Joel “Impossible” Runyon and Cold Shower Therapy
- Tara Hodgson
- May 12, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 27, 2021
So last week I posted about different things I had started since lockdown began, one of those was Cold Shower Therapy.
It’s an idea I first saw on Joel Runyon’s Impossible blog. You take a five minute cold shower, not lukewarm, not slightly cool but cold. As in you need to be swearing and making up more nonsense words and wanting to jump back out the minute you step in. I’ve been going for almost two weeks now and it’s not as bad as it seemed at first. The showers are still painfully cold and I want to scream but I’m finding going into the shower easier and easier.
It’s not simply going in the shower and celebrating that achievement, although part of it for me is trying to start seeing showers as less energy draining than I do currently. It’s about setting your mind to a task or goal that you want to achieve and going through steps to achieve that. It’s about changing your mentality and stopping putting excuses in the way of doing the things. You decide that you’re going to achieve that goal, and somehow by taking a cold shower for five minutes each day you do.
Photo by Castorly Stock on Pexels.com
My Story
I came across this idea and dismissed it straight away a few months ago. I didn’t want to take cold showers and I made a whole host of excuses, my favourite being that it would take too long to warm up afterwards and therefore make me late for things. I built up to the idea slowly as this lockdown continued – I’m now not going to be late for anything other than cleaning the house and getting my own things sorted, and this is the first step in sorting those things so….
I went into the bathroom, put the shower at a temperature I like it, got my phone ready with a timer and stepped in. I enjoyed the minute of nice, warm water and started trying to make excuses for why I should start the next day but once that minute was up I turned the shower to cold. Swore a lot. Scrambled at the shower curtain a little bit and I managed to stay in for five minutes. I realised by minute two of the cold shower that it wasn’t as bad as I had been thinking. Once I was in the shower I started to get used to the cold temperature and it was actually kind of refreshing to step out, get dry and warm up with a nice cuppa and wearing my fluffy socks.
I had overcome my fear.
Now nothing in the day could be so bad as that five minute cold shower (and in the end that wasn’t even so bad itself). I could sit down and work on the things I had been wanting to do for a while but putting off. The main goal for this 30 day cold shower therapy is to have this secret project started. To get past the planning stage and start putting what my ideas are into practice, and because it involves a lot of reading and wordy things I’m counting reading a novel as that start.
I’m now almost two weeks in and things are taking shape in this Project. I’ve even started looking up how to use excel more efficiently to go with it and I am loving it. I feel a lot brighter, more motivated and generally happier. Apart from that initial couple of seconds that I’m swearing and making everyone that hears me worry if I’m being murdered in the bathroom. That still happens and I still really, really don’t like it.
Will I continue with the cold showers after this 30 days? Probably not, being completely truthful. I’ll have a significant amount of progress on the Project by then, be into a routine and want to get back to enjoying warm showers. But maybe every now and again when I’m putting off a task, I know what to do.
Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.
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