What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength

by Scott Carney

Nature gave us the ability to heal ourselves. Conscious breathing and environmental conditioning are two tools that everyone can use to control their immune system, better their moods, and increase their energy.

The Western-lifestyle makes it all-too-easy to take nature for granted.

In other words, there’s nothing else to say other than “Breathe, motherfucker.”

But what is comfort? It’s not really a feeling as much as it is an absence of things that aren’t comfortable.

Comfort and pleasure are the two most powerful and immediate rewards that exist.

With no challenge to overcome, frontier to press, or threat to flee from, the humans of this millennium are overstuffed, overheated, and understimulated.

Effortless comfort has made us fat, lazy, and increasingly in ill health.

This century has seen an explosion of obesity, diabetes, chronic pain, hypertension, and even a resurgence of gout.

By incorporating environmental training into your daily routine, you will achieve big results in very little time.

Yet no environmental extreme induces as many changes in human physiology as the cold does.

This vast and complex network of vessels would extend more than 60,000 miles if laid end to end. In a single day, the 5.6 liters of blood in a human body travels a total of almost 12,000 miles through the system, or almost four times the distance across the United States.

Weak circulatory muscles are a side effect of living in a very narrow band of temperature variation.

Muscle control in the central nervous system breaks down into three distinct categories. There are muscles that we can activate consciously, in what doctors call the somatic nervous system.

There are also muscles that we have almost no control over whatsoever. These include muscles that control the pace of the heart, the motion of the vascular system, the speed of digestion, and the dilation of our pupils. All of these are part of the autonomic nervous system—the body’s version of autopilot.

But there’s a third group of muscles and reactions that are shared between the autonomic and somatic systems.

There is an entire hidden world of human biological responses that lies beyond our conscious minds that is intrinsically linked to the environment.

To keep the core warm, the muscles that control the arteries clench tightly and restrict the flow of blood only to vital areas. The process is known as vasoconstriction.

White fat stores caloric energy from food, which the body tends to burn only as a last resort.

Brown fat is different. Most people create it automatically when they’re in cold environments by way of a process called beiging.

Essentially, the body detects physical extremes and starts to store mitochondria. When brown fat starts to work, the mitochondria suck white fat through the bloodstream and metabolize it directly to generate heat.

Even when it is the most defining characteristic of a person, simply not exercising the neural muscle over a short time can make someone entirely dependent on external resources.

If you happen to be prone to panic attacks, then submerge your face in ice water at the peak of the attack, which will signal your body to prepare for going underwater and disrupt the heart palpitations.

The invention of technology, as a rule, seems to correlate with a generally weakening of the raw physicality and resilience of our species.

In broad strokes, however, thermogenic research has showed four main strategies that the body can use to resist the cold: Humans can increase their metabolic rate by shivering; they can stay warm through some passive metabolic mechanism; or they can shunt blood to their core by closing off the arteries in their extremities. Lastly, as in most cases of people who live in colder climates, the human body can also accumulate higher levels of ordinary white fat as an insulation to help stem heat loss in the first place.

The neural circuitry between the nasal passage and the sneezing center in the brainstem is only a few inches long, and it is one of our most primal reflexive pathways.

the body cannot sense oxygen, only its byproduct.

Every time you do this you effectively grow a slightly stronger wedge.

The autonomic nervous system divides itself into two interrelated components. First is the sympathetic nervous system, which controls the so-called fight-or-flight response.

The parasympathetic nervous system controls the opposite responses, sometimes called the “feed-and-breed” actions.

Both systems are involved in breathing, and the right techniques can help strengthen both sides of the nervous system.

different breathing routines target different aspects of the nervous system.

The second method will become critical later for controlling vasoconstriction. It consists of a rolling set of muscle contractions

that you start at your feet and sequentially tighten until you reach up to your head.

And there is no better tool to dissect and modulate the inner workings of the mind than meditation.

But meditation and breathing practice alone only comprise half the equation.

Whatever the cold source, the goal is to give your system a little shock.

While you’re in this moment of shock and pain, you have two basic goals. First, you need to control your breathing and keep calm.

Once you feel reasonably calm, the second thing you need to master is suppressing your impulse to shiver.

The process for doing it is a familiar one. Once you’re already cold, clench the muscles in your feet and hands and then sequentially tighten every muscle above them. The method is essentially the same as the one you use during power breathing except that now, rather than simply pushing all the blood up to your head in general, you instead focus on a specific point on a small ridge on the backside of your skull where the temporal bone and occipital bone meet just behind your ears. Once you’ve pushed all of your muscles up to that point, you then squinch any muscles you have in your scalp and head and pressure downward to the same spot. Essentially you’re trying to pinch this area with muscle contractions.

begin with three rounds of power breathing followed by a breath-hold with no air in my lungs. Then I take a 15-second half-lung recovery breath and start the next round. I time myself and try to add a minute to each breath-hold until I hit 3 minutes. Then I do another round of breathing followed by 50 breath-out pushups. I follow this with a headstand for 30 seconds to let blood move to my head.

Anecdotal evidence notwithstanding, it’s probably not possible to definitively say that the Wim Hof Method is any more effective than the placebo outside of the few studies that have been done in a clinical setting.

decision point where I jump in, lie down, or turn the faucet to cold is when my mind throws up the most resistance.

The anticipation of discomfort is almost always worse than the actual experience. The inverse turns out also to be true.

Humanity has used its cerebral ingenuity to extract the stored energy of the planet for its own purposes. The collective action of our carbon-dioxide emissions, rampant pollution from the industrial revolution onward, and the mass extinction of animal life are just a few iconic ways that we’ve steered the environment toward our own, ultimately destructive, ends. The process has been mostly unconscious—no one planned the destruction of the planet—but the results are so massive that they almost seem calculated. In a way, you could say that humanity itself is now the world’s conscious nervous system. And, just as our own bodies have grown weaker as a result of clinging to comfort and using our gadgets to appease our inner drive for homeostasis, the alterations we’ve made to the planet through technology have undermined its fundamental equilibrium.

All you need to do is get a little bit outside of your comfort zone and try something out of the ordinary. Try finding comfort in the cold. You have nothing to lose. Just breathe.