Can a cold shower turn me from a night owl into a morning lark?

One of life’s sleepier people by nature, Christine Manby seeks out a new, if initially uninviting, way to increase her daytime productivity

(Tom Ford)

What does your morning look like? I try not to open my eyes before midday if I have to because mornings have never been my best time of day. In the event that I can’t just stay in bed, they look like an endless slow shuffle between laptop and kettle, until I’ve reached the point at which my blood is 85 per cent tea and I’m starting to feel human again. It would be OK if I were also the kind of person who stays up until 4am being all industrious while everyone else is asleep. Alas, I’m not.

I know from having talked with sleep expert Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, that the chances of substantially shifting my body clock on to a rhythm that matches the traditional working day are slim. Research suggests that we humans have the capacity to effectively shift our natural wake/sleep pattern forwards or back by half an hour at the most. But there has to be a way to make the hours when I am awake more productive. Could something as simple as taking a cold shower turn me from a morning moaner into a pre-noon Ninja?

I have talked about the Wim Hof Method before. To recap, when I first heard about the Dutch endurance athlete who climbed most of Everest in a pair of shorts (he didn’t quite make it to the top due to a recurring foot injury), I was sceptical that there would be anything about his experience that I could apply to my life. But, persuaded by my friend Michael Maisey, who has been through more change in his 30-odd years than anyone else I know (from young offender to author and motivational speaker), I gave Wim Hof’s breathing method a try. Miraculously, it seemed to have an effect. After only one session, I felt a substantial decrease in pain from my dodgy disc.

However, the second tenet of the Wim Hof Method is frequent exposure to the cold. There is no one, and I mean no one, less likely to voluntarily seek out the cold than me. As a teenager, I used to fight the family dog Ben for the place closest to the fire. On one occasion, in a desperate attempt to get the hottest spot, Ben lay on the hearth itself and the room was filled with the smell of lightly singed hound. After that, he always used me as a fireguard, snuggling up to my back and using all four paws to shove me closer to the heat if he felt we needed more.

At Wim Hof’s workshops, participants voluntarily climb into ice-baths. I’m pretty sure an ice bath would kill me. A cold shower however? My friend Michael explained that you don’t even have to start with the shower on cold. You can gradually turn the temperature down while you’re in there. Like the reverse of boiling a frog. I would quickly find I was able to tolerate the cold for longer. The Wim Hof website promised, “eventually cold showers and even ice baths become things you look forward to (trust us)”.

Ice-cold baths: the more you have, the more you like them (AP)

Can I trust you, Wim? I wondered. He’s certainly not the first to suggest that cold showers are a good thing. Greek physician Hippocrates, widely considered to be the “father of medicine”, was prescribing cold bathing in the treatment of illness way back in the fourth century BC.

The benefits seemed worth the discomfort. Reduced stress levels. Greater alertness. A strengthened immune system and increased willpower. Oh, and weight loss. Let’s not forget that.

But how do these benefits come about? Surely the natural instinct to avoid getting too cold exists for a reason. Feeling uncomfortable is a body’s way of saying, “Don’t do that thing”. Wim Hof admits that a cold shower is a stressful event. He talks about a process called “hardening”. Gradually, your body gets used to it, or “hardens”, preparing you for even greater stresses in the course of your everyday life. Meanwhile, greater alertness is a side effect of the deeper breaths the cold encourages you to take, increasing the level of oxygen in your blood stream. Sticking it out is all it takes to strengthen your willpower. The weight loss comes about because cold showering will make you shiver like a rat pulled out of an icy pond.

I made that up. While shivering could probably burn a calorie or two, cold showers are thought to facilitate weight loss by encouraging our bodies to lay down more “brown fat”. This is not the usual kind of fat which hangs out on your bum suggesting you put the heating on and have another doughnut. Brown fat lives nowhere near your arse. It’s usually found around the neck and shoulder blades. Brown fat gets it colour from iron-rich mitochondria. These mitochondria convert calories into energy. The conversion is kicked off by the sympathetic nervous system which has been proven to be activated by exposure to the cold. A 2009 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, snappily titled “Cold activated brown adipose tissue in healthy men” seemed to suggest that a year of regular cold bathing might help you lose up to nine pounds.

Ever on the lookout for a simple/lazy way to offset my Twix habit, I decided that the touted benefits of the cold shower made it the perfect addition to my daily routine. I just had to grit my teeth and get on with it.

I tried the reverse frog-boil technique, starting hot and turning the temperature down. Knowing it was coming didn’t make it easier to bear. Perhaps knowing it was coming had made it worse through the awful anticipation. My whole body tensed in indignation as I turned the hot tap off altogether. It was very hard to resist the temptation to turn the water temperature back up and finish the shower with another quick dose of heat but few minutes later, dry and dressed, the horror of the cold water was a distant memory.

The first time, of course I saw no noticeable effect, but after a fortnight, I thought my skin looked better. It seemed less prone to dryness. My pores looked tighter. My hair seemed to look cleaner for longer. Was I more awake? Well, I’m writing this before eight in the morning. Was I slimmer? Er, no. But alas that NEJM study was based on an exclusively male study group. Other research suggests that women don’t benefit from the activation of brown fat in the same way but the skin perks were a big enough bonus for me to consider making cold showers a permanent part of my day.

A late blast of summer weather this September perhaps made starting the cold shower routine a little easier. It will almost certainly be harder to keep up as the days get shorter and winter draws in. Though who knows, maybe after three months of taking a cold shower every morning, I’ll be one of those crazy brave people who runs into the sea on Boxing Day wearing nothing but a pair of furry antlers. Probably not though.