based on a paper published in the European Journal of physiology lasts many hours, and it's a 100% to 200% increase in dopamine.”

“Whereas the ice bath and cold showers will give this long arc lasting two to three hours or more.”

“this is known to increase Baseline levels of dopamine significantly in fact double them or more for long periods of time meaning hours up to four maybe even six hours into the day”

“cold shower or cold immersion which not only increases dopamine long term or over several hours rather but for most people is experienced as pain that pain causes a rebound out of that dopamine trough faster than it would occur if you had just stayed in that a motivated State and waited for it to go away or done something like cleaning up”

“you can accomplish this a number of different ways you could get into a cold shower in the morning and I do recommend doing this in the morning and in that case it's okay to get the water on your head in fact I recommend it uh you could get into an ice bath you could get into a cold Plunge in these circumstances I'm not suggesting this for sake of increasing metabolism or fat loss and the whole discussion around uh deliberate cold and metabolism and fat loss has become a little bit controversial so we won't go there now mostly because we're focused on the clear ability of deliberate cold exposure to increase dopamine for long periods of time AKA your dopamine Baseline”

“So you could use all sorts of tools and protocols, like a cold shower to increase epinephrine, adrenaline, and dopamine and get more motivated, and then do something.”

“So the mooden enhancing effects that you report those are almost certainly a the consequence of having slowly elevating but significantly elevated dop do dopamine that goes on for hours. That's almost a dreamlike profile for dopamine because most everything else like an aderall, a rolin, a cup of coffee and a um and a workout drink or pre-workout drink or something is going to give you a big spike in adrenaline and dopamine and a big crash.”

“but there's a whole bunch of other good positive effects of ice bathing like dopamine going up tfold and all this stuff right have some anti-depressant effects”

“but there's a whole bunch of other good positive effects of ice bathing like dopamine going up tenfold and all this stuff right now that's gonna have some antidepressant effects right”

“interestingly those dopamine levels and serotonin and nephrine stay elevated for hours afterwards before going back down to the Baseline levels of dopamine firing which is amazing because what that says is we never go into that dopamine deficit State we get our dopamine indirectly by paying for it up front and that process is relatively more immune to the problem of addiction because we had to work first to get it um whereas intoxicants cause that sudden upward Spike of dopamine followed by dopamine freef fall that dop mean deficit state that state of craving before going back to the level position”

“ice cold water immersion noting that dopamine levels rise gradually over the latter half of the immersive ice cold water bath and then interestingly those dopamine levels and serotonin and norepinephrine stay elevated for hours afterwards before going back down to the Baseline levels of dopamine firing”

“when we do something that is difficult that induces pain and the two examples that she gave were cold immersion and exercise the body has to offset that pain somehow and it does so by increasing the endogenous production of dopamine”

“when you remove the pain painful stimulus I.E when you get out of the cold plunger when you stop the workout you have this lingering effect of that heightened dopamine but again it's a physiologic level and it hasn't been sort of a hijacked level”

“what it really comes down to is endogenous dopamine production from pain”

“Cold exposure vs. drug highs”

“He explains in amazing detail the benefits of getting effortful dopamine (ie. cold water immersion) from motivation, focus, attention, and mood.”

“cold shower is always great and it's not just zero cost it'll save you on your heating bill”

“when I get out I always feel much better it's like okay there's a relief there you get that Arc of dopamine release that's quite long lasting”