When I first heard about cold exposure for performance and recovery purposes in my days as an athlete, I brushed it off as a useless, new age fad.

It then resurfaced in my research for peak performance when I came across an article detailing the experience of sitting in a -264 degrees Fahrenheit cryotherapy machine for three minutes.

Undergoing this seemingly futuristic treatment is said to help your body incinerate calories, jolt your immune system back to life, and trigger a flood of mood-boosting endor- phins, similar to a runner’s high.

I want something that I can do at home and alas, I’m not yet a millionaire who can afford to buy a cryotherapy machine for myself, so I decided to look into more plebeian means to reap the same potential health benefits.

That’s how I came to discover:

The benefits of cold water therapy are numerous and fully backed by one metric fucktonne of research.

This weird hack has been studied for generations, and even dates back as far as the time when the Spartans used it to recover after battle.

Today, professional athletes from all over use ice baths to reduce inflammation and speed up recovery. Simply put, the cold exposure cleans you out by removing waste products like lactic acid that builds up from exercise.

Furthermore, when combined with alternating warm and cold water, these seemingly ridiculous showers clean out the lymphatic system.

Most simply put, the lymphatic system helps carry waste out from your cells and is a major key in defending your body from unwanted infections. When the lymphatic system is blocked, you can get frequent colds and unexpected joint pain.

These contrast showers — exposing your body to the cold water immediately after a warm shower — cleans out your lymph vessels and drastically improves your immune system.

Cold showers also help activate brown adipose tissue (BAT), which in turn generates heat, raises your metabo- lism, and burns off fat. It also seems to increase the amount of BAT in the body, leading to more calories burned and a leaner body.

Now as useful and sought-after as fat loss is, I was also intrigued by the potential productivity and performance enhancements that cold showers can deliver.

After extensive research I came to this conclusion: I definitely feel energized after a shower, but it wasn’t the miracle cure for procrastination that many of my loyal cold shower enthusiasts have sworn by.

The biggest benefit that I’ve found is simply that a cold shower takes a lot of mental strength to accomplish.

Point blank: they’re hard. Like really, really hard.

And as research shows, people who do hard things early in the day tend to accomplish more and procrastinate less.

To a cold shower virgin, the amount of willpower it takes to submerge oneself underneath a frozen waterfall may seem like that of a Shaolin Monk.

Doing something that you are resistant to every day, immediately upon waking, takes an absurd amount of mental strength and discipline.

It’s the best way to start your day, and over time, these habits become automated and bleed into every area of your life.

The world is full of scary things; we’re at our best when we tackle them bravely and with confidence, not when we’ve built up habits of shying away from things.

Think of it, quite literally, as stepping out of your comfort zone.

So, set your alarm for five minutes earlier, and before you rush out of your shower, turn it all the way cold.

It’s going to be fun; it might be scary, but in no time, you’ll have built it up as a habit.