Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimised practices for waking, working, learning, eating, training, playing, sleeping and sex. Aubrey Marcus

aimlessly. If you are going to own the day, you must own your breath.

      The Cold

      The Wim Hof method of breathing—like pranayama and Lamaze—is about taking back control of your entire breathing apparatus and focusing intently on the breath. It is the simplest and most important weapon in your arsenal for reducing chronic stress and other birth-worthy stress loads. But it is not until the method is paired with cold exposure that it becomes truly life altering—a mechanism for both healing and growth. That is because without the cold there is no external resistance to tell you when enough is enough. There is no force outside the physical capacity of your lungs to push against to guide your sense of progress. There is no acute stress. This is not a revolutionary concept. We have known for millennia that resistance is the shortest path to growth. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another,” says the Old Testament (Proverbs 27:17). Put more weight on the bar, you get stronger. Run harder, you get faster. It’s a form of good, acute stress known as hormesis.

      At its most basic, hormesis is a biological phenomenon in which low-dose exposure to an environmental agent (called a “hormetic stressor”) produces a beneficial effect, while a higher-dose exposure produces a toxic effect. The layman’s explanation for this odd duality is often summarized by the famous Friedrich Nietzsche quote: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” In theory, it can apply to nearly any activity, but for our purposes we are focused on the good kind of stressors, which are natural and acute. The ones that happen quickly and then pass, which create a hormetic response that triggers the body to repair itself and adapt to handling the same or greater stress in the future—aka grow. Vaccination is a good example of hormesis at work. You expose the body to a weakened version of a virus, the body adapts to the stress, develops antibodies, and becomes immune to full-fledged exposure of that same virus. Mark Sisson, bestselling author and a thought leader in ancestral health, writes, “Think of hormesis as your body ‘hedging its bet’ and going a little above and beyond just to be safe. You don’t just compensate for the stressor, you super-compensate. You get stronger/faster/healthier/more resistant to the challenge than you were before.”

      Cold is one of those good, acute stressors that makes us hearty and resilient, like a sherpa or a Viking. Or a Viking sherpa! Dr. Rhonda Patrick, a top investigative researcher into the benefits of various hormetic stressors like the cold, put together a brilliant 22-page document highlighting the many research-based advantages of cold exposure, including benefits for brain health, pain management, longevity, fat loss, athletic performance, immune health, and mood. People who swim in cold water during the winter, for example, had 40 percent fewer respiratory tract infections (so much for Mom’s advice). Cold showers have also been suggested as a potential treatment for depression. A lot of this rests on the ability of the cold to modulate inflammation.

      INFLAMMATION

      To give you an idea of the importance of inflammation, having a healthy inflammation response is the key predictor for making it to the age of a hundred or older. But all inflammation is not necessarily bad. In fact, we need it. At its most basic, inflammation is just the body’s response to injury or threat (i.e., stressors), including tissue damage like you would get from exercise or an injury, environmental stress like heat or cold, and pathogens like bacteria or viruses. If the stressor is acute (short-lived, with ample time to recover), inflammation is a positive part of the response that makes you stronger.

       Deep Dive:

       Good Inflammation versus Bad Inflammation

      When you work out, you break down muscle tissue and the body creates inflammation to get more cells into the area and repair the tissue, rebuilding it to be more resistant to injury. It can even happen with bone breakage; with proper time to heal, bones will become stronger at the point of fracture.

      When you get sick, it is not the virus that gives you the symptoms; it is your immune system. Fatigue, mild fever, body aches, congestion—the stuff we colloquially identify as “the cold” or “the flu”—are actually manifestations of the inflammatory response. Immune cells called proinflammatory cytokines are produced and directed to the injured or threatened areas through capillaries that open to promote blood flow and help fix the problem. That increased flow, along with all the newly produced immune cells, is the actual physical inflammation. When the virus subsides, so does the inflammation. Or so you hope. When inflammation doesn’t go away, it is called chronic inflammation—and that is literally like living in Dante’s Inferno. Chronic inflammation starts to damage the body. It makes you tired and creates pain. Inflammatory cells can start attacking healthy cells, creating autoimmune diseases and overall wearing the body’s energy resources thin. This leads to many disease states and is generally the root of all sorts of maladies.

      What turns off the inflammation when it is no longer needed, preventing it from becoming chronic, are stress hormones like norepinephrine and adrenaline. It just so happens that the Wim Hof method is especially adept at releasing a shitload of those hormones. Cold shock has been shown to reliably release up to 300 percent more norepinephrine, and the deprivation of oxygen from breath holds reliably produces more adrenaline and norepinephrine.

      But in chronic stress, with the stress hormones norepinephrine, cortisol, and adrenaline present all the time, the body becomes habituated to their presence. The tolerance that results from chronic exposure is not a phenomenon unique to stress or inflammation. As with alcohol or any drug, excessive exposure leads to increased tolerance. (In chapter 3 we will see how this happens when the constant presence of sugar in the diet makes the body resistant to the effects of insulin.) So instead of shutting down inflammation in the presence of these hormones, the body becomes less responsive. Inflammation is allowed to go relatively unchecked, which is the mechanism that turns it chronic.

      With an acute stressor like the cold or a breath hold, hormones like norepinephrine and adrenaline spike enough to reduce inflammation. With inflammation low, the body can relax the chronic production of stress hormones, and you have the opportunity to break the cycle.

      COLD MENTAL STEEL

      While the benefits of inflammation and stress are vital, the thing that really sets cold exposure apart from other forms of hormesis is the mental edge it provides. In the smithy of life, cold exposure is the anvil against which your character is shaped and your resolve is hardened (one might say that deliberate, conscious breathing is the hammer that does the shaping), so that you might confront your chronic stress and conquer it more completely. Character and resolve are two traits that rarely get tested in modern society, and they tend to atrophy as a result. Resolve, especially, is at the heart of why we let chronic stress steal our life force and why we struggle from our first waking moments to take ownership of our days.

      The Powhatan Indians—that’s the tribe Pocahontas belonged to—didn’t have this problem. They would bathe their babies each day in the cold waters of Chesapeake Bay to toughen them up. It was a habit they started from birth and would continue all their lives, each season, each morning. What about the winter? No worries. When the water was frozen over, they’d break through the ice and jump in. It was a daily baptism by frozen fire.

      Being an American Indian was not an easy life. Not in the mid-Atlantic, not anywhere. It was a struggle, a fight to survive. So you had to practice your resolve for doing the hard things. That cold plunge bred hardiness. It created courage, defined as moving forward in the face of fear. If you can conquer freezing water, even grow to love it, you can conquer anything.

      MENTAL OVERRIDE

      Nike’s slogan “Just Do It” is genius. When you are sitting on the precipice of your cold tub, or the shower nozzle is taunting you, your mind is going to be spinning a million miles an hour, attempting to find a solution for your fear and guide you to comfort. What do you do? Just do it. The same applies for starting your workout, or talking to that pretty girl or boy in the bar, or writing your name down on the karaoke call sheet. Even though you are going to feel like a hero when you tackle any of those feats, your mind computer will still scramble to find excuses and justifications why you shouldn’t. But you are not your mind computer, fueled by fear. You are the operator of your mind computer. And you always have the choice to ignore