Take Cold Showers

There's no AA for those of us addicted to comfort.

Modernity has created a relatively smooth standard of life compared to historical averages.

We've reached escape velocity when it comes to the bottom rung of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Food, water, and shelter are now afterthoughts, and seemly get in the way of what we need to do on any given day.

Sure, life is hard, and everyone is dealing with something. Mom gets sick. Pets pass before we do. And you can't move quite as fast, or as much furniture as you used to.

Despite the inherent challenges of the human condition and contrary to popular belief, according to Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, poverty, illiteracy, famine, disease, war, oppression, bigotry all declined globally in the past 30 years.

Let's assume Pinker's data is accurate and our world is safer than ever. Then what we see on the news wouldn't be as bad, right? Wouldn't the people on Facebook who voted for the other guy have more common sense? Wouldn't we all get along and hold hands while singing kumbaya?

A better world is hardly a finish line because humans are built to take on stress and come back stronger than before after successfully handling it.

As Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in 1864:

"Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element."

Give us a utopia, and we'll break it to make things interesting. We have it good. But we don't have to look too far (or on Facebook) to find a challenge outside of us to deal with: Enter cold showers.

Wim Hof's free app inspired me to take cold showers. Cold exposure reduces resting heart rate, which reduces stress on your blood vessels resulting in a potential decrease in cardiovascular issues.

Aside from the physical benefits, since taking cold showers, I've become more comfortable in uncomfortable situations.

When I first started, I could barely stay under cold water for three seconds. I eventually worked my way up to several minutes of only cold water. My saving grace is repeating I am capable over and over again until I believe it.

I've realized having enough space between you and the uncomfortable situations in life is an opportunity to analyze how you react and, most importantly, how you respond.

You can meet a challenge by not believing in yourself and shy away from it. Or you can take a deep breath, lean into the discomfort, and ask, "What can this feeling teach me?"

Life can get cold. And what's stopping it from getting colder isn't up to me. I can't bend the outside world to my will. But I can change myself by becoming more resilient. I can change how I look at my environment and seek to understand it rather than resist it.

The shower is your tool for safely dealing with uncomfortable situations. Over the next week, try to see how much you can stretch yourself. Take a warm shower as usual, and right before you hop out, turn on the cold water only for 2 seconds. The next day sees if you can do four seconds, then six seconds, and subsequently build your tolerance day after day. I promise you'll be building much more than tolerance. You'll be building confidence to deal with the cold harshness of life as well.

(This post initially was written for Paths to Peace: 9 Short Ways to a Life of Lower Anxiety but ended up not making the cut. If you liked this post, consider downloading the free eBook now.)