When was the last time you took a cold shower?

“I bet it wasn’t too recently!”

Every so often you might read something or hear something in the news about a local chapter of “The Polar Bear Club”, a group of people who like to go swimming in bitterly cold water. You probably shake your head and think that they must be crazy.

What if I told you that every time you took a shower with warm or hot water that you were missing an opportunity to practice HARDCORE Stress Management™?

And I am not just talking about the discipline required to actually turn on the cold water and get into the shower. If that’s all that cold showers were good for they would fall far short of the requirements to be considered a HARDCORE technique.

I was first introduced to the value of cold showers while living in Russia during college. And unlike you, I didn’t have a choice in the matter …

Believe it or not, summertime in Moscow can be oppressively hot! I happened to be living there during July and August, in the middle of a heat wave. Every café on the streets of Moscow was full of people sitting in the shade, splitting an ice-cold bottle of vodka with friends.

What I didn’t know at the time was that the city government uses these hot summer months to do maintenance on the hot water piping throughout entire areas of the city. What this basically means is that for the space of about 6 weeks, it was impossible to get hot water in your home or apartment.

I am more than a bit partial to my morning shower, and I wasn’t willing to go to the “banya” (the bathhouse – the Russian equivalent of a Swedish sauna) every day just to take one. So I was forced to take cold showers every morning for over a month.

And when I say “cold”, I mean COLD! The water coming out of my shower head was bitterly cold, despite the heat outside.

At first I remember that I couldn’t stand to put my whole body under the water, so I would start with just my feet. I would work my way up my legs before dunking my head quickly under the water and then stepping away from the current to shampoo and soap myself, shivering all the while.

Those first few days really did seem miserable. I dreaded getting out of my warm bed and into the cold shower every morning, and I exhaled a deep sigh of relief whenever I finally got out.

But after a few days I started to notice a change …

I began to notice than my skin seemed to be very healthy and soft, and my friends complimented me saying that I “must be doing something new to my hair”.

I noticed that I felt better, healthier, with more energy to burn throughout the day. I even came to really look forward to the invigorating rush of the cold water hitting my skin in the morning, and the inexplicably wonderful warm glow experienced after stepping out of the shower.

I had also been suffering through a bit of a depressive period, and I noticed my mood improved dramatically. After this is after a mere few days of changing nothing but the temperature of my morning showers!

I was so impressed with the results that I started reading into the existing literature concerning the medicinal and therapeutic uses of cold water in order to broaden my understanding.

I discovered that swimming in or “dowsing” yourself with cold water is an age-old practice in many cultures, usually cultures that developed in an area which experiences very cold weather (go figure).

It is often connected to saunas or steam-baths, where bathers will alternate between the heat of the steam-room with the cold water and snow outside. Some Russian hospitals even use cold water dousing as an inexpensive treatment for various conditions.

Cold water is healing and invigorating. While warm or hot water washes away important oils that moisturize the skin and hair, cold water cleans and stimulates their production without drying you out.

The shock of the temperature change tonifies the circulatory system and nervous system, as well as fortifying the immune system against disease.

All these benefits in of themselves would qualify cold showers as a HARDCORE Stress Management™ technique, but another important consideration is cold water's effect on depression.

Immersing yourself in cold water has a powerful anti-depressant effect which has not been adequately explained by science. Whether it is a side effect of the invigoration of the nervous and immune systems, frankly I don’t know. Yet I experienced it, and many others have as well.

Give cold showers a try. I will go ahead and tell you that the first few days aren’t easy, but you don’t have to jump right in like I did. Accustom yourself first to lukewarm water for a few days, then slowly start to take colder and colder showers. Over time, you will begin to see the results.

Cold showers are only one of the many HARDCORE Stress Management techniques reviewed and approved in our library.