Practical Tips for Cold Therapy

Hello and welcome to Zoey Recap. whereere each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health Today, we're diving into one of the most requested topics we've ever had coold water therapy Cold showers, ice baths and wild winter swimming have exploded in popularity over recent years with supporters claiming a range of health benefits But are these claims actually backed by Sence? Was it all just another wellness fat I'm joined by Dr. Susanna Soberg and Professor Tim Spector down the studies and discover what we could all do with a bit more ice in our life. coold plunge. what happens when Like I'm thinking about my own personal experience of like going into the sea in England, which I've done once because it was way too cold. It's very unpleasant. What's going on in your body as you do that? Yeah, a lot of things are going on in your body when you go into the cold water. It's very different from a cold shower also, but we can get back to that So emerging yourself into cold water will mean that you will put this very, very big stressor on your body because the body is in a natural temperature. you don't want to get too cold, but this is so potent because it surrounds your body immediately with no air, of course. So the potent of activating your coe receptors in the skin is like one hundred percent And that is like a huge stressor sending a rapid signal to your brain that now you are definitely in a situation where you are in danger actually. So the body acts as if you are in danger, even though you do it deliberately and send a signal to the brain to regulate your body so that you can better survive this So it sends out no adrenaline to activate your brown fat And Susanna, can you explain exactly what is brown fat We have two kind of fat tissues also in the body. and One of them is the white fat, which we know it's on our belly, it's on our thighs, and we want to get rid of that because it can grow and it's so difficult to activate it and get rid of those fat pearls, you can say, because it's all fat pearls just stuck together. So that stores our energy in the body opposite to that we have the brown fat. The brown fat actually increases our metabolism so the brown fat can burn the white fat So it's kind of like a good fat and we could say that the white fat is a bad fat, but we also need some of that white fat. But the brown fat we want to increase so that we can have a higher metabolism or energy expenditure, both when we are purposely activating it, but also when we are just sitting here Oh when we are asleep, the more we have of the brown fat, the better. it's just like you can compare it to the muscles So we all agree and know today that it's good to have a lot of muscle mass Because there's a lot of mitochondriry in the muscle fibers And the more we have of those, the better it's functioning and it increase our insulin sensitivity. And it's the same with the brown fat cells. The more we have of brown fat cells, the more mitochondria we have, the better insulin sensitivity we have And also it can burn more fat in our body, not only when we are activating it on purpose, but also when we are just like sitting here So our basic metabolic rate will actually go up if we have more brown fat. Brown fat has been one of these research areas for hundreds of years that we have known about, but it was not until actually the millennium that we discovered that a little bit of cold exposure could actually change our metabolism close balance and our insulin sensitivity in humans. And this is so fascinating. It's a study twenty fourteen showing where the researchers had people who had a bad insulin sensitivity and some of them were obese and some of them had type two diabetes. And they had them sleep in a room which was twenty four degrees Celsius for a month and then they measured their br fat Then they sipppted at nineteen degrees for a month and then again measured their brown fat and also insulin sensitivity. And what they found W that sleeping in a room at night at nineteen degrees Celsius actually increase their insulin sensitivity the glucose clearance got better. And when you then looked at the measure of the brownford, you can see that it had increased and that was just from sleeping at nineteen degrees in a cold room a month. Susanna, I'd love to switch to actionable advice now. So if someone's listening to this and they've never done it before They didn't grow up in Scandinavia, so they weren't wild swimming and you know, jumping into a sauna the other time. How can they integrate this into their lives. And I'm also very interested in like how can they Start if they might be a cold sissy like me Yes. So if you are co Cisy like you or me, I think the best thing you can do is too much about it actually. If you want to try it out, then go and try it out, but don't have expectations like I have to sit there for a while. This is not a competition. cold exposure is an inner journey So you use some kind of cold exposure. I would say a cold plunch is Definitely a good place to go if you have that, the ocean, if you have that, or if you don't, then a cold shower is also fine to get started So thirty seconds cold shower Use your nose to calm your nervous system so breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth if you need to. And if you can switch totally to nasal breathing, that will help your nervous system to calm down as well And you can use that also with cope launching. So breathe in through the nose air to calm the nervous system and never do any hypervventilating breathwork before or doing your co plunches, That is also I think I important to note And head donking, please don't do that because that would just decrease the blood flow to the brain and it actually also increases the risk of fainting. And we also don't want that And you have no extra benefits of putting your head down in the water. You can spash some water to the face which will activate the betus nerve Donking your forehead down doesn't do any health benefits for you. So take it slow and feel what is good for you. breathe through ten seconds and that is fine, but try to get over the cold shock. That is the goal So try and get past the first thirty seconds Yeah, I think the cold sh it might actually be a little bit longer than that for new people. It could be up to one minute and for some one and a half, depending on yeah, how cold adapted you actually are in the first place. So back to the question that Jonathan asked. So how different is this from people to people? And it can be actually very different So If you are used to being much outside, for example, then you get very quickly adapted. But if you are not very much outside an outdoors person, then you would take a little bit longer to get adapted to the cold. So be gentle to yourself and don't compare yourself to others And I like to have a sauna first, but does it make much difference, do you think you can't simim start with the saona and I mean, people should do it the way that they feel is best for them If you start in the cold water, you have that increase in oxytocin, nor adrenaline, dopamine would change how you sit in the sauna because it's sort of like a place where you meditate also In order to get the health benefits, do I need to combine a cold plunge and a hot sauna together No, you don't have to combine them. The thing about alternating between one extreme temperature and the other, like the co plunge and the sauna, is that you push your cardiovascular system And that is a workout for all your blood vessels. That is one thing, but also going from one extreme to the other will push your cells to either activate to generate heat or to shut down. And that is also a workout for your body. So in that sense, it has benefits doing it together if you just do cold plunches on one day and saunas on other days, that is also getting the benefits. It's just more like Divided, you can say Susanna, can I ask, ourur US listeners will know all about cryotherapy And I was in Los Angeles recently and every shopping mall has a cryotherraapy center now. so you can just pop in and do your three minute cryotherraapy session and go back to work So it's incredibly practical. You don't have to find a a lake in the middle of a city and, you know, and shiver wh And yeah, and it's reverse because you go in and the first thirty seconds are quite fun and then it gets progressively colder because it's It's minus one hundred degrees in this freezer. and you come out after three minutes, as the last thirty seconds are tough But I got a similar buzz after it, but I wanted Is there any science behind the difference, but you know, is it As impressive as the cold water stuff So there are studies showing that the cryo therapy also activates your code receptors which means it also activates the brown fat And I think that its the three minutes with these extreme temperatures, it would definitely help on your metabolism Of course, there are differences because when you submerge into cold water, you also have that hydrostatic pressure from the water which And I didn't feel I was going to die either. That was the other thing. So I didn't get the gasping or the sort of life threatening feel of it. It's not because the body needs to feel like it's dying in order for you to get the benefits. You do get some benefits and I do think that the cryo actually has benefits. It's just another metality. It's just another dose that you get. But you can say when you submerge into cold water, that is surrounding yourself with like one hundred percent molecules around your body in cold you cannot be packed more into cold. So that's of course more potent to activate your metabolism and of course also all your chemistry in the brain We had another common question around this actually, which is Does a cold shower work at all or does it need to be like a full plunge into icy water So cold showers work because you do get cold, of course, and you activate your cold receptors. There's a study, a randomized control study from the Netherlands showing that if you do that for thirty seconds, end your showers on thirty seconds cold showers You will have less sick days at work It might be that it's not because you actually less sick, it might actually be that you just get more energy to go to work. I'm not sure about what exactly is going on there, but it's definitely not a bad thing that you feel fresh enough to go to work. So it will activate your coob receptors, your brown fat, it will also activate no adrenaline dopamine and you will get that increase in your sympathetic nervous system, but it's probably not going to activate your parasympathetic part of your nervous system. And that is kind of what I would like people to experience that they have this kind of stress up and also the stress down Hosting this podcast means I get to quiz world leading scientists every week about how to improve my health But I'll be honest with you for a long time my snacking habit was completely out of sync with the science. I hidd an energy slumamp grab a snack bar I usually inhale it in two bites while looking at my phone I knew that the ingredients were a bunch of artificial additives and emulsifiers But honestly, I was hungry And usually there was nothing else healthy to eat It wasn't until our chief scientist Sarah Berry explained the physics of snack foods on this show that it finally clicked Highly processed bars are engineered to be eaten fast and release their sugar immediately which in my case caused a shock. Sike and then crash in my blood sugar leading a few minutes later to a collapse in my energy and a spike in my hunger In my opinion This is a cynical move by big food companies to make us eat more. I was furious.