I’ve been in a cold shower for a few weeks and I’m surprised how quickly I’ve adapted. Now, I can stand there with almost no discomfort, in the water, which will make me tremble involuntarily eight, ten showers.
According to the cold shower nerd I follow, it is important not only to keep the water cold, but to avoid exercising your own cold mentally and physically. You just want it to hit you. Don’t bend over your shoulders, don’t embrace your own warmth, don’t be a painful face.
If the water is too cold and you react without control, you will twitch a little bit. You will find your own non-resistance state and then try to achieve it in cooler temperatures next time.
This simple approach is being authorized – almost immediately – it applies to cold water more important.
To be clear, this is not something that “not killing my stuff will make me stronger”. I don’t have David Goggins or David Blaine-like temperament. I don’t want to run a 240-mile supermarathon, nor do I want to wrap in ice eggs for two days. I really like comfort. I’m wearing sweatpants now, drinking decaf and listening to Enya.
I’m talking about painful and unpleasant things, which are more subtle than beating yourself. Human abilities make people consciously play with our psychological resistance to things, making many areas of life easier and relatively faster.
By allowing more discomfort than usual without objection, you can expand the realm where you can roam freely – i.e. without suffering. I could swim in the cold lake, forget my sweater at home, or get stuck in the rain, and suffer much less than before. This change is not life-changing, but it is important and comes only after a few meetings, perhaps a 20-minute exposure time.
Similarly, cold is just one of the many difficult feelings in life to be famous. In theory, the same approach can be used to sterilize many other forms of discomfort: fatigue, heat, humidity, hunger, neuroticism, depression, social anxiety, spicy taste of food, fear of spiders – any feeling that oneself reflexes to try to get rid of.
As long as you have some way to control exposure levels, you can find and live in that window below “Asea” and consciously carry more without wear or retreat. This can expand the range of your easy/finished experience in a lasting way.
We already know that our various “comfort zones” can be expanded only due to familiarity. Your first public speech, airplane flight or horseradish experience can be a bit crazy. Repeated experiences will naturally increase your comfort in what you are discussing, as your system learns the physical and emotional outlines of this experience and stops fear. Certain forms of behavioral therapy involve triggering phenomena, especially phobia (height, open space, spider), to expand the range of tolerance for subjects in general life.
But the non-resistance practice I’m talking about goes a step further than this natural adaptation. Not only do you want to get more exposure, you can also enter some pure window windowalthough avoiding physical or mental retreat. The comfort zone expands almost immediately when you can stay there without attracting the impulse to squirm or escape (even waiting for relief impatiently).
It’s a powerful and unique human ability that I don’t think most people have even tried. I mean, why do you think you do this when your deepest evolutionary impulse is to escape unpleasantness?
Although the cold shower has been familiar to me, the ability to make this impatience has become familiar to me as it is an important part of meditation. In meditation, when you notice something you don’t like – restless inside, picky crow squeezed outside, doubting if you’ve done it right – you can make you feel that way. You can relax any support reflex and release the natural impulse to push it away or try not to feel it.
Sometimes you don’t know how to do it at all. But sometimes you can and find yourself feeling weird about your own pea-like peas, which can drive you crazy all your life.
There is a specific, indescribable sense of liberation that releases the urge to recoil, just like you can now walk through certain walls. Feel something It’s like you suddenly allow you to enter the area where your employees are, or at least have diplomatic immunity in this place.
Another analogy is that it’s like you’ve passed by a part of the arcade game where you’ve been dead there before. A certain screen always looks like an absolute wall, the end of the line, but you pass the game and the game keeps evolving.
In hindsight, this is also how I learned to like spicy food. One night, on the bar and grill, I was sent a bunch of unexpected hot wings, my friends always ordered the hottest wings and could see that I regret my choice. He told me to stop fighting burning, just “let it build up” instead of trying to cool it down. Not long after that day, I could eat almost any wings except the kind of wings designed to ruin your nights, and I would never have to worry about the vegetables being too spicy.
Our lives are long-standing disgust, looking like walls. You are free to talk to some people and you can avoid using it due to worrying about embarrassment. You can walk, but the burning of the running is too unpleasant. You can do your current job, but there are too many management roles. As long as it hates the boundary that is seen as real, unnegotiable, it may also be a stone wall.
These walls are at least partly a function of our reflections of discomfort, and their position determines our lives and possibilities. You may notice that others often walk freely on the walls and vice versa.
Non-drug resistance practices can move where your reflex tends to participate. This is obviously very useful, but it is a subtle ability that is hard to describe. Meditation does train you in it, but meditation is often more subtle and hard to convey to people.
A cold (or cool) shower is an easy way to understand non-resistance and start practicing. You can control the temperature so you can easily find the threshold you want to back off, but it can also be unbearable. If you can find the magic area in the shower, just below the comfort, where the walls start to dissolve, you can start seeing it elsewhere.
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