It is super important that you know your own data. Now, I’m all for the Wim Hof Method and cold water immersion. But at the right time. In particular, at the right time for you.
But the only way we know if it’s right for you is if we have your data and so we can measure how you react to it. I read an article today on Wim Hof’s page on supercharging your sleep. To summarize, the thesis was that cold water immersion right before bed will help optimize your sleep.
Really great.
Well, it was brought to my attention because a couple of my clients told me they wanted to add this in.
So we did.
A week later, we took a look at their data and all of their sleep was cycles plummeted over the course of a week, HRV nosedived, their resting heart rate spiked by 10-12 beats over the course of the week. The only difference was they started doing cold plunges or taking cold showers before going to bed.
Well, when the DNA test came back and we really took a deep dive into it for them, they run in sympathetic overload. That’s what actives the flight or flight response, as opposed to the parasympathetic “rest and digest” nervous system.
When we’re going to bed, we want the parasympathetic nervous system to take over so we can get into deep sleep quicker. When we took away the cold immersion before going to sleep, everything came back in the right direction.
Does That Mean Cold Plunges Are Bad?
No.
It means it was bad for them at that given period of time. They still use cold immersion after they workout and sometimes in the morning depending on what their HRV said the night before. But it’s all about understanding a time and a place. It’s not “this tool is going to change your life.” No. That’s a receipt for disaster.
That’s why we need to know our HRV, resting heart rate, sleep cycles, and more. This is how we test modalities on ourselves and figure out what does revolutionize the way we feel. We determine it through certain interactions, variables, and tests. With this, we can get the results we want.