520 | Uncommon Cold

The End The End The End Every little thing, you think that you need Every little thing, you think that you need Every little thing that you're feeding your greed Oh, I bet that you'll be fine without it Yes, welcome to the Minimalist Podcast For rediscovered what it means to live a meaningful life with less My name is Joshua Fields, Millburn, and joining me here at Earthing Studios in beautiful West Hollywood, California It's my good friend T.K. Coleman I've got a book in my hand, I'm a happy man That's always the truth with him What you want us here in the studio today, we have a very special guest He is a professor at the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University He is also the founder of Morazco Forge And is an expert in the use of cold thermogenesis for building metabolic and physiological resilience His latest book is titled Uncommon Cold Up here, please welcome to the show our new friend Dr. Thomas Seeger Come on, other podcasts, I'll give you an applause You think my engineering student several times? That was great lecture He's told their grade depends on it I'm going to try that next semester He's all around Where's your track that are live events? T.K. where it's like you'll be great at the end of this Based on the sound of your applause No, that's a type of prison isn't it? Like needing applause Beginning applause feels good, but as soon as I needed it, it's like Oh, yuck Anyway, we've got a lot to talk about today Coming up in this episode, we're talking about Living a productive life with chronic illness Especially when you're struggling All the struggles we deal with If we are a loved one, is dealing with some sort of chronic illness Or pain, we're going to talk a bit about that Also, we're going to talk about some uncomfortable activities That get easier over time And why ice baths have become a new trend And much, much more Plus on page 2 I personally have 15 important questions I'd like to ask about Cold plunge therapy for Dr. Seeger So quick health disclaimer None of this should be perceived as medical advice I'm certainly not a medical doctor So please consult me Medical doctor So please consult your physician Or yoga instructor Or local mechanic Or uber driver Before making any health changes on your front But seriously, this is not medical advice But we're going to have some observations around some things I've dealt with personally And some of the stories that Tom has dealt with as well over the years And so let's get right into it Let's start with our callers If you have a question for our show, we'd love to hear from you 839 or you can email a voice recording right from your phone To podcast at theminimists.com Let us know if you're a Patreon subscriber So we can prioritize your message By the way, big thanks to our patrons Your support keeps our podcast 100% advertisement free Because sing along at home y'all Advertisement suck Yes! Well, our first question today Is from Angie Hi Joshua and TK Angie here from Washington I'm a Patreon subscriber I've been following the minimalism since about 2015 But it wasn't until recently that Joshua really opened up about his struggles with chronic illness After hearing some of his story I realized that we have the same condition And I have been so comforting to know that others understand my challenges But this type of chronic pain and discomfort Through my own health journey I've experienced Long periods of discomfort that left me unable to leave the house This left me feeling quite hopeless to plan my life moving forward as far as my career hobbies Or even spending time with friends and family I'm curious to learn more about how Joshua navigated these feelings during his own journey Considering he was able to progress his career And continue to make plans and attend many public events for the minimalists I would also appreciate you sharing more about what you currently do for your health Including what your diet looks like today And what symptoms you still struggle with I also look forward to TK's perspective on any topic discussed I always take away something positive from his wisdom He definitely has a gift Thanks for all you do And for helping so many people on such a deep level And yeah, I too look for it to TK's comments on any question that is asked on this show Tell them I'm not sure if I told you this but about three years ago maybe three and a half years ago Now TK joined the team It was a common law marriage He had been on the podcast with me and Ryan so many times he came on We just had this great rapport, great conversation We invited him back and he came back again eventually just started showing up And we kept it It was just like my he was my favorite guest And then we became really good friends because he's taught me so much And I bring that up because this question is an important question because she's like Angie saying Well, they have how do you keep all these plans and commitments and live events And the truth is I didn't always I said no to a lot of things that I would otherwise and really like to say yes to Sometimes given circumstances we have to say no I've done full episodes about what I've done with respect to struggling with chronic pain And I've identified and the one we did a minimizing chronic pain we'll put a link to it in the show notes I think that's the most comprehensive one We also did an episode on toxic foods, toxic super foods with Sally Norton which I really enjoyed The Sean Amara episode we were just talking about I thought that was interesting as well But the three things I often talk about are or thing or grounding food and ice Those are the three things that have or just cold therapy in general Those are the three things that have helped me with my autoimmune condition So in 2018 I developed these three autoimmune conditions And was waking up every morning with 10 out of 10 panic level pain It was awful And by far the number one thing that helped me was beginning to ground again I didn't realize it at the time but for 30 something years I had inadvertently disconnected myself from the earth because of our built environments And I as a result got away from nature And for a long time especially in my childhood years and throughout my 20s I ate really poorly not knowing that a lot of the processed food was junk food it was garbage In fact you have a line in the book On common cold where you talk about how the FDA food pyramid is alive So I'd like to talk to you about grounding I'd like to talk to you about food first And then we could talk about ice and there's one other thing I would add to this I've been doing recently and I would just call it oxygen Breathing obviously makes sense but I've been doing hyperbaric oxygen therapy recently Because those first three things I mentioned improved my life significantly I think I would be dead without grounding regularly I wasn't so much pain and that helped out so much And yet I got to a point where I had reached a plateau I improved like 80% or so I was trying to figure out where else can I work around the edges And then a few friends and a doctor recommended hyperbaric oxygen therapy And that has helped this last 10 to 15% that has been a tremendous for my own healing So let's start by talking about earthing or grounding we'll talk about food And then we'll talk about ice but I know one of your taglines has to do with basically reconnecting to nature The next best thing to nature that's the idea behind the Moralsco ice bath That's behind everything that we do at Moralsco is nature is the best way to do it But I live in downtown Phoenix, Arizona I'm surrounded by civil engineering infrastructure and I don't mind I'm a civil engineer But I'm on the 32nd floor you think I'm connected to the earth I've got no palm tree is not a shady forest This is not where I'm meant to be And so now I invent machines that will reconnect me with the nature that I'm disconnected from Because I live in this urban environment Otherwise I'd be entirely dysregulated So all these things that you're talking about I want to add one We have to talk about vitamin D and light when it comes to autoimmune disorders So we can work through everything that you've got on your mind and then I'm going to say Okay Joshua here's the other thing that maybe haven't been thinking about or that you should be asking Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right and light both indoor light and outdoor light Avoiding bright lights, the LED especially flickering LED lights when you're inside We're fortunate here because it's only time I really stand under bright lights And these are non flicker because we're in a studio But flickering lights especially fluorescence would give me terrible headaches back in my corporate days But then also getting light in the mornings and throughout the day Spending time outside whenever possible if I have phone calls to make I live up in Ohio And so like I'm just walking through the forest basically making phone calls Right And so it seems to me that anything to do with health It's a should be free or relatively inexpensive There is at least an option when we get into nature whether it is sunlight which is free or grounding Which is absolutely free or cold exposure which can be free depending on where you are So where do we start with these things? Tell me some of your insights that might help Angie Let's talk first about you mentioned autoimmune disorders and then you had three of them Every autoimmune disorder is associated with some dysregulation in vitamin D metabolism My son's autoimmune disorder is type 1 diabetes right he was diagnosed when he was six years old And it wasn't until after his diagnosis that I read this study coming out of Finland They tracked mothers and infants for like 25 years and they said where does this type 1 diabetes come from? It originates in a vitamin D deficiency in the first year of life of the infant Vitamin D is essential to the development and the function of the immune system And a baby is not born within a mature immune system so in that first year of life You got to have good vitamin D to get your immune system normal Those who don't have it are a greater risk of type 1 diabetes It turns out multiple sclerosis fibromyalgia, Parkinson's, rheumatoid arthritis Every single autoimmune disorder is associated with dysregulated vitamin D metabolism So how are you going to fix this? Some people will say well take a bunch of supplements take your vitamin D and your K2 And if you're in a serious like deficiency or insufficiency arrangement or situation Some supplements can help now I'm not a physician I'm a professor of engineering So I'm not given medical advice but in this next best thing to nature ethic The last thing you want is to be getting your nature in a pill Get your sunshine since it would be UVB A lot of people will have tanning lamps or they'll have a UVB lamp that they use year round And I don't do this I don't do it anymore because what I realized is you make light inside your body Your mitochondria they're responsible for the redox reactions so these are the electron transfers that fuel your body When they're creating the heat that is cold thermal genesis is your body's response to the cold So that your mitochondria not going to produce heat instead of ATP Heat is light it's several thousands nanometers in wavelength but you know that the infrared spectrum can be expressed as heat That's not the only light they make they might light across the spectrum including UVB So you activate your mitochondria in the cold they're now making UV light inside your body Some of that UV light will intersect a cholesterol molecule inside your brown fat cell and convert it into pre vitamin D So I put this article out saying hey look at these mechanisms with the bio photons a lot of skepticism But a few months ago this is a study in Poland they took two groups of women One group no MS the other group had multiple sclerosis they put them in cryotherapy chambers And then they measured their blood serum levels of vitamin D in the group without multiple sclerosis no increase in the blood serum And so people would come after me on Twitter and say how can you say this about you know light inside the body and vitamin D if the blood serum levels aren't increasing And I'd say vitamin D is lipophilic it's stored in your fat cells when you make it inside a fat cell It doesn't have to enter your bloodstream when you make it in the skin It's got to be transported throughout the body almost every single cell of your body has vitamin D receptors And so the women who are making it in their brown fat cells just stays right there and their bodies don't need it But in the cohort with multiple sclerosis they got a spike in blood serum levels of vitamin D Why would that be because when you have multiple sclerosis you have a vitamin D disorder Their bodies need it right away. There's the first clinical trial that points to cold exposure as a source of light inside your body that can make vitamin D This changes our understanding of the cold in relation to autoimmune disorders It's not just taking the inflammation down which is wonderful It's also correcting your vitamin D metabolism in the winter when the sunshine at least at the northern latitudes isn't available to you It's also fixing the people in phoenix you think they get plenty of sunshine you think they got lots of vitamin D But nobody goes outside in phoenix in the summer time is like 120 degrees Fahrenheit And they're like no no I want to stay in my air condition you know environment and they wind up vitamin D deficient Because they're not getting sunshine and they're not getting cold so when it comes to the autoimmune disorder The thing that nowhere near enough people are talking about is its relationship to vitamin D and how you fix the light environment outside your body You mentioned some good things get up in the morning get a little light there's no UVB But it's good for your circadian rhythm and then fix the light inside your body by using some cold exposure especially in the winter time Quick practical question about the sunlight Suppose there is someone who spends all day in an office they have a life on the 32nd floor working all day And they said I'm going to have to make it a deliberate practice like go into the gym to get some sunlight How much is enough what's the bare minimum if you just go outside and just stand there for 10 minutes whatever it may be That's a great question. I don't know the minimum effective dose but TK I can tell you that it's different for you than it is for me For those people who are not subscribed to the video you might not know this but TK has a dark complexion And that means that he needs a lot more sunlight to create the same amount of vitamin D in your skin compared to me I'm fairly light skin in my ancestors they come from the North Sea So the minimum effective dose depends upon what's called your Fitzpatrick type your skin tone And it depends upon what time of year it is in LA and in Phoenix we're almost the shortest day of the year right now in December There's still enough UVB in the middle of the day where you can make a little bit of vitamin D So I can't tell you I'll get out there for 20 minutes because I don't know your skin type and I don't know what time of year And I don't know what latitude you're at I don't really trust the blood serum levels of vitamin D Trust them to indicate that you're low I trust them to indicate that you're on the verge of rickets But I don't trust them to indicate when you've really optimized your vitamin D levels And so I don't really have an answer for your question On the other hand you get into the cold and you do this for two weeks every day You will recruit new brown fat into your body This is some pretty good animal models, some pretty good human trials on this Every day for two weeks is enough for you to produce the brown fat In the brown fat, mitochondria It is the brown fat that are responsible for the cold thermogenesis White fat is where you store energy Brown fat is where you burn it And most people in LA in Phoenix They don't have any brown fat because they're not getting cold What was it today? I don't know 60 degrees out And the people in Montana are laughing at us for putting on hats and coats And it's chilly out If they were 50 in Montana they'd be playing frisbee in the snow Because they're already cold acclimated So it's a great question And what I want to say is you can track this with an app called D-Minder You know, download it on your phone And it'll help keep you qualitatively in touch with Am I a little low? Did I skip a few days? Do I need to get out there and take a walk for lunch Which is a good thing for you to do anyway I think that's super helpful We have a question on page 2 about eating So we'll save the food conversation I want to get into the cold side of things Because this is your area of expertise I've been icebat bathing before it was cool 2011 was the first time I did it And I wasn't cold acclimated at all I remember the first time I got into an ice bath It was actually right down the street from here Ryan and I were on our very first tour A book tour And it was December of 2011 And the first time I got into that ice bath And it wasn't even a particularly cold one It might have been 35-50 degrees But it was pure panic Who the hell does this? Why would you do this? By the way, I'm glad you're here Because you can explain a lot of the benefits to me And when I was reading your book I was like, oh, that's why I feel better That's why it works Because the subtitle of your book I thought was spot on It's the science and the experience of cold plunge therapy The experience is so much more important than the science in one sense It's that like, if all the science says it if I Or to pat my head and rub my tummy and jump up and down on one leg And that would help me But then if it doesn't help me Then it doesn't really matter with my own experience The opposite of that is For some reason, even if it's placebo Patting my head and rubbing my tummy Helps with my ailment Even if it's placebo, then my in equals one experience Which you talk about here And so for Angie, maybe you could start by talking to her a bit about In equals one for her chronic illness But then let's talk a bit about What is most compelling about Well, ice bath therapy I'm gonna take a detour That you'll never turn into a sound bite So people are gonna have to subscribe If they want to hear this part Because when I listened to Angie's voice It brought me back to time in my life that I haven't written about And I rarely talk about Shortly after I moved to Arizona State They made me an offer that I felt like I couldn't refuse And so here I am I'm an associate professor And I'm teaching my engineering classes And I'm getting my grants But my life sucked I suffered from an acute social anxiety I didn't have a problem in the classroom teaching But I couldn't travel I couldn't get on a plane and go to a different country I turned down all these offers to go Speak or participate in a conference Or something like that I couldn't explain the anxiety I didn't know where it was coming from But it was crippling my career I talked to a mentor And he said, well, you can't do that For you to take the next step You ever want to become a full professor You're gonna have to accept these invitations I promised him that I would take the next one And these were coming from my friends And the army corps There was these NATO things And the Azores and Iceland And these beautiful places And now I gotta go to Guadalajh And now I gotta go to Guatemala Like in the middle of the fricking jungle for this workshop Because I made a commitment to my mentor And I had to think What is the pain protecting me from Pain exists in the body for a reason We are like evolutionarily Physiologically Wired that pain is meant to send us a signal To protect us and keep us safe What the hell am I trying to keep myself safe from You think I had to cognitively override I'm a middle-aged white professor Traveling on American passport What really bad thing is gonna happen to me I didn't process that until I was in Rome Because we were a series of these invitations That I had to accept One of my graduate students Who went to Guatemala with me She grew up in Colombia And she grew up in Colombia during the time Like the drug civil war She, her parents took her And her sister to Canada Just to escape the violence When we were landing in Rome We're going through the thunderstorms And the whole plane is bouncing People are getting upset And I feel like I'm gonna puke And I'm like what did I do And I turned and I looked at her She had her eyes closed and she was smiling And I thought okay I'm gonna give the smile a shot You know? Because what I'm doing isn't working I had to process that If she can go through the Colombian Civil Wars Get finished high school In a foreign language In a foreign country Get herself a tennis scholarship To a historically black university And Mississippi that she's never visited And she's not even black What am I worried about a little thunderstorm before I realized the pain was protecting me from fears I had in childhood I grew up it's 1970s It's inner city, it's violent schools White flight thing, forced busing and stuff I grew up in Pittsburgh And Pittsburgh is a very parochial neighborhood oriented kind of town If you're in the wrong neighborhood With the wrong people at the wrong time For a kid that's an existential crisis It was in Rome that I figured out I was eight that that pain Wasn't protecting me anymore It was protecting some little eight-year-old That I was still carrying around inside me So I said to my eight-year-old I got you You stick with me We're gonna go through this life together We're gonna hold hands through the conference Or whatever it is Now I get on a plane, I fly to LA It's no big deal, I'm gonna meet Joshua I'm gonna make friends with TK The question that came to my mind when Angie was talking I don't know her And I don't know if this is gonna help her But what is the pain protecting you from Because maybe it's obsolete Maybe it's the vestige of something that happened to you It was really useful, it was really adaptive And now there's some part of you that you're not aware of That is holding on to it And it needs to get released Kelly Starat, he was on the podcast And he said that pain is a request for change And if I were to amend that at all I would say pain is a request for healing And that's what you're talking about Sometimes it's physical healing And like, oh, my ankle, I rolled it And so it's painful and it's healing But then sometimes there's the emotional or psychological kind of feeling And the emotional or psychological kind of healing is like, I have this pain My body is trying to ask me that it needs something different in order to heal Yep TK, maybe we could talk a bit about Because we'll get into the ice bit In a moment, in fact, on page two I have those 15 questions for Dr. Seagriss Maybe we'll get really dive deep into We'll plunge into the ice, so to speak Because it's been really beneficial for me I do it every day now Unless I'm traveling And then I'll often find ways to do it when I'm traveling I know you did the same when you were here today And it has been a way for me to sort of deal with the pain But also to reset my bodies in ways I didn't know was possible So I want to talk to you about some of the science on that But for Angie, a couple of the things that have been helpful for me You did mention smiling Which is like a form of stress management in a way And TK, I'd love to talk about like the metaphor of smiling And it's not just being polyanna or being overly optimistic It has something to do with changing your physiology And then maybe we could talk about that And then I've got some other things with respect to stress management as well Sure, we can look at smiling as performance Or we can look at it as practice When smiling as a performance, it's your way of saying Hey, even though I feel the complete opposite of this I either have to do this to keep my job Or I have to do this to make sure you don't know what's going on Underneath the surface That is sometimes necessary If you're a bartender and you're a server You owe your customers the smile It's part of your responsibility Sometimes that can be unhealthy If in relationships you're smiling And what you ought to be doing is having difficult conversations About how you're hurting Or how what someone is doing needs to change But smiling as a practice is a way of saying I have some measure of agency in any and every situation And even if that agency is not the same And even if that agency is reducible to something like lifting my pinky finger It is good for me to do that to remind myself And to signal to my world that I have causative power And that changes your mentality when you live that way And when you practice it with the little things It begins to expand to bigger things that you previously couldn't imagine And smiling is one way of doing that I don't feel great right now I am struggling and hurting on the inside And I'm not going to smile because I want to fool you I'm going to smile because I'm telling myself This is how I aim to feel And so I'm going to take this leap of faith And move my body in the way that I want to feel Because this is how I want to move through the world And my feelings will eventually catch up with me I lead with intention, not with emotion And I bring my emotion into cooperation with sustained intention I think about smiling as I used to say Like what makes me smile But now I think about it differently What brings out my smile Knowing that it's intrinsic That happiness or joy is already there And sometimes there's something that can trigger that emotion that is in me It's like I've got this glass of water here And it's filled with water And if I were to spill it Well water's going to come out There's a smile in me What's going to spill the smile out of me Sometimes this music, in fact on page three I talk about every year I do this list of my 10 favorite albums of the year And my number one album this year It's been on in the house all the time And me and my 12 year old daughter, my wife We're dancing every morning I'm waking her up to it And she's tired but then she sees me dancing in her face And all of a sudden, the smile is already there It brings it out from within her It's already there, you're uncovering it You're not finding it, the smile is it somewhere out there And the other thing I'll say about stress management That has been really helpful for me Noise reduction We're in the noisiest time ever Especially if you live in a big city Whether it's Phoenix or New York or Los Angeles Or even if you live in a small town today You have all of the modern conveniences In your pocket, it's noise And so you never hear me when I'm talking about What do I do to deal with my struggles My chronic pain Why does tune into the news media You know what really helps me MSNBC and Fox News Because media does not rhyme with peace Media does not rhyme with wellness Media does not rhyme with healing You could tweet that professor Sean I think that we're often looking for something Out there to sue us Some sort of analgesic But the problem with that is Is it's just covering up the pain So in the moment, noise can cover up the pain But that doesn't actually address the root cause You've let me to something else That I don't know if it's come up on the podcast But I started thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs This is some, okay Civil engineers work at the bottom You know, shelter Food Basic infrastructure stuff I'm not satisfied with that I was working on disaster resilience Especially after Katrina My career as a civil engineering researcher Changed how do we recover from the disasters Figured out It's not in the concrete And it's not on the steel It's not in the structures It's in the human ingenuity It's in the response So I had to go back to Maslow And think about the whole pyramid And I think a lot of people misunderstood this Maslow published a hierarchy of human motivations In like 1943 At that time Victor Frankl was rotting in a Nazi death camp They'd stolen his manuscript And they'd steal people's survive They don't have anything at the bottom of the pyramid They have no food, they have no shelter They have no safety, they have no self-esteem Maslow wrote this book called Man's Search for Meaning And you were writing it? Oh sorry, Frankl wrote Man's Search for Meaning When he was released When he was liberated from the death camps He had the manuscript in his mind He wrote it all out And at the beginning of your podcast You talk about a meaningful life The meaningful life doesn't exist in the things at the bottom It exists like way beyond the top Of what Maslow called self-actualization The pyramid doesn't have to be satisfied From the bottom up to the top Frankl taught us that man can suffer almost any material deprivation If they have a reason why Now we're going to relate that back to the ice bath later Because I'm supposed to talk about ice baths But so many things are coming up In response to Angie's question That have been other parts of what I've read And what I've written for myself That I don't think I can let them go Yeah, well before we exit her question One other thing that helps me is And I rarely talk about it on here Because it feels so prescriptive And it almost feels pious Is I meditate every day That's one way that I deal with the noise First thing in the morning Even like this morning I got about 340 And I just get up and I'll meditate for 15 minutes So it's not some elaborate practice And how do I know that it's working? I fail at it every single day And so I don't have an expectation of winning meditation That's how I know it's working And yet it's not about fixing me or transcending anything It's about presence It's about bringing myself into the moment When I talked about the noise, the noise takes us out of the moment It takes us out of these conversations like this It takes us out of awareness And it's just a way to check back in And if I'm doing that regularly Every morning and every night Even for 5 minutes is how I started It was just checking in with awareness And I found myself checking in to be more aware throughout the day As I'm walking into the studio And every time I walk in here I say yes But it's like this moment of Oh yeah, here I am Is what I'm really saying I'm right here right now And recognizing that I'm not somewhere over there My happiness isn't somewhere over there And on this podcast we often talk about consumers And minimalism applies to things And it's because we're trying to consume something to complete us And that happens with the media It happens with a lot of externalities Relationships, careers, status games All of these things that we think we're going to make us better But they end up making us miserable Or chronically stressed which then leads to a lot of these Chronic illnesses We have several more questions here I want to dive into Before we get back to our callers It is time for the lightning rounds Where we answer the Patreon community chat Question of the week We attempt to answer with a short, shareable Minimal Maxim And we put these Maxim's and the show notes Over at the Minimists.com Slash Podcast and every minimal maximum ever At Minimlemaxims.com Don't worry, you can wander on as much as you want TK and I obviously do Wrap it up with a little pithy bow at the end By the way, if you sign up for our email newsletter Theminimists.email We'll send you a newsletter every week It's called the simple newsletter And in there we have seven new minimum maxims Absolutely free, no spam, no junk, no advertisements But we do start your week off With a dose of simplicity The question of the week this week Oh, this is a good one What's a previously uncomfortable activity That you now regularly do With ease Well, you can see what we're asking this question, Tom At that first time I got into that ice bath It was not just uncomfortable It was fight or flight It was panic It was, oh my god, I'm going to die And so, tell me about that immediate response And then we'll check into what some of our listeners had to say as well Well, congratulations to your human being But it's a very human reaction It doesn't matter, 40, 45 degrees If you're just starting out a new program Of ice baths or cold plunge therapy Go cold enough to gasp If it's 60 degrees and you feel that gasp reflex You have activated the sympathetic division of your central nervous system That's the fight or flight You saying it was like I'm going to die Your mind will begin catastrophizing your own death You won't remember why you got in there in the first place And some part of you is going to be like I'm being an idiot, I'm so stupid And the worst thing is I'm so stupid And the worst part about it is not What's happening now But what you imagine might happen Next, the ice bath has a different relationship to stress and time Than anything else you've done You get on the treadmill and you're like, oh, that's not so bad And then five minutes later, you're like, this is hard And then ten minutes later, you feel like you're going to die You get into the sauna And you're like, hey, this is pretty good, this feels good And then 20 minutes later, you're like, I got to get out of here Right It's the opposite, the worst part is probably the first 15 seconds before you even get in the ice bath And then you're just, you're living in anticipatory anxiety Which is a Victor Frankl term Then that's first 30 seconds of abject panic It feels like your heart is racing Your liver has released a glycogen into your bloodstream To raise your glucose level and kiss your muscles Need it to fight or run You know, 30 seconds later 45 seconds later You know the dopamine and the norepinephrine And everything else is taken over And your brain is starting to feel good about it The dive reflex takes over from the gas reflex The dive reflex is the parasympathetic division of your central nervous system This is the rest and digest After a minute, when you're doing this right, you're going What was I even worried about? Why was I so upset? I could stay in here in another couple of minutes If you're just starting out, you can get out as soon as you feel the urge to shiver And it doesn't matter if it's 30 seconds or 15 seconds or 5 minutes Cold enough to gasp, long enough to shiver But for me, you know, I do this every day I do a 33 degrees with chunks of ice floating in my morosco I just do two, three minutes There's no reason for me to do anything more And then I'm like, geez, I don't have all day to sit around on my ice bath I got things to do and I'll get out and I'll feel like Superman There's nothing that can bother me the rest of the day Because I've already trained my nervous system to deal with all of the catastrophes in my imagination That I will invent for myself That, okay, I have processed them and I don't have to worry about them anymore TK, there's one area I have to disagree with Tom here Is the hardest part is not the first 15 seconds It is actually before the first 15 seconds for me 15 seconds for me I recognize this finally with my daughter, who's 12 But the first time she got into, we have a morosco as well And I don't get a free one from Tom or anything like that I'm paying customer but I brought him here Not because he runs a great company makes these great ice baths Because I, for a decade, was doing it without a At home ice bath system I had a bathtub and I would go grab 70 to 100 pounds of ice From my local convenience store and there was one place I lived Where my refrigerator would make enough ice Where I could just set it aside and I was making my own So I was ice bathing for free And so I had no excuse except there's this wall of resistance And I noticed it with my daughter the very first time She wanted to get into it And the reason she wanted to get into it I said, hey, I'll do your homework for you Today if you do two minutes in the ice bath And she, because I'm trying to teach her to do difficult things I didn't promise her a great She did right She's on school, so I'm the great her as well And so she was like, okay, I'll do it And then before she even stepped in It was like there was this wall She couldn't get through And as soon as I saw that And I think this is a metaphor TK for any resistance we have in our lives There's always going to be this wall It's sitting down to write the book you've always wanted to write Which for me is actually the answer to this question here A previously uncomfortable activity that you now regularly do with ease Besides ice, it's writing and reading I'm really dyslexic And so I just thought reading was really difficult And I don't know how people do this all the time And so like I didn't want to do it I had the resistance And with writing was the same thing I aspired to write every day but I didn't do it Because this wall of resistance And I saw I showed my daughter Ella You just have to step through that wall You look at the wall like it's right there and you step through it And then I think what is those first 15 seconds Because it's that that shock And the first time she got in 14 seconds was all she could do And she gets out And she's like is that okay I'm like it's fine I'm not going to do homework for you But it's great that you tried it Good job But can you do some of it? I'll do all of it If you get in the back of her for two minutes And she's like okay And then she gets in there And she stays in for full two minutes because it's 90% And then she gets out You know what she said to me? She looks up and she goes oh my god I feel so alive And that was the moment I realized like that's how I feel when I get out I'm hooping the hollar and my my my neighbors are like what the hell is wrong with this guy But it's all because that wall of resistance TK maybe you can talk a little bit about resistance in this context The ice bath revival I'm baptized every morning You're making me think of Steven Pressville's observation Resistance with the capital R Where he says the more related something is to your life calling or your spiritual evolution The greater amount of resistance you will feel reminds me of the old saying Another level, another devil right? So if you just want to sit around and do nothing No challenges whatsoever If you just want to drown yourself in superficiality You've got all the time in the world the whole universe supports you But make up your mind you're going to read make up your mind you're going to start writing Make up your mind you're going to do something hard Then all of a sudden you can think of everything else that you need to do Oh I guess I better call on Susie it's been too much You didn't care about on Susie Until you have something that you need to do Now she's all important right And so when you learn to see that resistance Through a kind of metaphorical lens There's an excellent little book called Uncle Ramsey's little book of demons And the premise of the book is that one of the reasons why our brains have evolved To become so complex is not because we're tool using creatures But rather because we see things in terms of relationships And relationships are so complex they demand more of our minds And he says that ancient cultures had an advantage when they saw everything in terms of like The fire is alive, the water is alive There's a spirit behind every rock There's some usefulness to sing things that way And I think it can be useful to personify our problems in certain ways When you see that resistance think of that as a demon that knows how beautiful and brilliant you're going to become On the other side of doing that hard thing And it's scared as hell And it wants to stop you so it will feed you any lie it thinks it can get you to believe Because it knows that it's doomed if you become yourself And I'll talk about some of the lies that I feel with the resistance Some of them seem real like I'm going to do it Seem real like I'm going to die right but then just so I say that I like I know I'm not going to die I've done this before right The other lies I'll get to it later We're all just do twice as long tomorrow right And so no matter what and that can be with writing it's like oh I didn't write today I want to write for an hour a day I'll just do two hours tomorrow You know what? Instead of doing a three minute ice bath I'll do six minutes tomorrow and it's like okay It's a little micro alliance It's a type of procrastination that says right now isn't good enough And that's a fascinating lie which actually ties into some of the answers from our audience here What's a previously uncomfortable activity that you now regularly do with ease TK before we get to our pithy answers Let's hear what Bethany, Alexis Janie and several others had to say This is specifically Bethany here But a bunch of people said public speaking That's a big one right naturally I'm a shy person Bethany says But with a lot of practice and passion for what I'm saying I enjoy it and it's become a big part of my career I know that I make a joke whenever we've done 11 tours now There are three things I hate it's crowds travel and public speaking And yet it sounds like a career It's like what am I keep doing I don't actually hate it I feel that resistance with those things It's not naturally pulling me in just like the ice bath doesn't naturally pull me in But the reward is on the other side of that drudgery Christina says embracing the quiet I'm extremely extroverted and felt uncomfortable with awkward silence Once I stopped trying to fill the silence I actually felt peace Yeah, I think the peace is buried underneath the clutter That's physical clutter sometimes it's mental or emotional clutter Sometimes it's spiritual clutter Health clutter whatever kind of clutter you want to call it There's peace that's already there It's pre-existing it's sort of the default state Tom, where do you find peace? The ice bath is what works for me Because nothing brings me to my present moment like the cold water Yes Have the regrets or the shame from the past I have the anxieties about the future And I might be at a point where I'm like well that's it This whole ice bath thing it's never going to work I'll get into the ice bath I'll spend my two three minutes and I'll come out with six new ideas And I'll say you know I'm probably going to quit this whole ice bath business But before I do I'm just going to try this one thing over here And let me try that one thing over there And we'll just see how this works out Every single I shouldn't say every day I have good days and I have dark moments Every single dark moment I now know I got to get into the ice bath I have to reset my thinking My brain is like preoccupied With the wrong things These things that aren't going to help me And I think it's again Sometimes you're not aware of the things we do to defend ourselves It's not pithy and I'm going to Indulge you with another anecdote I was doing this workshop of sustainable engineering faculty And we all are talking about you know the environment And we're talking about education And how important these things are And I sensed the resistance in the workshop Because the faculty weren't making specific decisions Because the faculty weren't making specific commitments to what they were going to do And I said, well hang on Here's what I want to know What is so important to you That you would be willing to risk public humiliation for it Went around in the circle and they all said nothing They didn't care They cared about the environment They cared about scholarship They cared about teaching But not one of them said I will go to Washington DC I will do whatever the thing was That was sort of on the chalkboard I will risk public humiliation for this thing that I care so much about What a powerful question Public humiliation is this idea of public speaking And when we're talking about writing I think a lot of people, public speaking is way up at the top But a lot of people hesitate before they will write anything Because they feel like they're going to be graded It's a permanent record, somebody's going to read it And so fear is, this is a quote of somebody Fear is at the heart of all bad writing And that's probably, you know, Stephen King or somebody who said that I didn't make it up When we go to write, we're afraid That we'll be judged and humiliated for the things that we put out there So why some people can write to themselves, but they can't publish it You got to have this attitude Or here's what works for me Whatever I write is wrong Whatever I say is wrong Now I explain this to my students and it's too frightening But I got that from Alon Musk This is like a startup kind of entrepreneurship mentality We're all wrong and wrong in the sense that people are going to attack us For whatever they feel like Someone's going to come after me on Twitter And they're just going to say, what are they want If I adopt this mentality that it's all wrong And I just want to make it incrementally less wrong along the way Then that gets me a little bit through that resistance and that fear of humiliation Says, the hell with it, I'm going to put it out there I don't feel proud of it in this moment But I'm never going to be less wrong about it If I don't get the practice of publishing, reflecting I'm going to listen to this podcast And I'm going to hate 80% of everything that I said And then the next one, I only hate 75 You know This is like the opposite of self-righteousness This is like being self-grounded in a way And it's not like a false sense of humility But it is just sort of the opposite of hubris But it is just recognizing that I'm going to be wrong at some point How about you listeners What's a previously uncomfortable activity that you now regularly do with ease Let us know your thoughts in the comments Or over there in the Patreon community chat Which can join the community chat for free by the way Okay, give me something pithy, TK What's a pre-release? So on a previous episode, we talked about the way in which prices can be gamified And we began with the observation that usually the more valuable something is The more expensive it is But you can use that fact to manipulate people by pricing something Artificially high to create the appearance of value where there is a value And then you can use that fact to manipulate people By pricing something artificially high to create the appearance of value And a similar thing can happen with difficulty Usually the more important a goal is The more it's going to require some sacrifice, some trade-offs, some discipline But that can also get tricky Because that can fool you into thinking that if something is hard, it's intrinsically valuable It's worth doing And what I find is when I work with my clutter counseling clients And there's some habit they want to break or some new thing that they want to do I want to start working out and I want to eat healthy food One of the most effective ways is to find an easy starting point What's the easiest way for us to take that first step so that we can then build some momentum And rely on the power of momentum to deal with the difficult stuff But what often happens is there's this feeling that comes up But if I allow myself to permission to start easy Then isn't that cheating? Isn't that disrespecting the thing I say that I'm passionate about? And there's that conditioning that we have to undo So a corollary maxim I have for this is Sometimes finding the easy way out is the best way to find I mean sometimes finding the easy way out is the best way to shoot I forgot this thought now What is it? Sometimes the easy way out is the best way in Right? It's saying you know what? I only have to do this for 30 days I only have to do this for 30 minutes And knowing that I have an exit strategy before I begin It gives me the power to begin And so my difficult thing is social events I'm so strongly introverted I'm gasping for air within 30 seconds of being around 10 or more people But I give myself permission I say I permit myself to leave in 15 minutes And if I have to be there for an hour I give myself to permission to take a break every 15 minutes Where I go outside and be alone for two minutes And then I come back in That's my easy way to do it I go outside and be alone for two minutes And then I come back in That's my easy way in And by identifying that I mean that's my easy way out And by identifying that easy way out It makes it easy for me to do something that's usually difficult to start I do that bargaining with myself whenever I get into the ice bath I'm just going to do 60 seconds just one minute And I never just do one minute But like it's always the bargain And the same thing with writing is It's like the inverse version of one day at a time is like I'll give myself permission to not do this tomorrow And so I have to do it today But I'll give myself permission to not do it tomorrow But tomorrow comes and I just pull the same rule forward I love this one Where you say instead of procrastinating I'll do twice as much tomorrow You say you know what? I'm going to take tomorrow off But for right now I'm really going to get into this thing You're lying to yourself but you're turning the lie around And then tomorrow comes you're like well yesterday It wasn't so bad Maybe I'll take next month off Maybe I'll take next month off for whatever it is You got to do it to sit down and start creating Yeah, that's wonderful So it's like one day at a time but it's tomorrow I'll not do this tomorrow And that's been really helpful for me Which brings me to my pithy answer is Discomfort is the cost of growth And so sometimes in order to grow Or in order to heal Even it's uncomfortable We do these uncomfortable things Be weary of any Pleasure that is unearned Yeah, candy is really pleasurable Right? It's like oh yeah, this tastes really good There's no nutritional value to it There's nothing wrong with a piece of candy But if my diet consists primarily of candy Then I will get sick But existentially we're eating candy all the time On our phones Scrolling is the new smoking Right? And so we're just We're just going through it And we're just going through our dosing On empty calories And uh, spiritually I think we're doing that as well We're opting out of the difficult things Because the easy things are so enticing They're so pleasurable But they're unearned My daughter yelling after 2 minutes When she gets out of there And says oh my god, I feel so alive That's earned She earned that through the discomfort And there was a particular kind of growth there because it showed her she could do a thing that two minutes ago felt entirely impossible to her. All right, that's almost the end of page one. We saw an entire switchboard of colors to talk to. Also, I have a bunch of ice bath questions for you before you're all day. Yes. We have a segment called right here right now where we talk about one or two or I have three things today that's going on in the life of the Minimists. So the first one is this is the last episode of the year. It comes out on December 29th and I already alluded to it. Every year at the end of the year, this is my 15th year. I've put out my top 10 list. You can find it over at theminimists.com slash sound and tune into the very end of this episode for my favorite song from my favorite album of 2025. Also, our next fans are Friday afternoon. Minimists Zoom is this Friday, January 2nd, Ryan Nicodemus will be there. He was with us on the last one as well. How amazing was that, TK? So much fun. And so good to have him. I know we miss having him around here, but this is one of the ways that we get a little bit of Nicodemus time every single month. Yes. Just to come out. He's so beautiful. Yes. So join me and TK and Nicodemus, SaviD will be there. Professor Sean as well. If you want the details, it's theminimists.com slash Zoom. Have a Zoom call with the Minimists will be there for an hour. You can turn your camera on, hop on camera with us and have a conversation. Or if you just want to be a fly on the wall and watch the conversation, you can do that as well. And finally, speaking of writing, I've been teaching a writing class for 13 years now. It's called How to Write Better. I've written four bestselling books. I've written five books with four of them were bestsellers. And I've been teaching this class with Professor Sean for, he's been doing it with me for over a decade now. And we do it once or twice a year. And the next time I'm doing it, start your year right with learning how to write better. Develop that writing habit. You've been wanting to write that book. You've been wanting to start that blog. You've been wanting to improve your business emails. I have everyone from high school students to medical doctors take this class. I've taught thousands of people. You can find a bunch of testimonials over there. And more information about the course at how to write better dot org. The enrollment for this course opens on January 5th, 72 hours only. And we limit this to 100 students. It's just not sustainable beyond that. So 72 hours only, January 5th. How to write better dot org if you're interested in improving your writing in the new year. Much more coming up. But first here is a quick minimalist tip or insight from one of our listeners. Hi, minimalist and fellow podcast listeners. My name is Candace living in the United States originally raised and spent most of my life in South Africa. I teach yoga and lead retreats and also work as a declutter coach for many, many clients in my life coaching business as well. And have been listening to your podcast for as long as I can remember. I feel that even with all the knowledge that I've had the fortune in my life to acquire and that I share, I still learn something new from your podcast every week. I think you both have so much to offer the world. And I feel that the platform that you created to share insights and knowledge with the world and with your listeners is just absolutely phenomenal. I did want to send this message just to say that you were podcasted, you did on nonsense with I think it was Kapil. Good to and I often hear you, both you Joshua and TK speak about how the conversations you've had around hugging and it really to me as I was listening to that podcast just sounded like he was really angry and just needed a hug from the minimalist. I'm one of where the assumption can often lead to error and mistakes. So I'm assuming based on the tone and listening, but in the many, many, many podcasts, hundreds of podcasts that I've listened to by the minimalist, I have never felt that anyone has been angry. He sounded extremely angry and for somebody that doesn't want to take on perhaps ideologies or anything like that in the world and is literally calling everything nonsense. It didn't come across that he believed what he was saying because he just sounded like he needed a hug. So I wanted to share that he was probably the first guest ever that I felt didn't really want to be interviewed or take part in a podcast and I thought the way that both of you handled that, you Joshua and TK was done really well. And I think if you ever were to see him again, I think the medicine he needs is just a nice big hug from the minimalist. So I just wanted to share that and thank you for all that you do. I think that you, as I've said, the insights and wisdom that you share and how honest and authentic this podcast is really is medicine in itself. And I often re-quote and I write the minimalist and I share. I also forward your episodes to many of my own clients to WhatsApp group each week. And thank you for all that you do. TK, this is so interesting to me. I love this comment from Candace because I love Kapil. I was actually talking to him this weekend. He was helping me with something and I don't know if you know who Kapil Gupta is. He's like my favorite living philosopher, but he can come off as quite abrasive at first. I say he's like the Dowd-Aed晴 but delivered through a sawdall shotgun. And that sort of describes who Kapil Gupta is. He's a no nonsense kind of guy. I mean, quite literally as to the episode was about. But TK, you've said that that was your favorite episode that you've done on the show. I'm wondering, he didn't come off as angry to me, but I could see why someone might think that. But what did you think? Well, first I think for Kapil to talk about philosophy is a kind of hug for him. I think he was getting all of the hugs he needed out of that conversation because it was clear that he wanted to be there. He was fully engaged and he even reached out to us after that episode because he had some more things that he wanted to say. When you're talking to someone who feels like, you know, they're just looking at their watch. They're ready to get out of the room. I'm thinking to myself, oh, this is trouble. But when you're talking with someone that's fully engaged, I'm like, yeah, conversation, philosophical reflection. That is his hug. But this reminds me of a conversation we're having before the camera started rolling and a very interesting insight that Professor raised here. We were talking about Yokech, the basketball player who is considered to be the best basketball player in the game by many today. He's the, you know, the reigning MVP. Is he the reigning MVP or is he? No, but he's three out of the last five years. Yeah, three out of the last five years. And always one of the top two candidates for the MVP award. And one of the funny things about Yokech is that he looks like basketball is just a job for him. He looks like he doesn't enjoy it, doesn't really care about the lifestyle. And that's that's kind of funny because people that are in the NBA love being in the NBA, they seem like they love the lifestyle. Sometimes they get caught up in the lifestyle and it compromises their skill set. Or they seem like they love basketball. Famously, Michael Jordan had a condition in his contract that he could see a basketball game on the side of the street and he could pull his car over and just start playing with whoever is there. You can't do that if you're a regular NBA player, but he'd love to play basketball so much. And it seems it at least feels like Yokech who's Serbian is the opposite of that. Seems like he's so unhappy. I remember when they when they won the championship and they had the parade, he just looked like that thing couldn't end fast enough and he's just ready to get home to his family and back to normal life. Look, it's plumbing to him. I did my job. This is how I provide for my family. And you said something interesting because we were talking about him like he's this eccentric individual. And what did you have to say about that? You and I didn't grow up in Serbia. We didn't grow up in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia or any of those. And there is a culture that came out of I don't know him. I've never talked to him, but generally speaking, came out of the people his age, the boy says age to grew up that says you cannot show emotion. That's showing weakness. That makes you vulnerable in a time of war. It may be that him at his most dispassionate, at his most stoic, reflects the deepest caring because if he didn't care, he could joke and he could laugh. And we would misinterpret this. No, again, I don't know him. But I'm saying it's possible that these cultural expectations are discordant. What he communicates as deep passion, right? We communicate as indifference. And his indifference might come out as what we would interpret as enthusiasm. And we get it all wrong. And I don't know that that's the fact, but I know that different, the expression of those emotions is culturally trained. Yes, somebody can be an extrovert or an introvert. But in one culture, that'll be way over the top. And in another culture, they might think, you know, extraversion is different than the way we would approach it in the United States. Oh, yeah. So good. So good. So good. If you have a comment for us, send it to podcasts at theminimolest.com. So we can feature your voice on the show. Thank you, Candace. Up next, page two and page three. We got a lot more to talk about. But first, let's take a quick pendiculation break. We'll be right back. All right, child, that's the first 38% of episode five, 20. We'll see you on Patreon for the full two hour maximal edition with Dr. Seager, which includes answers to a bunch more questions, questions like, how might ice baths be beneficial for women? What are your favorite simple eating tips? What is green light therapy and how is it beneficial for people who are suffering from migraines plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on the minimalist private podcast on Patreon. The link is in the description. When you subscribe, you can listen to our private podcast episodes on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Plus, you'll gain access to all of our podcast archives more than a decade, all the way back to our very first episode. Big thanks to Dr. Thomas P. Seager for joining us today. You could check out his book, Uncommon Cold. We'll also put a link to his website, moroscoforge.com in the show notes. And then as our minimal episode for today, big thanks to Erthing Studios for the recording space on behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, T.K. Coleman, post production Peter, Spire Jeff, Inspire Dave, Jordan Nomore, Tomcat, Professor Sean, Savvy D and the rest of our team. I'm Joshua Fields, Millburn. If you leave here with just one message, let it be this. Love people and use things because the opposite never works. Thanks for listening. You'll see you next time. Embrace the cold and touch grass. Yes.