Today's Stoic challenge was to take a 30-second cold plunge: commit to a half-minute of discomfort, and come out on the other side of it as a stronger person. Taking a cold plunge for health benefits dates back centuries to the ancient Greeks, Romans, and even the Egyptians. Every year in the US and around the world, communities support polar plunges for charity. But this challenge wasn't about the health benefits.
The challenge was about doing something hard and showing yourself that you're tough enough to handle any problem thrown at you. This kind of shock not only gets your blood flowing, but it also strengthens you.
I was excited to take on a challenge. I was NOT excited about taking a freezing cold shower! As a person that is often cold, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to warm back up after the frigid plunge. It's that "inner cold" that I was afraid of experiencing. However, the challenge was for 30 seconds. Thirty seconds? Anyone can take on a challenge for thirty seconds- including me! And, so I took my standard shower, knowing that I'd eventually have to leave the comforts of warm water.
The time came. Thoughts of dread flooded my mind as I turned the showerhead away from me, adjusted the water temperature to cold, gave myself a mental pep talk, and counted down 3...2...1!
I wanted to scream! Dancing around in a cold shower gasping for air was not my idea of fun! I definitely felt awake! My whole body was tingling. 12..13...14 seconds. Oh, my gosh! What was I doing? "I can do this," I told myself. I was not going to quit, not now, not ever. 28...29...30! I did it! Wahoo!
The "fear" of what the experience would be like was much worse than the actual experience. It was cold! Thirty seconds lasted forever, and yet it ended pretty quickly. It's incredible how a thirty-second experience can pump you up mentally and physically to tackle the challenges of the day. I think that was the whole point.
Ryan Holiday wrote in today's challenge:
All these fears we have, all these things we play up in our minds that cause us to tremble—like the cold plunge—we quickly realize, that wasn’t so bad. “We suffer more in imagination than in reality,” Seneca said. He understood that the cold plunge makes this observation so much more tangible, so much more real.
The point of exposing ourselves to discomfort like this is not self-flagellation, or to prove something to others. In Stoicism, we do these exercises to inure ourselves to difficulty, so that when life threatens us with involuntary inconveniences or forces us into scary situations, we have no hesitation in facing them down. We can simply do what needs to be done. Because we know we can take it. And we should do it today, while the year is young. “It is precisely in times of immunity from care,” Seneca said, “that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress.”
Most of us live in fear of inconvenience, of even the slightest physical discomfort. And when we are matched against something unfamiliar, uncomfortable, uncertain, we panic, we meltdown, we get frustrated and angry. The whole point of this shower is shock and disquietude—to teach the body and the mind an important lesson about what life is really like and who is in charge. You are training the mind to lead the body, not the other way around.
When you practice pushing yourself to (and through) the point of discomfort, you grow mentally stronger, you begin to build resiliency. Everyday annoyances begin to feel less disruptive. They less frequently threaten your ability to remain in control. That’s what it means to be a Stoic: controlling the things you can control, not letting menial external inconveniences derail you.
Now that I know what it feels like to take a cold plunge, can I make it a habit and train myself to be mentally stronger?
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