To understand a year of cold showers you need to go back 12 months, back to when I started, because the world of the 1st of September 2020 was very different from the world of today. Just before St Patrick’s Day (17 March 2020) my youngest child’s pre-school closed, then a few days later the older boys school closed, and that was that until after the summer holidays, the 1st September 2020.
For the first few days of home schooling, and it was
only the first few days, I got the kids to put on their school uniforms, and we
tried to be ultra normal, but nothing was normal. My wife works for the NHS, she needed to be
in the office and was away virtually every day.
The jobs I was trying to progress were gone, and they aren’t coming
back. My physical and social outlets
were gone, and will never be the same. I
have three boys with three years and three hundred and sixty three days between
the oldest and the youngest. So the kids
were never alone, generally a good thing, sometimes a bad thing, but I was the
main carer and teacher, and there was a lot of caring and teaching to do!
So after these months I decided that on the 1st
September I’d start taking cold showers each day for a week. As the children re-started school, this was
my re-start, my line in the sand, my demarcation between the then and the now. I’d taken the odd cold shower in the past, I
hated them, but this meant that the concept of cold showers wasn’t alien! The first few days were awful, the cold water
was dreadful, it was on the edge of being sore, by the time I’d finished the
shower I actually felt light headed!
Mentally I didn’t want to do it, especially after the
first day, that’s how long the novelty lasted(!), I had to force myself to do
something I didn’t want to do, and better still something I had absolutely no
reason to do. That’s why I shared it on
social media, it was another step in the pathway of self-discipline, of forcing
myself to do something I didn’t want to do, of creating the demarcation between
the then and the now, the self-conscious decision to re-start. At the end of the week I didn’t want to stop,
but I wanted to stop, if that makes any sense. Then at the end of the month it
was the same, I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t stop. Retrospectively I realise that stopping the
cold shower would have been stopping the re-start, it wasn’t just about the
unpleasantness of the cold shower, it was about moving on, the then and the
now.
I can’t report any profound health benefits, either
physical or mental. That is the kind of
outlandish – “here’s 10 superhuman
lessons I learnt from cold showers every day for a year” kind of
thing. Well the only perceptible one was
staying in the sea (the Atlantic) for a long time with the children and without
feeling really really cold during our summer holidays, the seas always cold at
Portrush, and the kids had wetsuits, I didn’t.
After the first week of cold showers the water still felt very cold, but
not as cold, the shock and the light headedness were gone. I also learnt that if you breathed in a
certain way (and this took a good few months to realise), that is deep quick
breaths, you blew the air out with a ‘sh’ sound, the water would stop feeling
cold. You still felt the water, but you
didn’t feel the temperature, it didn’t feel warm, it just didn’t have a
temperature, this is a pretty powerful breathing technique, which I haven’t
explored as much as I should.
Without intention the social media post became
connected to physical activity: cardio, resistance, mobility / stretching. To demystify what mobility / stretching is,
it is either a set program of movements or stretches I accessed via an app or
YouTube. The YouTube stuff was yoga,
some yoga is just plain weird, it wasn’t that kind of stuff. The heart of yoga is a flow, the connection
of breath and movement. This stretching
and movement (eventually) leads to increased physical awareness, flexibility
and flow of movement, at the beginning it’s just hard and awkward, but press on
my friend. Personally I believe
flexibility and flow are the most important of all physical attributes, because
everything else emanates from them.
Anyhow these three became linked to the cold shower, and therefore part
of my daily routine. Once again to go
back a little, during the first part of the lock down I had tried to do this
but it had petered out, it lacked consistency and accountability, but not now.
Inadvertently what I had intended as a demarcation,
(between the then and the now), had metamorphosed into mental and physical
progression. It was self-imposed
consistency, but it was more than that, it was a consistency that was tied to
hardship (obviously a minor hardship), but it was an unnecessary hardship, one
with no practical benefits. People can
practise a similar lifestyle for business, but the outcome is money, people can
do this in martial arts and the outcome is advancement in belts, people can do
this with eating and the outcome is a healthy BMI. But the outcome of a cold shower is a cold
shower.
Cold showers are easy, the discomfort is always there,
you don’t have to go anywhere or buy anything, all you need to do is turn the
water to cold, then stay there for however long you have decided to stay there
for. On a practical note use a timer,
and at the start be realistic.
I think I’ll keep having a daily cold shower, I might
mark the month off via social media or something, but I won’t do it every
day. But it has been very important to
me. It kept me focused. It gave me something special, something that
is mine, I don’t see the lock down as an awful time, it just came and went like
everything else. I was productive and
some of that productivity will see the light of day between now and
Christmas. I also lost lots of things,
things that will not come back, but they have been placed firmly in the then,
but I live firmly in the now. I didn’t
go on a mystical journey, instead I decided to do something unpleasant,
something I didn’t want to do, something I didn’t need to do, something that
was completely personal. I’m starting to
realise that I found more than I appreciate, and that with time I may become
conscious of even more. During the
lockdown, which was a very unusual time, a time when many people regressed, I
progressed physically, mentally, and practically, maybe not lots, but I
progressed. I can’t say that the cold
showers were the cause of these changes, but I do think that the cold showers
created unique circumstances. Then
within these circumstances, new choices became available, new ways of looking
at the world evolved, pre-existing opportunities became clear, and unhelpful
routines or rituals were so disrupted, you were no longer part of them. Life is full of choices and opportunities,
sometimes the oddest of choices can lead to a situation where the most profound
of changes can happen.
NB I wrote this in the final days before completing one year.
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