A couple of years ago, I was heavily addicted to cold showers. I would take an average of five cold showers per day for many months. For the year or so I was doing them, they essentially replaced stimulants.
I loved the mental clarity, the pick-me-up effect, the alertness they provided, and the invigoration of my body and mind. An even greater benefit was winning many small battles against myself many times per day, which built a lot of self-respect & self-discipline.
However, after a couple of months, I noticed two issues. Excessive vasoconstriction and a reduced ability to sweat. I will briefly discuss both in more detail.
Reduced ability to sweat (hypohidrosis)
After a few months of taking a lot of cold showers, I noticed that I barely ever sweat (hypohidrosis) and that my sweating threshold was unusually high. For example, when I went to the gym, I would barely break a sweat no matter how much I exerted myself. Consequently, I felt like crap because my body would heat up interiorly but was not capable of thermoregulating itself.
At first, I did not think that there was any connection with the cold showers. However, over time it got worse to the point of me only being thermally comfortable in a very narrow temperature range.
I hypothesize that the constant cold exposure multiple times per day led to a reversible atrophy of my sweat glands (“use it or lose it”) in the same way that sweat glands are known to hypertrophy after a person moves from a cold to a hot climate, or in the same way that muscles atrophy when they are not used.
Full sudomotor recovery took a couple of months of abstinence.
Excessive vasoconstriction
Before incorporating cold showers into my routine, my hands and feet were always warm– even in the cold. However, when I started doing cold showers, my hands and feet were usually vasoconstricted for a couple of hours or so after each shower.
As I escalated my love-hate relationship with cold showers, this too got worse to the point where my hands and feet remained cold throughout the entire day. Interestingly, not even artificially increasing thyroid hormones into the hyperthyroid range did make much of a difference.
After stopping cold showers, this mostly reversed over the course of one year, though the vasoconstrictive properties are still not back to where they were before, especially in my feet.
For example, when I am in a cold environment, even when I don’t feel cold, the blood vessels in my feet now seem to constrict much more readily compared to how they used to. I suspect that some kind of kindling effect had happened, leading to an excessive reactivity of blood vessels, speculatively similar to what happens in Raynaud’s disease.
The mechanism behind this is probably due to the same principle that also caused the (presumed) atrophy of my sweat glands. Cells and physiological systems are amazing at making long-term adaptations to a given set of conditions. Sometimes, these adaptations persist for a long time after the stimulus is removed.
For example, muscles adapt when I train them, bones grow in the direction of the force applied, and sweat glands adapt to changes in ambient temperature. In the case of frequent cold exposure, the blood vessels in my hand and feet presumably simply get better at vasoconstricting.
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My current approach to cold showers
I still love taking a cold shower and I finish all my showers cold as they invigorate my body and mind for about 1-2 hours after. However, just like with most other things, moderation is best.
Of note, in retrospect, I believe that hopping into the sauna more often may have compensated for the issues I have encountered as sauna use does the exact opposite, namely inducing vasodilation and sweating, and probably also leading to sweat gland adaptation and hypertrophy. I discuss sauna in more detail here.
Info & further reading
- Scientific article: Changes in thermal homeostasis in humans due to repeated cold water immersions
- Scientific article: Responses of the hands and feet to cold exposure
- Scientific article: Sweat rate and sweat composition following active or passive heat re-acclimation: A pilot study
Disclaimer
The content available on this website is based on the author’s individual research, opinions, and personal experiences. It is intended solely for informational and entertainment purposes and does not constitute medical advice. The author does not endorse the use of supplements, pharmaceutical drugs, or hormones without the direct oversight of a qualified physician. People should never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something they have read on the internet.