I can admit it when I’m wrong. And I was wrong about “cold plunging”.

My misperceptions (or most of them) at least came from my heart being in the right place.

This past week, I’ve been in several discussions about the impact that critical events might have on our worldviews, either affirming or denying them. A slightly more casual worldview could also be defined as a personal value.

I’ve mentioned her in other writing, and I’ll mention her again. In her book “Real Self Care”, Dr. Pooja Lakshmin argues the differences between faux self-care and real self-care. Faux self-care includes retreats and cleanses that are out of reach for all but a few. Faux self-care is a narrative that is dominated by a capitalist society constantly reminding us that by buying this or that we can come a little bit closer to being perfect.

Real self-care, on the other hand, is something that no one can give you but yourself, like moving your body in ways that feel good, nervous system regulation and setting boundaries.

A value that’s central to my yoga and meditation practices is accessibility. With some judgment, perhaps, I question anything that can get in the way of a person and these powerful practices. 

Short on time? You can see the benefits in 5 minutes!
Flexibility or body image holding you back? Come to my class! It’s a safe and diverse space. I offer many variations of each pose. Move in a way that feels good to you.
Tight budget? My class is free! Everyone should have access to yoga! You don’t need fancy clothes, or mats. You can even develop a yoga practice from YouTube!

Where barriers between people and these practices exist, I want to be there, knocking them down.

I’ve long heard of the benefits of cold plunging, if not through online courses offered by Wim Hoff, through colleagues of mine in public safety wellness, colleagues I trust and whose opinions I hold in high regard.

But a practice that you need a special tub, and/or bags of ice? Feels inaccessible to me.

Less generous than my worldview that everyone should have access to wellness practices, regardless of their resources, was also a judgment that cold plunging was… I think I’ve called it… “bro wellness”. I apologize for that, y’all. Truly.

Between the special equipment, and the videos with the grunting, I misjudged it as hyper masculinity. But I was wrong.

I’ve been particularly rigorous with my body lately. On purpose! I’ve adopted this credo by Seneca: “The body should be treated rigorously, so that it may not be disobedient to the mind.”

But as I hone in my passion for climbing, and continue on a streak of building strength, steadily climbing (about three times a week), with no injury, I’m testing the limits of my body. I walked into hot yoga knowing my arms were very sore and tired.

Hot yoga is another one of those value-questioning practices. Do you really need to pay for a pricey class, to be in a room over 100 degrees and sweat through every article of clothing you’re wearing to have a yoga practice? No. But dang it if hot yoga doesn’t help my body repair itself, especially for mild injuries and pain. And I just love the teacher, Patrick. He teaches yoga in a way that’s accessible to any level of yoga experience, from a beginner to a long time practitioner, like me. So it checks off my “accessible” value box.

The studio had just opened a “cold therapy” room across from the hot yoga room. Two weeks ago, I kind of rolled my eyes. This time, I eyed it and poked my head in thinking… “that might feel good”. Before yoga began, Patrick shared that he was going to plunge after class and that we could do it together. And that was that. I signed up for a plunge following class.

There was one more obstacle, which was that including rinsing off in the shower after the hot class, you needed to be wearing clean plunging clothes or a swimsuit. It’s a rule with which I whole-heartedly agree, but wasn’t prepared for. $20 later, with a swim suit off of the clearance rack, I was ready. 

I chose the coldest of the three plunges because “why not”. The temperature was set at 40 degrees. Patrick set a timer for three minutes on his phone, and we got in.

I knew what I had to do, which was focus on my breath. And from the moment I entered the water until those three minutes later, I practiced straw breathing. 

I teach straw breathing all the time. To hundreds of incoming law enforcement personnel every year. To the public. To inmates. To colleagues recovering from critical incidents. To other peer support team leaders across the country. I jokingly called it my “Katie, get your shit together breath”. Straw breathing is what I know I can turn to for self-regulation.

And in the plunge, straw breathing worked. Perfectly. Under the somewhat bizarre and unnatural conditions of sitting in a very cold bath, I kept my cool. While I could deeply sense the bitter cold on my skin, the contraction in my muscles, and felt so much activity in my body’s reaction to the cold water, I kept my heart rate under control. I kept myself out of fight, flight, and freeze. 

After the three minutes was over, when feeling slowly crept its way into my body, a sense of joy sunk in. Some call it euphoria. I just felt very, very alive. And happy. Happy because this technique I teach so often to so many people works. I already knew that it worked. I use it all the time. People frequently tell me about how it has helped them. And while I encourage practicing straw breathing, or any type of breath work practice, regularly, so that it kicks in naturally, I can’t imagine a better way to send your nervous system into high gear, and practice bringing it back into regulation better than cold plunging.

So this is my formal apology to cold plunging: I misjudged you. You are not “bro wellness”. You are a very, very practical tool for training our ability to self-regulate our nervous systems. I just wish everyone I teach nervous system regulation skills could have access to this method of practice. 

This is where we run back into that matter of accessibility. Maybe I’ve had my sight set on the wrong targets. I’d been judgmental about the existence of options, like cold therapy and fancy wellness spaces, when the real problem is the aforementioned capitalism. The problem is a system that sucks billions of dollars to the top few, and leaves our communities struggling to fund public services, community investment, and comfortable wages for the men and women who take on the most challenging work. So while it’s both my job and my passion to figure out how to provide access to wellness services, it’s our job as a community to remember that next time we’re fighting each other, up regulating our nervous systems because it’s us versus them, that the billionaires and corporations are glad we’re distracted, unhealthy, unfulfilled and ignoring them as they laugh, “no wellness for you!”