Chris Ballard: Why Freezing Water and Daily Discomfort is the Ultimate Antidote to Loneliness

27:38So he would drop his body temperature just sitting in really cold water to the hypothermia level. And he did it more than 30 times because he realized if I'm going to test this, I need to do it on someone. And, you know, this is sort of a long history of scientists using themselves as guinea pigs. So Gordon, who got the name Professor Popsicle, he would take himself hypothermic and he'd find out how the body responded. And he ended up coming up with what he called the one ten one rule. And this is how your body responds to being in cold water in a sea survival situation. Let's say, you know, you're out on a lake in winter and you fall off a boat.

28:15So you have one. The one is one minute to calm your breathing because the first thing that happens is the body just sucks in. It's essentially twice as much air, the hyperventilation. So you have one minute to calm your breathing and sort of get yourself to a position where you can act. And then you have 10, the 110 one. The 10 is about 10 minutes to take any action you're going to take. If you're going to swim for it, you've got about 10 minutes to do it. And then at 10 minutes, your muscles start to freeze, your brain starts to fog. For most people, hypothermia is setting in. You're going to start dropping in the water.

28:49And then the final one is you have about an hour, give or take, depending on your body size and your acclimation, before hypothermia takes you. so if you're going to swim like these ice miles that people swim and you're a super fast swimmer some of them will do it in 25 minutes they're they're usually that's you're not even flirting with serious hypothermia um unless you're really skinny uh but there are people and i witnessed this and there's a chapter in the book about watching people swim it and i saw someone who it took them an hour to swim an ice mile and they walked out of that water and she actually just walked down the beach it was remarkable whereas i do it myself in the book as well in my experience i could i can assure you was vastly different uh than hers how long did it take you did you do a full mile i did not i did not uh i attempted an ice kilometer and they talked about the attributes you need as a good a swimmer, right?

29:50You can be, um, this is something someone says in the book, you can be, um, fat and fast and you're in great shape, right? You can be fat and slow and you're probably still in pretty good shape, but you can't really be skinny and slow, which is the category that I fall into. So, uh, I mean, I'll, I'll swim even after doing this for three years, I will swim for 10 minutes in the Bay here in San Francisco area where it's like 50 degrees. I will shiver for 20 minutes afterwards. And that's just your body. And so, yes, I don't want to give away the end, but it's safe to say it's entertaining.

30:27Darin Olien:Yeah, it's so dynamic. It's just like, God dang. And, you know, it's that whole, you know, we're in this modern world where we've created so much comfort. It's now biting us in the ass. uh and you know it the the the cold water subculture why it became so popular is probably because of those reasons like the whole biohacking world i mean i don't you know i'm not a fan of that term but it's you know it it it fits into that world of like oh take your shoes off put your feet on the ground uh you look at the early morning light as it comes in like get some get some sun on your skin like it's all these things that it's like if our aunts ancient ancestors going oh my god what what do you what do you guys this is so weird how you've almost created so much comfort you're killing yourself um and so do you feel like do you do you feel like this cold immersion is going to stick around?

31:38Darin Olien:Do you feel like there's legs to it where it's going to continue, whether it's still guys jumping in the ice bath? I mean, I've been doing it on and off for a decade. What is your feeling on that? Because obviously an ice mile swim, that's a whole nother deal um but what are your thoughts around do you believe that this is going to stick around and i'm kind of answering myself because i'm like well it's been around right yeah so yeah so what are your thoughts on on how it all kind of plays out yeah it's interesting that you mentioned that because when i went to finland for example while i was reporting they think it's hilarious that these americans are like doing a protocol you know two minutes three times a week and you know it's like it's like this is just what they've done for centuries and centuries you know they take a sauna and then they jump in an ice hole or they jump in the baltic sea and and no one's like measuring their blood glucose level after it just you know they it's like just part of the culture but also something people enjoy if you go to copenhagen people literally stop their bike commute to work and there's a canal that goes through the city there they'll stop their bike commute the water might be like you know 48 degrees they will just dress undress all the way just go naked swim around for a few minutes there get back out have a cup of tea put back on their clothes and then continue biking to it just such a it's integrated into the culture so my answer would be for sure overseas 100 like this is if you go to these places you realize This is not new.

33:23It's just something that people have done, something people will continue to do. The United States is an interesting test case because it got so popular, and people were like, oh, you're going to lose a lot of weight. There was a bunch of buzz around it, most of which was way overblown. Like the weight loss thing is way overblown. It's a lot easier ways to lose weight. if you actually want to lose weight through cold plunging you have to do the shivering because you'll actually get to 46 of your aerobic capacity just by shivering but no one wants to get so cold they shiver like there's much better ways now um but i think what will happen is there is a blip here in the states and it'll go down and the same people like you who were doing it before and athletes or people who've discovered it will come to it and overseas i think it'll probably only continue to grow.

34:12And to tie back in your point about discomfort, the more artificial our lives are, the more constrained, the more, I think, benefit you get from going and doing this.

34:24Darin Olien:Yeah, it's funny. I laugh because I've been to Finland, I've been to Denmark, and it's, yeah, the sauna, you know? Yeah, the sauna. And what I love about those cultures so much is that it's still such a powerful part of their culture, both the sauna and the cold, right? And it's embraced and it's encouraged and it's balanced in that way. And most homes even have a sauna in it. And, you know, and that's the integrated side. You know, I'm also from Minnesota. I have Norwegian on both sides. So I grew up and like, you know, go outside, swear kind of cold, you know. And, you know, and it's funny, like, I think it was like 15 years ago, I started doing hot cold in the shower.

35:24Darin Olien:It got to be more than that at this point, maybe 20. But it is powerful, man. It is a really, really powerful tool that you can use. But again, I think here in the States, we go extreme. We push it. Now, the interesting thing is, you know, I've met Wim Hof several times and there's this aspect where I'm curious your thoughts on in that, you know, we have automations in the body based on who you are, what you are, the body type, all of those things. And there's a place where we can step into our bodies and have an influence on. So if it's learning to control breathing quicker than hyperventilating, increasing temperature from inside the body, you know, all of these types of things that we can seem to be able to influence here and there.

36:27Darin Olien:What are your thoughts on that? Because I would imagine, is there a technique when these guys are extreme in these places, or is it literally still come down to the brain and the mental side of it and just strengthening that mind-body connection? yeah attention you're referencing anticipatory thermogenesis which is this concept that is still not fully understood and most likely my take i'm not a scientist my take is that it's this essentially this genetic component that some people have and some don't but some of the most i mean wim hoff has been able to do it uh there's a swimmer named lewis pew who's a polar swimmer lynn cox most famously set the record for swimming across english channel at 15 she broke the all-time record and all three of them have shown this ability not only to withstand these cold temperatures but the anticipatory element is when you actually raise your body temperature before going in the water up to about 100 degrees which is to me is bonkers so it's essentially a pavlobian thing where they've trained their bodies for repeated exposure but hard to understand that kind of element of it now i don't think the rest of us i certainly i did it for three years i was not getting warmer but the parts that i was able to train And I found this study of one for sure, but three years of cold exposure, almost daily, some lengthy sessions in there, cold swimming, ice swimming.

37:59So I had a, this is a lot of it, right? But at the end of three years of doing this, before I went to the, I competed at the world championships of ice swimming. And you got to go in and get your medical again. And so I'd go in, Kaiser here in Oakland. And they start doing, you know, the first, the aid comes out to take your blood pressure and everything. And they take your, you know, measure your heart rate. And he misses my heart rate. And then he sort of looks puzzled and looks down at it again. And he shows it to me. And it's 39. And he's like, you know, this usually triggers a referral to cardiology.

38:37And so, you know, most resting heart rates, even if you're an athlete, are closer to like 50. And, you know, there's people like Phelps and Miguel Enderain, where they'll get it down like 28, you know, athlete's heart rate. But the combination of doing so much cold exposure and so much endurance training for swimming, and mine was now usually was around like 40, 41, and that was a drop of about 10. And part of that's because every time you're getting that cold water, first you have this huge spike and your heart rate goes up and all your bells and whistles go off as your body's worried about a threat.

39:09But then about 90 seconds in or so, especially if you're up to the neck, your vagus kicks in. That's this vagus nerve which goes up and down each side of the body. And now it's trying to just preserve your time in the water. And so it actually reduces your resting heart rate. It's like we've got to stay here as long as possible. So essentially training your heart rate to lower. Now, I took it again. I clocked out at 40. I was able to swim once I explained what it was I was doing. But I also found it was more my emotional regulation that I had trained. And you could probably do this a lot of different ways.

39:46You don't have to do cold water. But for me, it was a really accessible way to do it. Every morning, even after doing this for years, I didn't really want to get into that cold tub. It's like I can see it. It's sitting out there in my backyard. It's like 42 right now. You know, it's not like you wake up, you know, like, oh, I want to go get cold. And that never really happens. And that has a lot of value in that. each time you do it, you're like, I really don't want to do this. And you do it and you feel great after and you're proud of yourself. And that, you know, each of those mini, like just a little bite-sized endurance test that it gives you.

40:19Then I found like in work, in family life, in everything else, I was able to maintain more of a level. And so these are the kind of things you don't really hear as much about when people talk about cold exposure. But for me, it was like, okay, this is a way to sort of cut down some of the lows, you know, to bring yourself into some equilibrium, to train yourself to do this thing continually until it becomes just part of who you are.

40:47Darin Olien:Yeah, it's, it's, it's cool to hear because, you know, we all can use some life resilience, you know, and it sounds like that trend that translated into your life, which was actually, I was going to ask that question that you, you just went there. And cause it's like, you know, there's, there's many ways to look at it. Just like, you know, make your bed in the morning and accomplish something. And, and, you know, I don't know about you when I was in college, I was, I was working at in construction on the summers and there's, there's something, and I'm just a laborer. You know, I grew up, you know, walking the beans and pulling, pulling in the bean field weeds in the bean field and throwing hay bales and mowing lawns and newspaper routes.

41:36Darin Olien:And the reason I say that is because there's an accomplishment. There was something here and then you did something and you can see it. You see the accomplishment. In this case, you go, I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. It's cold. It's cold. It never goes away. It never changes ever. You still have to overcome that. And there's something about that. There's something about achieving something. And I think life is about achieving moments. It's not about getting to this big place necessarily. Because I think with our lives right now, we're screens. We're typing an email. We're checking off to-dos.

42:23Darin Olien:but very rare many of us we're not seeing the the bricks that have been laid or the the the snow that was shoveled like you know the the things that we as a kid i did every day like even though those things either but but there's there's a level of accomplishment and i think kind of going back to what you're talking about, the community aspect of, hey, we did this. Not only did we do this, you overcame it personally and individually, but then you did it together. And man, one thing is for sure, community and connection is far exceeding almost anything else we can do. and uh so that that's what sticks out to me like there's little accomplishing things that that you know especially we can put it in the category of hey this sucks this is cold but i'm doing something for myself i'm doing something to overcome something and to feel better and and and that alone i think if we can string those types of things together in our lives especially in the kind of life that we have.

43:46Darin Olien:Because it's like even with AI, you didn't read that book from cover to cover. You just did an AI search on it now, right? So even that, we're being starved of accomplishment, right? Yeah, I mean, as a writer, as someone gobbling up information and going, I guess this is kind of a sidebar, but what are your thoughts on that part of life right now? Yeah, it's a great observation. You think about your childhood, there was no shortcut to baling that hay, you know, or whatever your daily task was like. There was, you know, you could do it a little faster, maybe, you know, you could be a little more strategic about it.

44:29I'll give the example of my father who grew up on a farm in Indiana. He's now in his late 80s. He's 87. And if you visit him, they live in sort of a wooded area. And literally every day, he needs to do physical tasks. And that's hard for him now. So he may like, you know, sort of recruit you to get on the ladder form or whatever it is. But he needs to see the things around the property that he has fixed or that he has done. He's almost happy like if the lawnmower breaks because he's got to fix the lawnmower. At the end of the day, he needs to do these things. And I've definitely inherited that from him.

45:09And it's incredibly hard when you're constantly offered shortcuts. So as a writer and a room searcher, there's all these shortcuts you could take. And I know this. You've learned it again and again, but you constantly have to be reminded, as a writer at least, that if you want your writing to be good, there is no shortcut. And it actually never gets easier. You know, I taught journalism at the graduate school here at Cal Berkeley for a while. And that's one of the first questions the young idealistic students always had is like, oh, by a point in your career, this must be easier, right? I'm like, that's the bad news.

45:47It never gets easier. The good news is that's part of why it's rewarding, is if you're constantly, if every day you're challenging yourself, I don't get to go, you know, fix the stuff on my property like my dad or bale the hay. But every day, I'm like, this is hard. I don't necessarily love that part of it. But I guess that's, that's the that's what I worry about most in seeing, you know, I've got teenage daughters headed out in the world, you know, college now is where where do you get those, you know, all the bumpers are there for us in society. So the bowling bumpers, where do you where do you have to worry about a gutter ball where do you get pushed this way i think that's that's the big conundrum now

46:29Darin Olien:yeah i mean it's it's it's you know doing something like writing this book the plunge um and it's now that we're talking about this it's like what you've put together what you wrote You immersed yourself in this and there's nothing AI could, it couldn't come up with what you put together because it's not physicalized as a person. You know, AI is not a person exposing itself to this culture. And so that story, this culture of something that very few people are even going to know about, would never know about it if you didn't experientialize and jump into it fully. And so I think that part of the world, that part of storytelling, that part of discovery is still wide open.

47:38Darin Olien:You know, it's still, it can never be. And I think that gives me a little hope. You know, I'm currently working on a docuseries on happiness. and and it's like you can't replace the jumping into the experience and having experiences and reporting on the experiences like that that can't be a it it's an impossible ai task you know so for that i'm like i i'm i celebrate that you've done that i celebrate that you continue to do that And even though hard, it's rewarding to you. It's rewarding to them because people in these subcultures get to share what's going on. How did you find when you were kind of in it and accepting and accepted, you kind of said it, but were people eager to share the story and give you kind of like a fly on the wall situation?

48:47Darin Olien:What was that like when that kind of started to open up for you? part of it is that you're looking at you're looking for a narrative so as a writer talking to hundreds of people what i'm looking for are the larger than life characters or the people with profound personal stories and so a lot of what i was doing was having those superficial conversations you always have with people and probing a bit and then looking for the people who were either super influential in this world, who maybe had some interesting conflict or tension in their life, and you're looking to build out those people as characters in the book so that when someone comes to read it, they may know nothing about this.

49:29But hopefully if I hook them in with the characters and the storyline, they'll keep reading it and they'll learn as they go. So for me, it was a matter of who were the natural storytellers, and I definitely found some of those. You know, Ron Barker, the South African who started this whole thing. Elena, who I mentioned earlier, she's the beer drinking Bostonian, you know, Tom Hyderbal, who had lost his wife to cancer in his 50s and said, you know, my wife said, promise me you won't go dark afterwards. And he'd been her caretaker during it. But he found himself one day is like 280 pounds, wasn't leaving the house.

50:08And so he's like, I'm literally just going to go walk around the block and started there. and then he went to walking further. And then one day he walked by this lake. He was up in Canada and he saw these women out there just laughing, swimming in the cold water and they invited him in. And that was for him the first step into this world. And he also used it essentially to moderate his grief and depression since then. So I'm looking for those kinds of stories and those people. And in Tom's case, he was more than happy to talk about it. He was someone who wanted to share this experience in a way or maybe would benefit someone else.

50:42The people for whom this has worked, especially when it comes to mental health, they really want to share that because they've had a profound experience. And I met a father, Chris Soa, in Rhode Island, and his daughter had died by suicide. And in his case, he was about to go on pharmaceuticals who was just stricken by grief. And he read a New York Times story that mentioned, this is 2022, that some people were finding mental health benefits to cold plunging. So he just went out locally there in Rhode Island and he found some people who were polar plunging and he joined them and he just like, he became a total convert.

51:21And this was a way to stop those thoughts that were swirling in his head all the time, at least quiet them for a little bit, give them a boost of energy and give them a community. So those are the people I was looking for. And they were everywhere. That was the thing is, you know, if I go to an NBA locker room, most of the players in there. Their story is out there. It's been told. They're telling it themselves now. They've got their own documentary team. They've got their social media. And they're also often pretty similar. You have these elite athletes who've all been on an elite athlete path.

51:53They're all around the same age. At this point, most of them started playing AAU basketball when they're kids. So it's like a lot of, I mean, there's obviously differences in their stories, but they're generally in the same bucket. Here, you have this global community that ranged from 15 to 85. All these people with past trauma or grand dreams or that sort of extreme endurance athlete brain set that I was so curious about, like, why would you want to go swim a nice mile? You know, why do you want to try to swim two? You know, these kinds of people. And so this big bucket, And then the life hackers and the people on the research side.

52:32So for me, it was more about so many good stories. Which ones do you put in the book? Yeah.

52:39Darin Olien:What's going to be the bridge to allow people to get, pun intended, feel immersed in it as they're reading it? And that's where it's like, I think the story of some of these, we're all the same. We want connections. We're all going through things. And, you know, community extreme around this side doesn't feel as extreme when you're doing it together. You know, it I guess it normalizes it to a certain extent, but you still have to overcome something every time. um yeah so like for you as you've you know finished the book and everyone can rush out and get it um how has the moderation now kind of set like what's your lifestyle like now having con kind of jumped into this extreme like where does it sit with you and what's your kind of daily weekly habits as a result of all of this.

53:50Yeah, I wasn't sure going in if I would, to be honest, I was skeptical that I would continue to do this past the work part of it where I was reporting and writing. But I do, I go out there every morning. I do a cold plunge. I like to hold back and forth. Short one, you don't need to really go more than a couple minutes, but it just starts the day. I feel good. I still use it for recovery from basketball, which I think it's helped me prolong my athletic mortality, so to speak. And then I'm swimming because that's one of the things I found through this is the swim training. I realized this is – I'm in my early 50s now.

54:29This is the sport you can do for the next 30 years where you can get that – you can blast it out if you want. Or you can get the straight cardio. You can do the endurance. you can hit that flow state where you're sort of you know processing all the stuff in your life if you want to the meditative elements so and you can actually for me at least i wasn't a swimmer before i can get better which is fun when you're older if you can actually see a positive arc and i'm not destroying my joints uh or what's left of my joints so there wasn't a lot wasn't a lot there so that's been for me it's been you know swimming twice a week uh any chance i can i'm going in the bay you know with friends and kids whatever and then uh the cold plunges and i'm also signed up to compete in january in romania at the next high swimming world championships so no shit

55:17Darin Olien:wow yes yeah that's amazing so what's that yeah what's that when is that then january said yeah january uh yeah the last one was in mulveno in italy which is the one i write about in the book and I somehow ended up making the U.S. national team. So I competed at that. And as I mentioned, once you're in, you're in. So I go back to Romania. 50 countries will be there. It's pretty crazy. They have sponsors. They have live stream. There's athletes who now do this. That's their job. And Olympians, current Olympians, past Olympians, it's a whole thing. Now, where is that? Is that in the Black Sea or where is that going to be?

56:00It's an Aradia, which is near Transylvania.

56:03Darin Olien:Oh, right. Wow. Yeah, and so they're at the point where to really try to aim for the Olympics, you need standardization. So they have Olympic pools. They're just chilled. And so in this case, you have a 50-meter pool. It's chilled. You can't do a dive, you know, trying to reduce the underwater head time. You can't do foot turns. So you're starting from, you know, your hand on the wall. You go, you turn, you do an open turn, you go back. and the last world championships I would have preferred the water being a little bit warmer but it was about 35 degrees Fahrenheit you know it just has to be below 41 so there's no wherever it ends up being that day if there's a cold front that comes in Wow

56:47Darin Olien:I'm sure if they don't standardize the temperature that's going to affect records too so there's that whole part of it right yeah yeah similar to track if there's a wind you know that's going to affect a world record and so the the i mean there's one thing about sitting in cold water and a whole other thing about moving through it that's a that's a that's a chill man that is freaking that's worth trying because i found part of what the the sitting is meditative once you normalize to it and i love that element of it. But there's a real rush. Because if you're responding to that cold water, at least you feel the agency of being able to swim.

57:34And if you're swimming to somewhere where you can get out of the cold water, that's also good. I just got to get from here to here. Like I got to go 50 meters, and then I'm allowed to get out. So there's that character to it as well. And then of course, people keep comparing it to cocaine in this world. You're just so jacked up because of your body's reaction that you do feel i mean you're not actually moving faster i can attest to that but you feel like you're moving faster and then the other element that i just want to

58:04Darin Olien:say here is is is with the cold with something like that it's such a force of the only thing the only thing you are is in that moment you can't be somewhere else yeah and if anything that meditative extreme moment is also a massive opportunity for people. Yeah. That is the, yeah, the appeal for people for mental health. And they're doing longitudinal studies in UK on this now for, especially as an intervention for men who may not be as likely to go to therapy. But here's something, hey, you want to go cold swimming with a bunch of guys on the weekend? that feels like something I'm more inclined maybe to do.

58:49That's what it is. It's like you are present. There's no phones. You can't look at your phone. There's no – the news isn't blaring at you. You can't really think about whatever has been stuck in your head. You're there. For those next two minutes, you are there.

59:06Darin Olien:Yeah, amazing, man. So what's next for you? What's on the horizon? I'm working on the next book idea. Hopefully we'll get it signed off on in the next six months here. Nice, man. I love it. Just stay active, stay in it, and keep putting one brick on top of the next one. I love it. Yeah. Or one bale of hay, as it might be. Or a bale of hay. I mean, it definitely, I am glad I grew up the way I did. and I wish kids could experience that. I think more kids could, not that they need to bail hay, but this sense of accomplishment and doing something and moving something rather than scrolling something, let's say.

59:58Exactly. Amen.

59:59Darin Olien:Yeah. Well, thanks, brother. I appreciate it. And stoked for people to get this and to understand this incredible culture and also realizing that it doesn't have to be a hard thing to do necessarily in terms of a barrier to entry. You can find a body of water and also you can put cold water and immerse your face, right? And there's benefits there too. So I appreciate you, man. You got it. Thanks so much.