There’s a reason why militaries worldwide use cold water during their special forces selections – and it’s not just to make recruits miserable. Taking cold showers has notable impacts on how your mind and body perform, react, and recover from the stresses placed upon them. In this OA guide, we’ll introduce some of the most significant benefits to taking cold showers, and hopefully, convince you to take the plunge!

Before we talk about their benefits, let’s face the truth: there’s nothing fun about taking cold showers. The first time you take a freezing shower, you’ll immediately forget about its benefits and start questioning the life choices that led you to your current predicament. 

If that’s not bad enough, here’s the kicker: they don’t get any easier. Whether you’re on your first or hundredth cold shower, it’s still going to suck. Yes, you might be slightly more acclimated to the low temperature, but your warm mammal body will never enjoy getting doused in cold water – especially if you’re hot and sweaty after a workout.

With that out of the way, let’s get started with the benefits.

If we haven’t made ourselves clear yet, we’ll say it again: cold showers suck. While that might initially seem like a drawback of taking cold showers, it’s actually what makes them great!

Doing difficult things and overcoming adversity hardens your mind. When you start taking cold showers, you’ll often stare at the water for a few minutes before eventually forcing yourself under it. Taking cold showers builds discipline – you are doing something, not because it’s enjoyable, but because it is your responsibility. 

Starting each day with a cold shower means that you overcome adversity first thing every morning. This doesn't just build mental toughness in the long run. It also creates momentum for overcoming more challenges later in the day.

When you suddenly subject your body to a significant temperature change, it undergoes what is known as a cold water shock. In an attempt to regulate its temperature, your body’s survival instinct is to increase breathing, circulation, and heart rate while also boosting the number of white blood cells in your bloodstream.

How does this help your immune system, you ask? Because your body’s cold water shock response is coincidentally very similar to its response when fighting off sickness. When you get sick, your body’s temperature and heart rate increase while releasing more white blood cells.

In essence, taking a cold shower is like giving your body a simulated cold. It activates your body’s immune response despite there being no genuine threat. The result? Any bacteria or other organism that could cause a sickness gets wiped out by your immune system’s preemptive strike! Taking daily cold showers is a cheap and efficient way to stay fit and healthy without the need for antibiotics or other immune system supplements.

There’s a reason why the world’s top athletes practice regular ice baths. Everyone knows that applying ice to training injuries and sore muscles helps reduce inflammation – cold showers take it a step further. By jumping into a cold shower right after your workout, it’s like applying a full-body ice pack! 

The cold water immediately cools your body, increases circulation, flushes your vascular system (veins, arteries, capillaries), and helps drive lactic acid from muscles to the liver, where it's efficiently disposed of. If you regularly find yourself sore after workouts and struggling with your recovery, taking cold showers might be the solution to your problems!

If you’ve read our other guide on Starting Your Day Like a Green Beret and applied our tactics, you likely wake up before sunrise. If you do, you’ll know that rolling out of bed at 0500 can feel like an impossible task. To make matters worse, you likely feel groggy for an hour after you rise – not in the mindset to get any significant work done.

If this is something that you’re having trouble with, then a cold shower is the solution. Jumping into a freezing shower right after rolling out of a toasty bed will instantly wake you up. From increased heart rate to deeper breathing, a cold shower primes your body for action. After you finish your shower, you won’t even consider going back to bed – you’ll be off to the races! Cold showers are an excellent way to wake yourself up and boost awareness in the morning.

Taking just one cold shower is already better than taking none at all. But if you want to benefit from everything that cold showers have to offer, you must be consistent. Stay disciplined and force yourself to take a cold shower even when you don’t feel like it. Holding yourself accountable and tracking your improvement is the only way to see results, whether you’re taking cold showers or working out. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to identify when you’re falling behind if you don't compare your progress to an external source. 

That’s why you need a group of equally determined and disciplined people to keep you accountable and encourage you to stay on the path if you start falling behind. Here’s where we come in. When you become an OA Aspiring Operator, you get instant access to our weekly accountability group run by special forces cadre. You also unlock countless other benefits like access to exclusive SOF podcasts, invitations to Live OA Events, discounts, and much more! Get started today by visiting our membership packages page.