The Cult of the Cold Plunge

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In an ad for Plunge, a company that sells luxury bathtubs, Andrew Huberman stands barefoot in gravel on the side of a house, mountains just visible in the distance. He smiles at the camera and begins talking about how much he loves soaking his body in ice water. ‘I’ve been doing cold, in some form or another, for let’s see now, gosh, since 2015? I went over to Spain to learn from the great Wim Hof, and then actually brought Wim and family out to the Bay Area to talk to some tech companies’, he says. 

Huberman, a ripped neuroscientist from Palo Alto with tenure and a Stanford lab under his name, hosts an extremely popular wellness podcast that offers ‘science-based tools for everyday life’. The show was an immediate hit when it came out in 2021 – Huberman told Stanford Magazine that ‘the timing was right’ because the pandemic showed people that ‘they needed to take some control over their own mental and physical health.’ He uses that word – control – a lot. ‘Control Pain and Heal Faster’, one episode title reads. ‘Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus, and Satisfaction.’ His episode on ‘Using Deliberate Cold Exposure For Health and Performance’ has over a million views on Youtube, the comments full of people singing the praises of scientific self-optimisation. 

‘Taking my first cold shower was the start of something beautiful’, one viewer writes. ‘Together with the Wim Hof breathing exercises I feel reborn every day.’ 

C-suite executives say cold baths help them feel ‘less emotional’. They go to luxury spas called things like ‘Remedy Place’ and have business meetings in ice water before getting hooked up to nutritional IV drips. Celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Lizzo are proud cold plunge owners, and Joe Rogan loves it so much he had a $29,000 Blue Cube tub installed in his podcast studio. It makes sense, then, that when Huberman sat down at the microphone with him in early 2023, they spent much of the episode discussing the miracles of cold baths.

‘When you’re suffering or you’re lazy or you’re procrastinating, doing something that’s harder than the state that you’re in bounces you back. This is all based in the dynamics of dopamine’, Huberman says.

These dynamics are built on the concept of homeostasis. Equilibrium, for Huberman, is sacred. Everyone has a baseline for their dopamine, and anything too stimulating, like drugs or porn, Huberman says, causes dopamine to rise too high above this baseline. This leads to an inevitable crash – a low dopamine state. For Huberman, it’s low dopamine that causes people to feel tired or demotivated, to get addicted and to suffer, and the solution can be found in carefully following daily health protocols. To head off accusations of moral bias, Huberman often disclaims in interviews that he’s ‘speaking only through the lens of biology’. Cold baths and cocaine both increase dopamine to similar levels, he says, but where cocaine causes a dopamine crash, cold baths are a ‘healthy’ source of dopamine because the level is sustained for hours. It’s a story that sounds true enough, but Huberman has a tendency to base his sweeping generalisations on pretty small studies – in this case, citing a ‘beautiful’ paper from 2000 that found cold plunging increased dopamine by 250 per cent, but neglecting to mention it was conducted on just ten men. 

The boring reality of science is that it’s slow, tedious, and remains mostly inconclusive for a very long time. Even when we think we’ve discovered some universal truth, a new finding comes along decades later that completely overturns everything we thought we knew. Dopamine has undergone rapid changes in public understanding since the turn of the century, starting as the concept of the ‘pleasure molecule’ – based largely on stimulant research funded by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse. When it was discovered, in mouse studies, that pleasure is still possible without dopamine, the molecule shifted into the ‘wanting, not liking’ phase of its history. It’s now understood, at least in pop culture, to be more of a motivation molecule, but like everything else in the body, it has multiple functions, and this is the kind of nuance that gets completely lost when a podcast clip from a famous neuroscientist goes viral. On social media, scientific accuracy matters less than the sheen of scientific neutrality, and high-achievers have now mythologised dopamine for productive ends.

You probably know this dopamine mythos already. We are living in ‘an age of indulgence’, says the popular 2021 book Dopamine Nation, in grave danger of ‘devouring ourselves’. This is why we need to engage in ‘dopamine fasting’, an ascetic practice of pleasure denial that can reorient our focus toward our true calling: making that number go up. We must diligently be on guard against ‘dopamine addiction’, a neurochemical re-brand of the Protestant Work Ethic that describes getting too much pleasure without working hard for it. No matter that you can’t fast from nor get addicted to an endogenous brain chemical – in popular parlance, dopamine has become both the vital force that animates us and the demon that makes us do bad things. For wellness bros, cold plunging is dopamine’s corporate-sponsored sacred rite.

‘The relationship between temperature and sleep, temperature and the deployment of these neurochemicals, temperature and performance, is one of these variables that right now professional sports teams, tier one military, and scientists are really starting to understand. This is not a small variable’, Huberman tells Rogan. ‘It’s all about the ability to do more work.’

Huberman mostly stays practical about his cold plunge practice, but his mentor, ‘the great Wim Hof’, gets more spiritual about science. In his 2020 book, The Wim Hof Method: Activate Your Full Human Potential, he writes that his mission is to use science to prove that ‘it actually is quite easy to see and feel the presence of your soul’, and that ‘war, poverty, hunger, disease, and suffering’ happen because ‘we have lost sight of our own consciousness’. Hyperventilating and dipping into a bucket of ice every morning, according to Hof, is the way we can get it back again – it’s also the way we can learn to control our own immune systems, he claims, and cure the world of cardiovascular disease. Plunge CEO Ryan Duey calls Hof a ‘trailblazer’ who ‘took a stand for humanity’, his ideology paving the way for Duey’s company to reportedly bring in $4.9 million in their first year. Like Huberman’s podcast, the timing of the pandemic was also right – Duey says it inspired people to ask how they could ‘empower’ their own health, and Plunge answered with a $5,000 bathtub. He describes cold plunging as ‘a gym for your nervous system’, an important way to learn how to regulate your emotions in an overstimulating, chaotic world. It ‘builds resilience’, as Huberman says. Wellness influencer, entrepreneur, and Plunge affiliate Lauryn Bosstick is fond of saying: ‘It’s the hardest thing I’ll do all day.’

There’s a reactionary flavour of everyone’s-too-soft-now going on here, an imperative to suck it up shellacked in the rhetoric of personal empowerment. In a disenchanted world where achievement has become the ultimate purpose of life, The Cult of the Cold Plunge is an affluent sect looking to science for meaning-making. They will tell you that it’s just chemistry, that it has nothing to do with religion, that science takes no sides in the class war, but whether they’re lying or just in denial, they’re wrong. Science, like God, dopamine, and Andrew Huberman, comes from somewhere, and even those facts we think of as cold, hard mechanics – molecules, chemicals, the building blocks of DNA – were paid for by somebody. 

The water cure was all the rage about a hundred years ago, as the extreme exploitation of the Gilded Age gave way to the reforms of the Progressive Era. The cold bath had been prescribed to aristocrats since at least the eighteenth century, but it was popularised by a German Catholic priest named Sebastien Kniepp in 1886, who wrote a book called My Water Cure that was such a hit it went through fifty editions. Kniepp claimed illness was spreading throughout the population due to a lack of ‘hardening’ and that one of the best ways to cure this ‘effemination of the people’, as he called it, was ice bathing and walking barefoot in the snow.

Christian physiologists of the time were at least honest about their motivations to merge science with religion. In 1903, a wellness guru named John Harvey Kellogg wrote a book called The Living Temple. You may know him from his cornflakes, or that funny bit of trivia about how much he hated masturbating, but Kellogg was the director of a luxury wellness resort in Michigan called Battle Creek Sanitarium where he regularly treated the nervous disorders of the capitalist class. Raised a Seventh-Day Adventist, according to historian Brian C Wilson, he would later be kicked out of the church for his heretical views on divine immanence, which he branded ‘biologic living’. God works through every atom, Kellogg said, and science only proves His existence with every great new discovery. He believed that illness was spreading because rich foods, alcohol, and sex overexcited the nerves and drained the vital forces, and the way to resolve this chemical imbalance was exercise, sobriety, a bland diet, and cold baths. Kellogg’s 1,000-page tome Rational Hydrotherapy describes every kind of therapeutic bath you could ever imagine, from bathing in certain frequencies of light to something ominous called ‘The Fomentation’ — he lists ‘The Cold Plunge’ on page 523. 

John D. Rockefeller Jr, son to the world’s first billionaire and heir to his fortune, checked into Battle Creek in 1922 after having a mental breakdown and spent ‘two or three pleasant and profitable weeks’ there, as he told Kellogg in a 1929 letter. The two would write to each other cordially over the next twenty years, Rockefeller asking for advice about insomnia, the dietary value of plain bran, and his wife’s appetite (‘I have always thought that she eats more than she needed’), Kellogg sending him various products in development. Twenty years after his stay, Rockefeller would write that he never forgot ‘the interesting things I there learned and the help that I derived.’

Entire fields of biology would not exist as we know them today without funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. In her book, The Molecular Vision of Life, historian of science Lily E. Kay argues that, beginning in 1929, the Foundation sought to create a ‘science of man’ that would enable new forms of social control based in Protestant values. The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by rapid urbanisation, violent class conflict, and massive waves of immigration that stoked eugenic fears about the ‘degeneration’ of the human race. Rather than consider that the contradictions of capitalism inevitably lead to illness and suffering, professionals turned to science. Sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross introduced the idea of ‘social control’ as a possible fix for all of society’s problems in his 1901 book of the same name, which fundamentally shifted not just the social sciences, but the biological ones, too. According to Kay, Ross’ work ‘accepted the inevitability of class conflict and the social inequality of capitalism’, arguing that in order to function, ‘society had to modify individual feelings, ideas, and behavior to conform to social interests.’ 

Billionaire philanthropists at the time took this idea and ran with it, funding foundational research into personality, behaviourism, psychiatry, genetics, molecular biology, and physiology. One of the Foundation’s funding recipients was a project called the Harvard Fatigue Lab, which studied the effects of extreme conditions like temperature on workers from 1927 to 1947. According to an investigative journalist on the Wim Hof beat, Scott Carney, the Fatigue Lab would end up developing cold exposure protocols used by the US military into the 1990s, but, when it began, the Lab had more industrial concerns. Historian Robin Wolfe Scheffler situates the Fatigue Lab in a debate at the time between those who believed that the answer to increasing productivity was Frederick Winslow Taylor’s practices of scientific management and reformers who thought fatigue was a physiological fact that could only be resolved by shortening the work day. Taylorism – which today we would probably just call ‘self-optimisation’ – viewed time-tracking and spreadsheets as the best way to avoid fatigue. Taylor saw exhaustion as ‘a problem of the worker’s will and skill’. 

The Lab’s research focused on the chemical causes of fatigue and ended up backing Taylor’s anti-worker science. Founder Lawrence Henderson was a chemist who focused on the balance of chemicals in the blood and was inspired by conservative economist Vilfredo Pareto’s ideas about the importance of equilibrium. ‘The idea of equilibrium’, writes Scheffler, ‘especially the criticism it offered of left wing attempts at revolutionary socioeconomic change, resonated with Henderson’s own conservative political upbringing.’ Henderson’s lab studied the effects of exercise using the new invention of the treadmill, which allowed them to standardise their research, and led to the observation that ‘carbon dioxide and oxygen consumption, as well as pulse, actually attained a “steady state” during exercise’. Based on this finding, the researchers ended up framing fatigue not as the adverse effect of working too much, but as a chemical imbalance in the worker. The Lab’s staff would go on to advocate against major changes to working conditions, instead suggesting things like adding some salts to the water supply in order to keep steel workers from passing out from heat exhaustion. 

While scientific research was a key piece of the social control strategy, the capitalist class was also aware that science would not be enough — moral teachings were crucial. Kay writes: 

In his 1913 policy outline for the Rockefeller Foundation, trustee Harry Pratt Judson … stressed that ‘the real hope of ultimate security lies in reinforcing the police power of the state by training of the moral nature so painstaking and so widespread as to restrict these unsocial wants and substitute for them a reasonable self control.’ Listing the problems of social hygiene – drug addiction, alcoholism, and sexual promiscuity – he cautioned that scientific knowledge of these social aberrations had only limited value. Avoiding these ills required the ‘practice of self-control’.

‘I’m not into politics, I’m into freedom’, Wim Hof writes in his book. Scorning ‘square thinking’, Hof fashions himself a fearless truth-teller of the counterculture. His popularity in Silicon Valley makes a lot of sense, because his brand resonates with tech’s favourite myth: disruption. We all know that cold showers wake us up and ice reduces inflammation – it’s health advice so mundane, so recommended-to-death, that it’s basically just common sense. But Hof frames the cold as a ‘righteous’ force that can literally give us superpowers, leading to a transcendental health revolution for humankind.

‘If we can get people to take this up, we would need a lot fewer hospitals’, he writes. ‘Some of those buildings could instead be used as housing for the homeless or as public libraries that enable communities to deepen and enrich their knowledge instead of further perpetuating an on-going cycle of illness, surgery, and dependence on pharmacological solutions.’ This is not disruptive – it’s just the individual responsibility of free market capitalism masquerading as personal empowerment. If Hof was truly disrupting anything, the US government would never have invited him to help train Navy SEALS. In literary scholar Adrian Daub’s exploration of the ideas that animate Silicon Valley, he writes: 

[D]isruption acts as though it thoroughly disrespects whatever existed previously, but in truth it often seeks to simply rearrange whatever exists. It is possessed of a deep fealty to whatever is already given. It seeks to make it more efficient, more exciting, more something, but it never wants to dispense altogether with what’s out there. This is why its gestures are always radical but its effects never really upset the apple cart

Can optimising our health practices truly empower us to attain freedom? If, like Lauryn Bosstick the influencer-entrepreneur, you define freedom as being your own boss, perhaps. These missionaries of the cold plunge cult selling products with their personalities are the quintessential achievement-subjects, as philosopher Byung-Chul Han would say – projects, not subjects, doomed to perpetually work on themselves. But Han shoots down this American dream. Their ‘financial freedom’ is just power hiding behind inspiration porn, power which ‘manages not to be seen at all’ because the influencer-entrepreneur is coerced – by possibility – to exploit herself. 

Self-control is a much more efficient kind of social control; under neoliberalism, ‘power relations are interiorized – and then interpreted as freedom’, Han writes. ‘Self-optimization and submission, freedom and exploitation, fall into one.’ And of course, the shadow of self-empowerment is self-blame – if you can control your own immune system, then it follows that illness is ultimately your fault, and you don’t need healthcare, housing, or a union, just more determination and grit. As Hof writes: ‘This power is knocking at your door, and it’s your choice whether or not to answer. What do you want? Do you want to learn to deal with stress, or do you want to continue suffering?’

It’s ironic that science has replaced religion as the compass for life, because – in crafting a moral guide around neurochemical action – science becomes a kind of religion, anyway. Scholar Mary-Jane Rubenstein likens the scientist to a modern-day priest. Huberman translates data like an ancient scroll of wisdom and passes down these discovered truths to us on Youtube. For Rubenstein, science becomes ‘an ideology that insists it’s not an ideology but just the truth’. And in the dopamine mythos, conservative politics get slipped to us like a pill wedged into a piece of tasty, empowering wellness cheese. Hof might be onto something about losing sight of our consciousness, but it’s class – not the feeling of our own souls – to which we need to awaken.

Jesse Meadows is a neurodivergent writer with an art degree who gets a rush from digging through the archives. They currently live in Philadelphia and obsess about dopamine, deviance, and the politics of disability at sluggish.xyz.