To be successful, you need to take on several habits. Not only do successful people acquire and take good care of their wealth, but they also take care of themselves inside and out. Sound financial practices and an intelligent workflow, combined with maintaining a well-balanced lifestyle, help make them what they are. But what can help us build the foundations of success is taking cold showers.
Cold showers!? That must be surprising to most of us. It takes a lot of guts to do this every morning. Much more to do for the first time, especially in winter. What do you feel when the first drops of cold water hit your body? Shock, heavy breathing, a hesitancy that you need to overcome to get through it, especially all the images that are going through your mind, both good and bad, that makes you wish you did not have to go through it anymore. But these things are just what we feel at first hand. The benefits are numerous and profound in the long run. Here is the list of benefits of taking a cold shower. Once you go through them, you will understand why taking cold showers is a foundation of success.
A. Benefits of Taking A Cold Shower To Your Mental Wellbeing:
1. Cold Showers Builds Will Power:
It takes a very strong-willed person to take a cold bath. You will hesitate at first. But to beat that hesitancy to take on the cold water every day will build up your will, not just for taking a cold shower, but for other things as well. It takes a lot of discipline and mental health to take this challenge. You will build this routine into a habit once you do this for at least 21 days. But the target is to do this hereafter. Having strong willpower and practice of discipline built this way extends to everything else you do for the rest of the day. As a result, taking on bigger challenges will be easier for you than if you don’t have the qualities that cold showers helped build.
2. Cold Showers Improves Emotional resistance:
If you are the sort of person who gets irritated readily from small matters, building emotional resistance is something you need to do. Creating a positive atmosphere around you is a way to achieve success. People will find it easy to work with you. Taking cold baths can help your mind achieve this through the process of body hardening. Your body can build resistance against stress by repeatedly exposed to an external stimulus such as cold water. Once your body is used to this, you will notice how well you can focus your mind away from mundane things that irritate you and get on with things that matter the most.
3. Cold Showers Helps Relieve Depression:
Cold showers stimulate noradrenaline production, which helps the brain reduce the effects of depression. Noradrenaline helps you reach, escape, and defend yourself from threats or act in the face of any stimulus such as contact with cold water. Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University found cold showers can stave off depression. The experiment is done by gradually dropping water temperature followed by three minutes of cold water showering. The cold water produces a shock effect. This shock then results in neuro-electrical impulses send from peripheral nerves to the brain, creating an anti-depressive effect.
B. Benefits of Cold Showers on Your Health:
4. Cold Showers Reduces Stress:
Building resistance by repeated exposure to cold water can help you lower stress by building your body’s adaptation to stimuli. We are so used to the comforts of modern living that our “adaptation muscles” are barely used. Being too used to everyday living decreases our ability to recover from all kinds of stress. The stress we usually encounter now comes in the form of lower-level, steady stress that accumulates in our bodies. Taking a cold shower is a quick and easy way to bring back the “flight or fight” response of our body to take us away from being stuck in this state that is susceptible to anxiety and depression. Moreover, exposure to cold water helps build up glutathione levels in your blood and reduce uric acid. A proper balance of these chemicals helps make your body less stressed in general.
5. Cold Showers Helps Give You Increased Alertness and an Extra Boost:
You will note big deep breaths once you step under a cold shower. Your breath will become erratic. Taking deep breaths is one of the reasons why taking a cold shower will help wake you up. These deep and erratic breathing patterns will help give extra oxygen intake in your blood and improve your heart rate. This extra oxygen thus brings a massive boost of energy than when you took a warm bath. Aside from the extra boost given by having more oxygen in the bloodstream, the shock value of going through a cold shower can help wake you up.
6. Cold Showers Can Improve Skin and Hair:
The cold water does not wash off the oil from the hair and skin surfaces as readily as warm water does. The oil serves as protection for your skin. Oils trap moisture in the skin while keeping toxins and other harmful things out of it. Preserving the natural oil in your skin will help you stave off aging for a longer time. In the meantime, oil maintains the shine and gloss on your hair. The cold water also serves to keeping the follicles flat and increasing their grip on the scalp. Hair loss can be prevented by taking cold showers as well.
7. Cold Showers Can Stimulate Weight Loss:
First, let us discuss two types of fat in your body: white and brown fat. White fat is what you want to prevent having too much of. Brown fat, in the meantime, is what the body uses to generate heat to keep your body warm. A study at the National Institute of Health in Washington showed that repeated exposure to cold water activates this brown fat resulting in more calories burned to keep your body warm. Studies on mice showed that those with brown fat stayed leaner and healthier.
8. Cold Showers Improve Circulation:
Note how fast the heartbeats from the moment you go under the shower. Heartbeats are the body’s automatic reaction to keep your body warm. Blood is pumped to the organs during cold conditions to keep them warm. This stimulation of circulation activity also benefits cardiovascular function. Another way cold water helps in circulation is when cold water hits your body and external limbs. It constricts circulation on the surface of your body which causes blood in your deeper tissues to circulate at faster rates to maintain ideal body temperature.
9. Cold Showers Improve Memory Retention:
Cold showers help with improving memory retention by acting on your lymphatic system. Your lymphatic system serves to help carry waste out waste from cells. The best way to stimulate your lymph vessels is by alternating cold and warm water when taking a bath. When cold water hits your body, this will initially contract the lymph vessels. Exposure to warmer water relaxes it. This alternating of cold and warm water when taking a bath will pump the fluid that stagnated from the lymph vessels. The benefit of having fewer toxins in your blood system, among others, is improved alertness and memory retention.
10. Cold Showers Improve Immunity:
Cold showers improve immunity through their effect on blood vessels. Stimuli caused by exposure to cold and warm conditions constrict and dilate blood vessels which speed up metabolism. Taking cold showers will help strengthen the body’s natural defenses. One study compared a set of individuals who took purely warm baths with another group who took cold water showers at varying times. The result showed that as much as 29% of those who took cold water baths were less likely to get sick or reported less illness overall.
11. Cold Showers Speeds Up Muscle Recovery:
High-performance athletes, especially those subjected to extended minutes of physical exertion, go through an ice bath session. Cool temperatures reduce muscle soreness after intense physical activity. The cold water has regenerative properties, and your muscles will relax and repair themselves. Cold showers are not as effective as ice bath sessions, but cold water can improve circulation and reduce lactic acid remaining in the muscles.
12. They Help Make It Easier For You To Sleep:
The body follows a circadian rhythm. At one point before the end of your day, your body will start to prepare itself to sleep. One of the first steps in this process is by lowering the core temperature of your body. One way to stimulate the lowering of body temperature is by taking a shower. If you take a cool or cold shower, it will naturally start to reduce your body temperature and send a signal to your brain that sleep time is fast approaching. The shock value may wake you up initially. But eventually, and soon, drowsiness will take over and will help you to sleep.
Summary:
One of the ways to achieve success is to leave
your comfort zone. If we need to grow
and improve, we need to try something challenging. We need to step out, or jump out, of our
comfort zones. As mentioned earlier, the habits of successful people revolve
around staying sharp and staying healthy.
Cold showers are hard at first.
Or maybe hard to do indefinitely.
It could not be for anybody because of some medical conditions. But to
develop a habit, taking cold showers must be done every day if possible. The benefits far outweigh the shock value of
going under the cold water coming off the showerhead. If you are looking to be successful someday,
then taking a daily cold shower is an excellent step to do from now on.