What Doesn't Kill Us

by Scott Carney

Then, in the winter of 1979, when he was 20 years old, he found it. While walking alone on a frosty morning in Amsterdam’s picturesque Beatrixpark, he noticed a thin skin of ice on one of the canals. He wondered what it would feel like if he jumped in. With a juvenile impulsiveness he has never quite shed, he took off his clothes and plunged in naked. The shock was immediate, he says, but “the feeling wasn’t of cold; it was something like tremendous good. I was in the water only a minute, but time just slowed down. It felt like ages.” A wash of endorphins cruised through his system, and the high lasted through the afternoon. He has gone on to repeat the exercise just about every day since. “The cold is my teacher,” he says. The breathing technique emerged naturally. He started by mimicking the rapid breaths people take instinctively when they plunge into icy water, which he says are similar to the breaths a woman takes during childbirth. In both cases the body switches to an instinctual program. When Hof dunked under the ice, his body went naturally from rapid breathing to a breath hold. That’s when he began to feel changes in his body. The way Hof explains it, humans must have evolved with an innate ability to resist the elements. Our remote ancestors marched across endless expanses of frosty mountains and navigated parched deserts long before they invented the most basic footwear or animal-skin coats. While technology has made us more comfortable, the underlying biology ...