What’s so great about cold showers? Wim explains this question in detail in his audio program The Iceman Speaks, but here are some basics to get you started.

The first thing to understand is that the body deals with all stress as if it’s a physical threat. In ancestral times, stress usually showed up from clear external conditions—like adverse weather, dangerous animals, the need to find food, and so on.

But today, we’ve protected ourselves from most physical threats, while at the same time we’ve got more mental stressors than ever (for example, pretty much anything you see on the news).

And that’s the problem. Almost all of these mental stressors trigger only one kind of physiological response: the fight-or-flight reaction. Our fight-or-flight system is meant for emergencies, but thanks to the sense of constant threats around us, most modern people have that biological “app” running almost all the time. And it’s draining our energy—mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Yet did you know there’s another anti-stress system in the body that we don’t use … one that’s much healthier for us in the long term?

There is. And that incredible system is what we’re awakening with the Wim Hof Method.

More to come … stick with it!