Broke-Ass Cold Plunging

It's not for the faint of heart.

Want to hear this story read by the author? Paid subscribers can listen in here.

🥶✨🥶💫

Image by author, created with AI.

A friend told me that cold plunging eliminated his chronic pain.

At the time, I had a coach who did daily cold plunges, but I thought it was a bro-ey elective suffering kinda thing, like the 70 Hard Challenge or pulling a tractor while attached to a body harness.

I’m intrigued by health and beauty trends, but not when they involve self-abuse. Fasting makes me homicidal. Facial peels can fuck off. Lasering my nether regions got nixed the moment they got to the butthole, a feeling I later described as being sodomized by Zeus’s lightning bolt.

But I have chronic pain, so I let my friend’s proclamation propel me down a rabbit hole about why ice baths are the new black. Right off the bat, I discovered I could freeze to death in the comfort of my own home for the low, low price of $39.99. (I ordered a more expensive tub, though, which was fun because it definitely didn’t spring a leak within seconds of existing outside of the box 🙄).

Why, you may ask, did I spend my hard-earned money on a torture device? Because, after listening to the most mild-meltingly cerebral podcast in human history, I learned some pretty cool stuff.¹

For instance . . .

Cold plunges heal chronic pain by reducing inflammation.

Cold water strains your body, forcing it into “survival mode” as it works to maintain its core temperature. This increases blood flow circulation, delivering freshly oxygenated blood to areas of the body that need to recover, making it great after high-intensity exercise or endurance training.

I don’t do high-intensity exercise—it’s too intense—but if you enjoy punishing activities, you should definitely add cold plunging to your To-do list.

Ice baths also remove toxins and inflammatory markers from the body and decrease the production of cytokines, which are proteins that play a role in inflammation. Lastly, they improve the delivery of oxygen and nutrients throughout the body, leading to better overall health.

That was a lot, so let’s just bullet point the other benefits.

Cold plunges:

• increase the body’s metabolism, helping you lose weight

• can reduce stress and anxiety by increasing the production of mood regulators like norepinephrine, dopamine and serotonin

• can increase the release of endorphins, which are a natural painkiller and mood enhancer

• can make you feel alert and increase energy and focus

• can improve mental clarity by increasing blood flow to the brain, which, in turn, improves memory and concentration

Ice baths can even increase the production of new brain cells. Furthermore, by forcing yourself to embrace the stress of cold exposure as a challenge, you develop resilience and grit, allowing you to cope better and maintain a calm, clear mind when confronted with real-world stressors.

I’m living proof this works. I am now so chill I don’t even mind the 682 steps required for me to cold plunge three times a week.

The ideal temperature for a cold plunge is between 50 and 60 degrees F.

Cool. Cool cool. If you live in Colorado, like my friend does, you just keep your ice bath outside. Easy.

If you live in the desert, however, where it is sometimes 127 degrees F, this is not an option unless you decide you want your plunge to be used as a hot tub instead. Also, keeping your tub outside is a good choice if you want it to be instantly filled with dust (oh, yes, even covered—the sand dunes in the corner of my house laugh at you for even suggesting that would work).

So, desert living = indoor cold plunge. The master shower should suffice. Note: It will take 24 minutes to fill your bath with water. That entire time, you will fret about droughts and what a rotten steward of the planet you are.

The water will come out of the faucet at about 80 degrees because it’s the desert. So first, you will need to dump every reusable ice pack you own and the freezer bowl from your ice cream maker into the ice bath and leave them for at least one hour. The number of ice packs required will occupy an entire shelf in your custom-built, already not-quite-large-enough freezer.

Then, you will need to make ice.

To get the maximum benefit, the recommended time for cold exposure is 11 minutes per week.²

I could do that all at one time, but I’d have an aneurysm. So I do it in three sessions. The deal is, the colder the water, the shorter amount of time you need to expose yourself to it. In the winter, when the ambient temperature in my house is cooler, I can get what I need in three 4-minute sessions. In the summer, I have to stay in longer to get the same benefits because the water just doesn’t get as cold.

How cold does my water get?

Nine gallon-sized bags of ice worth. And two gallon-sized jars plus two quart-sized bottles of cold water’s worth. Buying ice every day would be instantly cost-prohibitive. And the biggest grocery store bag doesn’t come close to nine freezer bag’s worth in quantity. And the thought of running to the store every day makes me want to die. So I reserve the entire top shelf of my fridge for my plethora of water storage vessels and the rest of my not-quite-large-enough freezer for bags of ice. I may also have room for hashbrowns.

A minor problem is that my freezer doesn’t make ice. It’s not my freezer’s fault; it wants to. It’s just that the shelf that goes over the ice maker and keeps freezer scoobies from falling into it is aftermarket? was made by a blind person? exists solely to get on my last nerve? The tiny square hole through which you can access the ON/OFF switch for the ice maker is misaligned by a quarter of an inch, meaning that when the shelf is pushed in all the way, it depresses the switch to OFF. The ice maker will happily turn on and oblige my request to make ice unless the shelf is snapped in place. If I try to leave the shelf pulled out a little bit, the door won’t close. Shoving the door closed snaps the shelf back in place, and turns off the ice maker.

Of course, I could remove the shelf, but there is already limited real estate in my not-quite-large-enough freezer. And also, freezer scoobies 🤢.

So, I purchased a countertop ice maker. The little thing chugs along merrily at all hours of the day, needing emptying roughly every 35 minutes, which I forget to do 93% of the time. Therefore, it takes three days to make nine bags of ice. This is what my freezer looks like on the day of a scheduled cold plunge.

Image by author, lest anyone think I’m exaggerating.

Doing it at home is easy!

I have come to really look forward to cold plunge days because, as a woman of a certain age, I have developed the superpower of spontaneous combustion. This superpower is useful for eradicating sleep (because who can sleep on the surface of the sun?) and rendering T-shirts unwearable in five minutes flat. Also, drinking coffee now makes perspiration shoot out of my armpits like a fire hose, so that’s fun.³

This is why, on cold plunge days, I do a little happy dance before canceling all my meetings and social plans to prepare the ice bath. If you’re interested in doing your own at-home cold exposure therapy, just follow these steps:

1. Fill the tub, depleting the planet of one small lake in the process.

2. At least one hour before the scheduled plunge, fill bath with reusable ice packs and ice cream maker parts.

3. Once ice packs have melted, grab a heavy-duty serving platter, drape it with a tea towel and pull all dripping and soggy packs out of the tub. Be sure to use well-loved ice packs, so they may or may not have holes and be leaking a toxic substance that isn’t water. This is the price you pay for health 🤷🏻‍♀️.

4. Transfer vessels of refrigerated water to ice bath (x2).

5. Transfer bags of ice from freezer to bathroom floor (x3). (By now you have gotten in your 10,000 steps for the day, so pause to congratulate yourself).

6. Bang bags around a lot to break up ice for easy removal. Note: Many will spill.

7. Open any remaining bags that haven’t already spilled their contents everywhere.

8. Strip.

9. Dump in ice.

10. Set timer.

11. Try not to die.

And repeat! Every three days, of course, because that’s how long it takes to re-up on ice.

Bear in mind that an ice bath stored indoors with no chlorine (ick, that stuff’s bad for you) will start to get slimy after approximately 24 hours, so you’ll get roughly three plunges for each small lake you deprive the world of before having to empty the tub, scrub the ever-loving shit out it, and start again.

I’ve told a few people about this new habit, and they’ve all looked at me like I was insane. But I don’t have kids, so I can spend all the time I would’ve spent driving them to soccer and playdates filling my ice plunge instead. Still, I asked my mom for a chilling mechanism for Christmas 🙏🏻.

I don’t have high hopes though, because, after one glance at how much a base model chiller goes for these days, she gave me a look that said I’ll get right on that.

---

---

This post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you purchase products or services through these links.

1. To his credit, Andrew Huberman does an incredible job of simplifying extremely complex science, but you must bring your concentration A-game if you want to walk away with any real understanding. I’ve listened to him read and distill research papers for 2.5 hours and definitely needed a nap after. And if you’re ADHD or distracted by shiny objects, please don’t try this at home.

2. There is actually a point of diminishing returns, where stressing your body for too long creates detrimental effects, so here’s your PSA that there’s no need to turn this into a big dick contest.

3. I’d like to come back as a man, please.