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

by Scott Carney

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. The sensations that most closely match the feeling of burning will dissipate if you focus your mind on the pain. Try to relax instead of tightly clenching up every muscle. Enduring the snow is the same exact mental trick as trying to delay a sneeze or resist being ticklish. Once you feel reasonably calm, the second thing you need to master is suppressing your impulse to shiver. After the initial shock of the cold recedes, your body will soon click on an instinctual program to warm itself through muscle movement. It’s up to you to keep that at bay. Shivering will certainly use up a lot of calories, and for this reason it can be useful if you want to lose weight. But your goal here is to command your nervous system to submit to your will. If your body can’t shiver itself warm again or rely on the insulating properties of your white fat, its only remaining option is to start ramping up your metabolism. This is to say, you will begin passively generating brown fat and building up your stores of mitochondria if you can suppress your shiver response.