Chris Ballard, a longtime journalist and bestselling author of five books. For two decades he was a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated, where eight of his stories have been optioned for film and seven were selected for The Best American Sports Writing. He’s a finalist for a National Magazine Award, the recipient of the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting, and has taught narrative reporting at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His new book, The Plunge: Maverick Swimmers, an Unlikely Quest, and the Transformative Power of Cold Water, publishes the day this episode airs.
Chris joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to discuss the plunge, his experience with cold water, and much more.
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Listen to the podcast here
Chris Ballard On Taking The Plunge And The Invigorating Power Of Cold Water
Welcome to the show. Our quote for this episode is from Haruki Murakami. “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” Our guest is Chris Ballard, a longtime journalist and bestselling author of five books. For two decades, he was a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated, where eight of his stories have been optioned for film and seven were selected for the Best American Sports Writing. He’s a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the recipient of the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He’s taught Narrative Reporting at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His new book, The Plunge: Maverick Swimmers, an Unlikely Quest, and the Transformative Power of Cold Water now published.
Chris, welcome. It’s great to have you on the show.
I appreciate you having me on.
The Evolution Of A Sports Journalist
I find it helpful to always start maybe early on with childhood. What was your upbringing like? What from those early years maybe still shows up in your interests or how you approach work now?
I had one brother and we were both sports crazed. We played all the sports. We read all the box scores. We lived in the Bay Area. It was the chronicle. They had something called the Sporting Green. Literally green newspaper. It was very exciting. Each morning, it was a bit of a race to see who could get to the sports section first. San Francisco, Giants, 49ers, Warriors, and grew up just inoculated to sports. Our dad had been a basketball player as well. I hit a point by the time I got to high school and college where things I knew I enjoyed and were good at was writing to a certain extent and playing and following sports. That eventually funneled down to this career.
Other than being a sports player, I would think it’s what every kid would want to do. Maybe drive a big truck or get to have sports as part of your business all day.
For all of us who had these dreams, when you’re eleven, you’re like, “I’m making the MBA or whatever,” and then slowly your own limitations are revealed to you. In my case, I did Division III sports, which was a wonderful experience. It became clear pretty early on that this was the end of the line for me, and then finding a way to turn that passion outward and explain these worlds to other people. Finally, it has characters within them. That was the sweet spot.
I’m curious. How did you get into journalism? Did you do it right after school or was this something you had to break into?
I had an amazing High School teacher, Timmy Workman. She recruited a friend and I to start the school newspaper. At the time, it was a lark but I enjoyed the process. I did it in college. We had a daily newspaper at UC Santa Barbara, which was a big deal back then. Coming out of college, it was one of those things where the industry in the late ‘90s, there were a fair number of jobs much unlike in journalism. You could make a living doing this. It was a wonderful time to come into the media.
What was your first big break or big story?
I pitched a book right after graduating college. It was one of those ideas that was perhaps just so out there that the publisher bid on it. The concept was, I was going to drive around the country with two college basketball teammates in an old used van. We were going to go to every 48 contiguous states, 170 cities and report on playground basketball and pick-up basketball, the culture, the characters and the people. The publisher said, “Here’s $15,000. Knock yourself out.” That was both a great life experience. It leveled me in terms of being able to say, “Here’s a book I wrote.” It was quirky enough that the media covered it to a certain extent. It didn’t sell any copies but some hardcore basketball players did enjoy it.
You’ve written a variety of books around basketball, baseball, and craft athletic performance. We’ve got a lot of business leaders who read this show. What are some of the lessons from those books, leadership, sports and top tier athletes? What does it take to be there? Do you think it translates to what you’ve covered?
I like to think of it as two ends of the spectrum with success and leadership that I’ve seen, especially in the NBA and Kobe Bryant, who I covered for many years.
Flopping? Is that part of it? It’s almost becoming unwatchable for some of the stuff.
It’s a great tangent, but I don’t know if you saw it. There was a clip that compared the way Kobe Bryant used pump fakes to the way SGA is using them. Kobe used these pump fakes to create space and get a shot off. SGA is using them to draw fouls. If you watched them in contrast, SGA will probably still be playing when this episode comes out, I imagine. It is a little bit of a bummer to see how evolution has gone.
They’re taking six steps and this is the last thing we’ll talk about. These slow-mo videos of the double pivot six steps are amazing. How you get from half court to the basket without dribbling.
I understand that technically based on the rules that were set down decades ago, that this is a legal basketball move sometimes. Sometimes it’s not, but it doesn’t mean it’s right. It doesn’t mean that’s what fans want.
I interrupted you. You were going to share some of those lessons.
Kobe during his playing career was monomaniacal focused on his own success, ambition, dislike for the most part by teammates. His pure obsession allowed him to be great, but he was never a leader. It wasn’t until he got to the point where he had retired, to be honest. He could take that and sprinkle it into these other areas of life. He had that approach, which was successful for him, but not necessarily someone who people would have gravitated to as a teammate.
You see Steve Kerr. I was fortunate enough to cover for him for about ten years with the warriors and watching their rise. Kerr’s thing was, “It’s never about me.” I kept saying, “Steve, I want to write a feature story about you.” Literally, what we ended up doing in Sports Illustrated is he would not sit for a photo or a portrait. We ended up running a magazine story in which there are these photos of a scene like the sideline’s scene of the Warriors.
You see Draymond there and stuff then there’s a cutout where Steve Kerr should be. His whole thing was, “I don’t want this to be focused on me.” The problem is, once you put yourself out there, you’re on the cover of the book or the magazine, then the message sent to the players who were supposed to be in service is, “Steve is thinking about Steve,” and that always resonated for me.
Jordan and Kobe were both very similar, work ethic, and maniacal. Maybe they were the team but I think their focus is team objective oriented. Would you agree?
Kobe eventually got there. He tried. He started his career being Kobe oriented and he realized that Kobe could only go so far without teammates. Jordan also had the benefit of playing with Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson. He got to that point earlier in his career.
You spent two decades at Sports Illustrated writing about a lead athlete and at 52, you became one. Walk me through the text message that started all this.
It’s very generous of you, but I became a different athlete, let’s put it that way. I had a hip replacement at 42 for years and years of playing basketball and running outdoors and concrete tennis. I was just trying to hang on. In my late 40s, I wanted to keep playing basketball and an NBA contact I knew told me about this hot new recovery technique that all the NBA players were using like Steph Curry and Giannis. He’s like, “You got to check it out.” I was like, “Great. I’m in. What is it?” He’s like, “Intense cold.” It doesn’t necessarily sound that novel to me.
We’ve been icing our ankles and our knees for decades. He described this, it’s athletes rather than going in at 55 degrees and a nice bath. They are going all the way to their necks and they’re submerging in these plunge tubs. They’re alternating with hot. Whether it’s a hot shower or a sauna or a hot tub. Whatever it might be. He was seeing the effects of this. I started trying it out for my rec league old man basketball.
I certainly felt like it was doing something. You never know. There’s some placebo effect here, but definitely felt like it was doing something. That led me to start looking into cold water. In particular, I noticed that it wasn’t just meant for my knees and joints that felt better. I came out feeling great. That led me to interview some people, including Klay Thompson, the Warriors shooting guard. He kept his pool cold and he’d go jump in every morning. That led him to swim in the San Francisco Bay and that was the rabbit hole that took me down.
You live this first hand and your hip got better faster?
It’s more like, rather than being able to play once a week. I could play twice a week, which if you’re 50 years old and you’ve had hip replacement. That’s a big advantage. The secondary benefit which I didn’t expect, was this emotional regulation. I got a cold plunge tub and I started going in. It’s never fun to go in even three years later. You’re never like, “I’m excited to get in that cold plunge tub.”
The more you end up doing it, the easier it is psychologically to do it. That’s the difference. Your body’s always going to respond but you’re going to be like, “I did this yesterday. I did the day before. This isn’t that hard.” That started bleeding into other areas of my life. There was a lot of noise around cold plunges, but that was one of the things I found to be the most valuable.
The more you do it, the easier it becomes psychologically. Your body still reacts, but you think, ‘I did this yesterday—this isn’t that hard.’ It started to bleed into other areas. There’s a lot of noise around cold plunges, but it was one of the most valuable things I found.
That’s what I was going to say. Anyone with an Instagram or social media account has seen a lot of the browy cold plunge stuff. It feels like a trend. The new thing now is everyone’s standing on these like vibrating boards and they’re supposed to help your muscles. There’s always something, but you dug into this. Let’s start with science because some of the numbers in the book are honestly staggering. For readers who’ve heard about this or they’ve seen it in social media and assume maybe historical devices that they’ve seen, it’s hype. What is the research say about the benefits and how they work?
Neurochemical Benefits Of Cold Water Exposure
It’s important to look at what people say on Instagram and reduce that down.
Those are people probably selling cold plunges.
It’s performative and I totally get it. You do this and you’re excited. The more impressive it is, the better in some ways. The most sound thing that we can talk about is a mediated response. If you think about it from a biological perspective, you’re going from an ambient temperature of 80-degrees or whatever it might be.
You were going into 45-degree water. Your body’s like, “Crap. It’s fight or flight time.” It immediately kicks in this whole system. That’s where your noradrenaline will go up 500%. Your dopamine goes up to 250%, and this is just a natural reaction. If you fall overboard in the middle of the sea into cold water, your body needs to prepare you to survive.
To save your life.
This is a way in a hopefully safe setting, where you can essentially leverage that reaction. That’s where people get that feeling and there’s a lot of comparisons to cocaine, feeling juiced and coming out. That will last up to two hours, even when you’re warm and dry. It’s a way to access those neurochemicals, which can sometimes be harder to trigger otherwise. If you go for a good run, an exercise, you can get to some of the same spots. There’s a lot of ways to do this. This happens to be a way to do it that takes about a minute. You could do it in a cold shower. For most people, that is the most effective and efficient way to access this.
I’m curious. There are scientific benefits and stuff you looked at. Are there psychological benefits? As you said, doing the hard thing every day and having to do that. How much of it is physical? How much of it is mental? Where you’re like, “If I can get enough ice-cold baths, I can go have this difficult conversation in public.” Is there any good research around that?
There is. The physical reaction takes about a week, five exposures to cold water for your body to acclimate. You’ll cut down that gasp reflex. That hyperventilation. I feel like that’s a pretty good analogy. I’m sure it’s different for every person for how much of the cold exposure it takes to start helping you with emotional regulation and resilience. They’ve looked at brain scans, but there’s not going to be a number that you can cite.
It is anecdotally the thing you hear from people. People either do this once and it’s like, “That was great.” I did skydiving once. It was something I did with my life and I checked that box. They do it religiously and they’re annoying telling you about it and you got to go do it. The people that are benefiting from this are getting that. I found it foremost in the 2-month or 3-month period after starting we’re in the middle seat on an eight-hour flight.
I could have risen above myself and noticed what was going on in my body. It gives that ability. You can get this through meditation as well. The ability to look down on yourself a little bit and say, “I’m having this physical reaction for these reasons.” For a lot of people who are athletes and active, meditation is challenging. I keep trying and I want to be better at it, but there’s something about the active element of jumping in the lake or getting in a cold plunge where I feel like that appeals to me more as a way to get there.
I keep coming back to the concept in thinking about the book. We live in the most climate control, screen saturated, comfort optimized world that humans have ever built. I’m sure you’ve read Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile work. How does this type of exposure compensate for this softness and comfort? I say all the time, there’s the depression level and all the stuff around mostly kids who are probably affluent is high. Living was a fight 200 years ago. You got up and it’s like, “Where am I going to get my food?” Fight or flight and work for it. As things become more comfortable, we expect that comfort. When we don’t have it, we’re surprised. Comfort has been a double-edged sword for humans.
That is the part of this that surprised me. For the book, I end up taking up ice swimming.
Is this where we cut the hole like in the lake? I got all of the dopamine and all the reactions thinking about that just so you know.
It’s technically a sport. It definitely is an extreme sport, 41 degrees Fahrenheit or lower and you’re wearing a Speedo, goggles and a silicone cap. For the reporting, I’m going to George Plimpton reader surrogate. I got to do this. I’m going to write about it, and I was like, “There’s no way.” I’m going to do it for fifteen seconds. I’m going to fail. I was so negative about my chances of doing this ahead of time. That ties into what you’re saying.
I was underestimating what I was capable of and then through this process which is just a physical one. You slowly acclimate day by day and then, in the end, I end up in the US national ice swimming team and I compete at the world championships. All these things I never would have thought possible is partly because I’m not challenged like that and partly my fault for not challenging myself like that.
That would be what we’re getting out here. You can mitigate that out of your entire life. If you put a Fitbit on someone, they could successfully exist in this society with very few steps. Their heart rate would never go up. You could be professionally successful or personally successful, but that’s going to take a toll eventually.
When your body adjusts, what is happening? Does it know something hard is coming and it says, “I know what this is?” What can we learn from how your body adjusts to that?
The concept is hormesis, which you’re probably familiar with.
I am not because I have no science genes in my family. Give us the 101 on that.
The backstory is fascinating. There’s a college student in the 1960s, Edward Calabrese. He was part of an experiment where they were supposed to put this chemical called phosphine on the peppermint plants. It was going to kill them. It was a way to watch this process play out, but they mistakenly diluted it. It was not as strong as it should be. These plants grew 40% bigger instead of dying. He becomes fascinated and obsessive about this concept, which had existed for centuries called hormesis.
Which is these when you have a small positive stressor, usually. Smoking is not going to work for example. That your body responds by getting stronger. When you lift weights, those are micro tears and then your body grows back stronger. What’s happening is like, “Here’s a threat.” Mitochondria increases. Autophagy which is basically your cell cleanup occurs. The same thing happens with cold water exposure. Your body’s like, “This was a threat. We need to be ready for this next time. Here’s what we’re going to do.” It prepares for it in the interim.
Small positive stressors work by triggering adaptation. In response to a “threat,” mitochondria increase and autophagy—your cell’s cleanup process—kicks in. Cold water exposure does the same.
The same way intermittent fasting to a certain extent. They’ve seen that effect on your body as well. The more little micro stressors you can put at it, the stronger your body’s going to get. There are limits to this. That’s the difference between a macro stressor and a micro stressor. If you’re taking fentanyl every day, your body’s not going to respond positively. There are categories for it.
There’s a diet around this. It’s like changing your diet and doing something different in fat. If you see anyone, they’re vegan and they’re having these great results and then it’s plateaus. Whatever your body gets used to, it needs a little bit of a surprise. I think Taleb was talking about this, too, but I bought into that. Constantly mixing it up was keeping your system from becoming complacent.
If you do the same six exercises at the gym every week, your body is going to be like, “I’m ready for these.”
The mental health facet of this jumped out to me, too. One researcher you referenced said cold water exposure is one of the only things that makes you alert and relaxed at the same time. Explain that please.
The alert is the dopamine, the noradrenaline, your body, and the fight or flight. What happens with the relaxation is, once you are immersed in water, there’s this system called the vagus nerve. It runs on either side of our neck and down our forehead. When you activate that, it says, “We might be submerged for a while. We need to prepare to survive this.” In some ways, there’s these two conflicting things going on in your body. Your body is saying, “Juice it up. We got to be ready to act. We need to be ready for prolonged survival.”
What happens is, your first 60 seconds in the water, your heart rate goes way up. Cortisol and stress levels go up, but then he comes down very quickly to the point where your heart rate will be lower than it was prior to it. Your stress levels will not go up. The exercise they did, to give you the methodology, is using a freezable face mask. The thing you could buy off of Amazon. This is why you see influencers dunk their face in cold water like icy water. It essentially mimics that.
put on a freezable face mask and a stressed out half of these poor students in this experiment in Germany. The others put the face mask on and stressed them out. They saw the cortisol levels did not rise for those who had the face masks on and they jumped up 70%. It is pretty much immediate if you have the cold water on because your body overrides.
Vagus Nerve And Parasympathetic Nervous System Regulation
This is the parasympathetic versus sympathetic nervous system, too. I always confuse them. Will you explain the difference again? It’s like I learned it and I don’t hear it for two years and I forget it every time. Every time, I’m like, “That makes total sense.”
The easiest way to remember the parasympathetic is the rest and digest system. That’s what the vagus is activating. Your body goes into that state where it’s like, “We’re going to calm down.” The vagus communicates all around your body. It’s like a hub. A lot of the interesting research has been around whether through cold water or through electrical stimulation. Stimulating that vagus nerve as a way to deal with PTSD, mental health, and depression, you’ll find that ability to go from panic and chaos if we can bring that down for people.
This is an intervention which isn’t pharmaceutical. It’s widely available. That’s where a lot of the most promising scientific elements are. The secondary element is that when you go do this with other people, you’re adding community. If you do it outside like in England, it’s popular. If you go to a lake on a Saturday morning in England and you join other people. You don’t even have to know them. It’s like picking a basketball. You show up and you’re there at a certain time.
You are outdoors, which is great and you get sunlight. You get the cold water effect and then there’s this social cohesion where they call a manufactured crisis that you just survived. Two minutes in this cold water, that’s where they’ve seen real mental health benefits. Especially for men because men are less likely to go into therapy in the UK. It’s for the loneliness epidemic and all these things. That’s where they are looking at it as an intervention.
Maybe they should figure this out because somehow, I keep getting targeted with all these charts with summer starting. More people die from heat in Europe every summer than guns in the US because they’re culturally adverse to air conditioning. Somehow, these charts have been released all week. My daughter is traveling in Europe and she’s like, “We’re in this place and it’s 90 degrees.” This guy was talking about going to his friend’s $10 million house and it didn’t have air conditioning. There’s something about that. Maybe that is prolonged versus short duration to your system.
I had not seen that.
You can look up the death rate in Europe from heat every summer. It’s incredibly high inputting a lot of places. It’s not that they can’t have air conditioning. With heat pumps and stuff, there’s like a cultural aversion to it. It’s seen as an American modernity thing.
I know the flip side is what they often see in the Nordic countries. Which is if you raise your kids in an environment where they’re constantly exposed to cold, they grow up far more acclimated to cold, which makes sense.
If you raise children in an environment where they are regularly exposed to cold, they become far more acclimated to it over time.
My kids were the opposite of this because my kids all sleep with noise machines and eye masks. We do, too. The kids who grow up in New York City, like babies or whatever. They can sleep through horns. They’re just much more acclimated to noise in their sleep.
We live in Berkeley, which is a relatively urban environment and I can attest to that.
My family sleeps with snowflakes. I’m going to go out and say it. If I don’t have my eye mask and there’s a crack in the shade. It’s all over for me. There was another interesting thing in there, the distance swimmers talking about being in these trance-like states or moving meditation. After this initial rush of all these things, it sounds like there is a greater sense of calm. I would have thought that the fight and flight would keep going once you’re in the freezing water for minutes or hours.
It’s very energy expensive if you think about it that way. If your body is trying to survive and is trying to prolong its time there. Essentially your body’s vasoconstricting. All the blood is going to your core, which is why your fingers will get numb. The movie meditation comes the same way it might if you’re a distance runner. With swimming, it’s similar. The difference is that, when you’re running, you have all these external stimuli. You’ve got the trees, the ridgeline, the other runners, the sounds, the birds or whatever it might be.
Swimming is radically internal. If you’re swimming in the bay or pool or whatever it is. You’re basically just staring down. These marathon swimmers who swim 6 to 14 hours at a time, you’re looking down into Merck for ten hours. Some of them described it as incredibly therapeutic because there’s nothing I haven’t thought about during those swims that someone else can bring up to me. Others get that flow state wherein it’s like you drive through a town and you don’t even realize you drove through that town when you’re driving. It’s like that feeling of just the motion. The ability to reach that point is part of the allure for a lot of the swimmers.
I’m curious, Chris. I saw an article. I can’t tell you where it was from. It was early, but have you seen anything on either unknown risk to this? I feel like what I saw was something about a vascular vein or tears in veins. Shocking the system doesn’t sound like maybe something you were meant to do every day. Is there any data that talks about what might be harmful about this or long term?
That’s important in talking to the experts about this in the UK. That’s the first thing they talk about. We’ve studied this from a sea survival situation first and then people have decided to do this recreationally. This is not something to worry about in a cold shower. I should say there’s a big difference between taking a cold shower or getting it to 60-degree water in the summer, where it’s a little chilly and going ice-swimming or jumping into a frozen lake. There’s a big difference there. If you have a pre-existing heart condition like an arrhythmia, this can be dangerous. In particular anyone who’s going to do ice swimming. You get an EKG. You get a full work up. It’s very comprehensive.
Secondarily, don’t do it alone. Don’t decide to go to some river in Chicago and go ice swimming by yourself. It’s easy to underestimate how quickly your body responds to this. That lends a positive to it and you need other people there. That makes it a communal activity because you don’t go do this by yourself. Now, obviously you could go in your backyard and get in a cold plunge by yourself. The final thing would be, you don’t need more than about a minute max. Anything above that, all the benefits are going to be mainly psychological.
Are there any downsides if you go longer or is that just the efficient frontier?
Sure. The pointy extreme of this that I write about because it’s interesting. It’s like the Everest element. It’s the ice mile, which is swimming a mile in water that’s 40 degrees or lower. As you can imagine, that comes with all kinds of dangers.
Shattering thinking of that.
For the book, I end up attempting to swim in ice kilometers, they call it, in Boston, Harbor in the winter. I can attest you want other people there. There was an EMS on site. A kayak next to me as I was doing. That’s probably not good for your body. I would not recommend anyone decide more than once or twice to go try to swim a kilometer in ice water. You’re pushing yourself to the extreme.
The benefits to that are the psychological ones like the Old Navy Seals idea that when you think you’re done, you’re only 40% on the way there. The founder of this calls it something that is between possible and impossible. It’s that ability to test yourself, in that moment, “Will I quit?” That’s the appeal at this very extreme level.
You said you saw other benefits shaking off old injuries and HRV going up. I think you said resting heart rate went down to 39, which is incredibly low. What about sleep? These benefits seem like they’re pretty holistic. That’s pretty impressive in cardiovascular health.
It’s important to say this is anecdotal. This is just my experience. It’s hard to disentwine it from the other things I was doing over this course of two years. In my case, it was a combination of doing pretty intense swim training and daily cold exposure. I probably can’t discount the idea that I had a goal. It’s our goal-oriented approach with this cold exposure and the swimming. One of the things I was able to allied by doing that was all these joint injuries.
Swimming training is great for your body. The shoulder is the only area where you might get into trouble. Every morning, I started to calm. I’d had this nice three-hour block of work after my cold plunge where I’m focused and locked in. Sleep was better as well. As I said, I don’t know how much of that was the cold exposure. You don’t want to do cold exposure before going to sleep. That’s not going to be good. Heat is better at that time. The best time to do it is in the morning.
Is alternating with heat making it more effective or is it recommended or that’s another product people have to buy?
A hot shower is fine. The biggest advantage to the heat is it is more enjoyable, to be honest. If you are going from a hot tub to a cold plunge and you get a little hot in the hot tub. It’s refreshing to go in that cold plunge. If you walk out on a 38-degree morning and you have to walk into a lake. That’s generally harder. That’s the hardest part of the advantage to doing it, but there’s something to be said for the comfort level, too. That’s where people love that sauna.
I’m curious, though, because your body wants it because you’re already hot and it wants to be cooled down. Does it lessen the dramatic effects of it? Does that change if you start with warm versus go right in?
Exactly. The walls that you have to climb up over mentally to get in there are essentially level. The walls are no longer there. You’re excited to get in it. That advantage is gone. The benefit is, you might do three rounds. Whereas, before you might have just jumped in once and then warmed up.
I was in a European circular pool. It was up to our legs and freezing water because after skiing it was hot. You walked in like circles and alternated. It was interesting. You couldn’t make it through the first one and then after a couple cycles, I could see your body adjust.
It then becomes, “I can do this.” There’s early evidence that’s also good for your cardiovascular system, essentially like a pump. You’re vasoconstricting. All the blood is coming in and you narrow the blood vessels. You are vasodilating, which is when you send all the blood out to the skin to shed the heat. You’re essentially running a pump through your system. This is why guys like LeBron swear by this. It’s a way to speed up the recovery element.
This may be more of a mental thing, but we had a hot and a cold. It was in some hotel. We were all doing it in Europe. It was freezing, but it seems like, generally, and it might be a metaphor. The worst way to get in is one piece at a time. I was like to my wife, “You can’t do that. You have to jump so your decision is already made. You’re torturing yourself.” It’s like putting your hand in the fire a little bit.
Agreed. I would say caveat to that is don’t dive in because once you get your head under, you’re going to trigger that vagal reaction. It’s going to be potentially dangerous if you’re diving into a lake because you’re immediately going to hyperventilate and potentially suck in water. One of the interesting history elements I learned about this was with the Titanic. They originally assumed all these people died from hypothermia because the water is 28 degrees.
It turns out, in retrospect, probably a good number of them died from drowning because when they hit the water, that cold shock triggered this huge hyperventilation response. They sucked in water. You don’t want to just dive in. To your point, if you splash in anything where you keep your head above water, that is the easiest way to do it.
You don’t want to just dive in. Even splashing into anything where you can keep your head above water is the easiest way to start.
I’ve seen this even in the cold ocean. I count to three every time I don’t do it. It’s like I’m going in another inch and another inch. It’s making it all so much worse.
Get it over with.
Again, it’s a good metaphor and speaking of metaphor. We talked about this earlier, but bringing it back full circle. There’s a deeper argument in the book about what you call Healthy Hardship. Modern life has engineered most of it out. In your case, we have to deliberately put it back in. If cold water is not someone’s thing, how else can they do this? How much is the comfort trap of modern life hurting us?
Implementing Healthy Hardship And The Safe And Uncomfortable Framework
In the poll I saw, 70% of Americans are worried about the future of the country. The anxiety is this low-level buzz or a high-level buzz at all times, so I agree with you. There are some people who experience this negatively, and then they shouldn’t do it. What you want is a positive stressor. You find what is analogous in your life? I love that idea and I believe it’s called the Misogi Challenge. When you find something, you’ve got about a 50% chance of doing it and you try to do it.
Sometimes this can be extreme. There’s a sports scientist down in Santa Barbara named Marcus Elliott. His thing was to go swimming in Santa Barbara and move a rock across the bottom of the sand under the water. Coming up for air, going down, moving the rock like hardcore. You can also be like, “I’m going to meditate for 40 minutes straight.”
Whatever it is you feel like you got about a 50% chance of doing. Whether you fail or not, you’re going to feel like you tested yourself. You’re going to bust out of that. You’re going to force your body to adapt or your brain to adapt a little bit. I can’t imagine sitting through all this modern life and not engaging that physical element. For me, it’s incredibly crucial to my mental health.
There’s this weird curve. As people obtained Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and wealth, they optimized for comfort. The people who maybe go a step beyond that are now trying to throw discomfort at people who can afford manufactured discomfort because they don’t have basics. This is a lot about suburban lifestyle and everything. It’s hard even for parents now. This is why kids are struggling. They’ve conflated making their kids’ life easy with meaning.
There’s a lot of, “Let me remove a lot of the challenges.” I read something and you probably read it, like tomatoes and a lot of things have less nutrients now because of what you said before. They don’t have to fight to grow like they did years ago. They’re growing in a perfect environment and the fighting is where a lot of the nutrients come from.
We both have teenagers. Part of what happens is, in lieu of these other challenges, these relatively positive stressors and challenges in their life. What they get are these social media, culture and social challenges that they have no control over sometimes. There’s that feeling of powerlessness. If you say, “You guys got a backpack into this campsite and backpack out this weekend,” as some challenge or whatever. It’s something you can do and you can feel like you’ve got an agency over. Versus, “Figure out Instagram,” and you’re seventeen years old. Good luck with that.
There’s a quadrant I use in some of my presentations talking about getting outside your comfort zone. I like the 2 by 2 Matrix. It’s safe and uncomfortable. If you think about if we went through all of them, if we went through unsafe and uncomfortable situations. This is free jumping and you’re going to get a lot of these benefits, but you could die. It’s unsafe and comfortable. That’s like sitting around eating a bunch of cheeseburgers.
It’s easy to do but it’s not good for you. Safe and comfortable is probably where most people are hanging out. I’m going to do nothing, it’s easy and it doesn’t push my comfort zone. Safe and uncomfortable, though, particularly as a parent of a kid, that’s where I want my kids to be. They might have some emotions. They might have some physical, like these ropes courses that have been invented with harnesses that you can control all of it.
You can get on and get off the obstacle. We do with our kids and they’re like green, blue and black but you can’t fall. You can get yourself in some uncomfortable situations. Again, as a parent, I’m not going to rescue them because they’re safe. They got to fight their way out of it. This is the quadrant and this is exactly where this falls into. It is fundamentally safe but uncomfortable whereas the most opportunity without hurting yourself.
I love that, safe and uncomfortable. It could be a parenting manual.
My next book is a parenting book from the lens of leadership and I have that thing into it. The other thing that falls under that the most people rank death as scary as doing this thing, but it’s public speaking.
Especially if you grew up partly during the pandemic and you’ve grown accustomed to doing the majority of your communication digitally without making eye contact. You got to talk to a whole room of people and try to make eye contact with them. Everyone’s focused on you. I agree. It’s probably become more challenging as generations get older.
It didn’t occur to me before, but this is a perfect example of safe but uncomfortable. If I could find a list of ten things, that would be a great list for people to get started off for themselves and their kid. Another one is everyone I know who is an amazing sales leader was in a training program in their twenties knocking on doors. They’re phone cold calling or knocking on doors. It’s super uncomfortable but safe. All those people just develop some heartedness around them to reject after doing that.
My first job out of college was selling Kirby Vacuums door to door.
Learning From Failure And Human Connection In Professional Growth
My brother did that. It’s the same thing, multi-level marketing and door to door. He was doing a demo and he vacuumed up a woman’s cross. It’s a pretty funny story how he had to talk himself out of that one and get it out of there but you learned. When did you do that?
It was about three months after graduating college. I’m sure my parents were very excited that I had gone to this liberal art school and was now selling Kirby Vacuums door-to-door, but I learned so much. One of the things I learned was, I was not a salesman. That lesson alone was super valuable.
You get good at rejection, right?
Yes. I don’t know if I ever got good at it.
Your immune system didn’t physiologically react to it in the same way.
Also, you got a lot better at realizing that the sale was all about human connection. You know this far more than I could ever say. You could have your script, your pad or the machine could be impressive, but if you couldn’t create that human connection within 30 seconds of someone answering that door, you were toast.
Sales are all about human connection. You could have the script, the notepad, even the best tech—but if you couldn’t create that connection within 30 seconds of someone opening the door, you are done.
Exactly. I’m going to try to make a list of ten things I can think of. I’m going to add door-to-door selling and public speaking. These are things that generally terrify people but they’re emotionally terrified. You should be terrified of Alex like free scaling or building. There are things where you get that same effect. I assume robbing a bank, and I’m not advocating that, but you’re getting the same adrenaline rush but there are a lot of consequences to doing that.
I was watching Alex scaling that building in Thailand. I was having a physical visceral reaction just watching it. I had to stop watching. My heart rate was going.
The original movie was Free Solo. I tell everyone my heart was racing. I know the end of the movie. My palms were sweating. You were having all of the physiological symptoms along with him. I was drenched. I have never been so stressed. I watched that movie before I had my WHOOP, but I would have loved to see my vitals had I been watching that.
That would be interesting. I wonder if there’s some positive physiological effect from watching a movie like Free Solo that you could log and be like, “This is a low-level stressor that you can introduce to your body.” or whether because we don’t have any agency in it. Whether it’s negative stress because you’re just scared for him, but you can’t control the situation.
If anyone from WHOOP or Oura is reading. In addition to being an excellent sponsor of this show, we’d be interesting to set up a focus group of these movies and see what people’s physiological reaction is to it. I had the same thing as you. I have never been so stressed watching a movie in my life.
I would read that study. I’d be fascinated.
Chris. Last question I’d like to ask everyone. I always say this is multi-variant, so it could be personal or professional or singular or repeated. What’s a mistake that you made that you’ve learned the most from?
That’s a great question. The mistake that I have made repeatedly in my life is sometimes not going all in. All the times that I’ve been successful is when I went all in. Whenever I go 60% in or 70% in, the outcome is not what I hope for. I had a little piece of paper on my desk for a while. That said, “Do the work. That’s all that matters. Don’t worry about anything. If you do the work, you at least will be happy with the outcome.”
I like that. I assume people can find the book wherever books are sold. Do you want to give them the title again and tell them where they can connect with you or learn about your work?
It’s called The Plunge: Maverick Swimmers, an Unlikely Quest, and the Transformative Power of Cold Water. Get it at your local independent bookstore, Amazon Barnes and Noble, etc. I have dusted off my social media accounts with the assistance of my older daughter. I’m on LinkedIn and Instagram and all that stuff.
Chris, thank you for joining us. In your honor, I’m going to take an ice cold shower rather than waiting for it to heat up. It’s literally like the thing that my body needs. I put my hand in and it’s cold. I’m shaking but I’m going to do it and see the reaction. I’ve done it before, but it’s a little thing I can do. Thanks for sharing the story and good luck with the book launch.
Thanks a lot.
You can learn more about Chris and The Plunge on the episode page at RobertGlazer.com. If you enjoyed this episode or you’re a show reader, in general, I have a small favor to ask. That is, would you take a minute to share this conversation with someone you think would have appreciated it? That is how the majority of new users tell us they discovered the show and learn about great guests such as Chris. Thank you again for your support. Until next time. Keep elevating.
