Previous to covid lock downs the sight of a barely clad body, braving the steely grey, off season sea was a rarity, but so quickly wild swimmers have become a very ordinary sight along our coasts and inland waterways. Such an avid and widespread uptake, of what can seemingly be an uninviting pastime, is a very visible testament to the benefits of cold water therapy.
If you have never experienced it, cold water swimming is exactly as you would expect, cold, body shocking, and a total assault on your physical senses…. but then, and really very quickly, the shock of the cold water recedes and you are left feeling refreshed, cleansed, sharp and alive. So there are the very immediate effects, but actually cold water therapy has a lot more to offer. Dr Mark Harper in his article THE SCIENCE OF COLD WATER SWIMMING, offers an insight into the how and why of cold water therapy. Undoubtedly the body is put under stress, but according to Dr Harper it is the amount of stress that the body is subjected to that is key to the benefit. We expend a lot of time and often money trying to reduce stress, and eradicate it from our lives, but Dr Harper makes the point that actually a little stress helps build resilience, and resilience is what we all need to combat, and overcome the stresses of our daily lives.
The answer, in a word, is hormesis, an adaptive response of cells and organisms to moderate and intermittent stress.
The concept of hormesis is often traced back to an early- sixteenth-century Swiss scientist and physician known as Paracelsus, though his rather magnificent full name was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. His best-known maxim roughly translates as: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison. The dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.”
Basically, high doses of any substance, including water and oxygen, are potentially toxic and even lethal, but exposure to low doses can be good for us because they promote resistance and resilience.
Hormesis—a low-level good/high-level bad model—also applies to physical stresses.
Essential to our production of vitamin D, ultraviolet light can, at low levels, improve cardiovascular health, enhance resistance to cancer, and improve immune function, mood, and sleep. Conversely, at high levels, such stresses cause tissue destruction. In the case of ultraviolet light, these stresses include sunburn and, at the extreme, malignant melanoma.
Similarly, excessive exposure to cold leads to hypothermia, but moderate and intermittent exposure to cold allows us to withstand the stress, which produces positive health benefits and gives us the confidence and physical and mental ability to endure other stresses in the future.
So there you have it, hormesis is the science behind the benefit. There is plenty of research backed and anecdotal evidence confirming the benefits of cold water therapy, it’s stress relieving, an antidepressant, I can personally vouch for its effectiveness in reducing hot flushes! Harper’s article, puts me in mind of the other ways in which we can help build our resilience. It is a reminder of how we can apply the sentiment to other parts of our lives, to put ourselves outside of our comfort zone, and maybe take on a personal or professional challenge. After that initial spike in stress hormones we can reap the reward of reinforced resilience.
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