Season two of Changes BIG and small will begin in two weeks. In the meantime, I have this bonus episode for you.I interviewed Sebene Selassie in episode 39. At the end of the episode, we discussed a change that I’d made in my life.
I’d been learning about Wim Hof and the health benefits of cold showers and I was curious to explore it. There are many purported benefits to cold showers.
My Process with Cold Showers
I took cold showers daily for 12 weeks. I’m in the process now of taking a two week break with cool showers before I go back to cold showers. The reason for that is I like to mix things up so that I remain flexible and don’t get too adapted.
If you want to try a cold shower, you can take the Wim Hof mini course, which is linked in the show notes. Or when you next, take a shower, turn the tap all the way to cold and enjoy the cold water for at least 30 seconds. Then try to work your way up to two minutes.
If you try the cold shower challenge, I’d be interested to know your experience. Does it get easier for you the second time, the third time and later on. Do you always start with a warm shower or do you use cold water from the very beginning for the entire shower? How about washing your hair with cold water? I got a brain freeze the first time that I did that.
That’s it for this week. If you haven’t listened to Sebene’s episode, I recommend you do so. You may also want to get Sebene’s new book, You Belong, which provides a support and guidance to help us live fully in embedded presence.
I’ll be starting season two with an exciting new interview for you in two weeks with a coach who will inspire us to define and achieve our purpose.
Listen to the episode
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Quick Links
Transcript of Conversation with Sebene
Damianne: [00:01:14] One thing that I’ve been doing is I’ve been taking cold showers and I’ve been doing this for five weeks. And I kept expecting that one day I will turn on the cold water and it will feel like hot water. And so far every time I have to take a deep breath.
Sebene: [00:01:37] What does it do for you, I’m so curious?
Damianne: [00:01:40] The main reason that I started doing this was as a means of challenging myself to see what would happen. Growing up in the Caribbean, we would use the cold tap water, but it was never really cold because it’s the Caribbean.
But years ago, I heard somebody talking about mental fortitude and how subjecting yourself to a cold shower helps you begin to realize that even if things are hard, even if you’re scared of something, you can still do it. And so I started doing it mainly because I was curious to see what would the experience be like of taking a cold shower. My hypothesis, well, there’s the head, but my hypothesis was that it would get easy with tim e, that after a few weeks, it’d be like, Oh, this is just another day taking a cold shower. And this has not been my experience at all.
Sebene: [00:02:33] You’re not selling me on it.
Damianne: [00:02:35] But I am enjoying it because I mean we habituate to things over and over again. And so why is this thing so challenging that I’m not becoming habituated to it after so long. And is it our natural aversion to pain, because really after a few seconds of standing, you take some deep breaths and then, I mean, you’re just taking a shower. It stops being so hard. At first, I would count down to seconds and have aims, you know, but now I just do it as long as I’m comfortable standing there. But you can’t really escape. I find that I’m very much in my body when I’m taking a cold shower in a way that I’m not when I’m taking a hot shower and maybe it’s a small form of meditation. I don’t know but…
Sebene: [00:03:25] Yeah, that’s great. I love that.
Damianne: [00:03:29] I’m interested enough to continue doing this and see how it goes.
Credits
- Theme music by Rafael Krux. Inspiration on freepd.com. License: CC0
- Featured image credit: Photo by Carson Masterson on Unsplash
