SDS 270: The Cold is My Master

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast, ladies and gentlemen, super pumped to have you back here on the show. I hope you’re intrigued by the name, by the title of this episode, The Cold is My Master. So what is it all about, what are we going to be talking about?

Well, as you know, if you’ve been following the podcast you’ll know that I’ve spent quite a bit of time here in Bali. In fact, the past six weeks I’ve been in Bali and I’m actually just flying out of here tomorrow. In this time, what I like about Bali and specifically the place where I like to stay is called Canggu, what I like about this place is you can really take a step back, relax, and if you have the right intentions, take care of your health, take care of your body, so as you know at the start, when I arrived in Bali I did a 10 day fast, it’s my second time so I did one last year, I did one this year, that’s when you eat nothing except for occasional juice, not even smoothies, just juice for 10 days.

Then in Canggu I’ve been doing a lot of things to take care of my health. I’ve been going to the Nirvana Strength athletics center, which I highly recommend if you’re ever in Bali, highly recommend, couldn’t recommend enough. I know both the founders, Ian and Johnson, amazing guys, great job, amazing center. So Nirvana Strength, check it out in Canggu. Like, world-class level. Spending an hour a day there just doing exercises and spending another hour in the sauna, in their sauna, in their cold pool and their hot pool, which are also fantastic.

So, eating healthy, looking after my health, doing meditation, yoga, experiencing things, but in general just taking care of my health. And one of the things that I did, in fact I did this with our business development manager Leonid, from SuperDataScience, he’s actually also here in Bali, he’s in Ubud. So what we did was a workshop by one of … A Wim Hof workshop, basically. So it’s not by Wim Hof himself but it’s by one of the students of Wim Hof, and it was actually in Nirvana Strength.

So, Wim Hof, if you’re not aware of him, is like a super popular person right now, super famous guy who’s done incredible things with his body. He has been in ice for, it’s documented, it was all taped, how he’s … this guy is like around 60 years old or 57 or something like that. And he was in ice for two hours straight. And his core temperature didn’t drop. He’s run a marathon in shorts and barefoot in the Arctic Circle, or a half marathon, somewhere in, I think it was Norway, somewhere there. He’s run a marathon in the Kalahari Desert, somewhere in southern Africa, like a full marathon, in the heat, without drinking any water.

He’s climbed Mount Everest in shorts. In shorts. He didn’t get to the very top but he got to the death zone where people die without oxygen masks. He was there in shorts, let alone no oxygen mask, no nothing, and no shirt. Crazy guy. So if you don’t know Wim Hof, highly recommend checking him out. The best place to get acquainted with him is the Vice documentary, which they filmed I think in 2015. Just go on YouTube and look for Vice documentary Wim Hof, his name is spelled W-I-M H-O-F, that’s his first name and last name. As a great place to get acquainted, it’s like 40 minutes long, really it will get you up to speed of what he does.

Anyway, so we did this workshop about breathing. So his whole thing is about breathing techniques and in this podcast episode what I’m going to do is I’m going to describe my understanding, my takeaways from the workshop and plus I’ve already done plenty of research on this space, I’ve watched videos about him, I’ve read about him, I’ve listened to podcasts with him, he’s been on the Joe Rogan Show and other places, he’s been on the Russell Brand Show, which you can listen to the podcast or on YouTube. So I’ve done quite a lot of extensive research on … Because I’m really interested in this space. So what I’m going to do, and also I’ve also researched other people who talk about breathing and these techniques from their point of view and contrast them.

So I’m going to share my understanding and how this stuff works and how it can benefit you and how it can benefit your brain, your productivity, your energy levels, as Wim says your health, strength, and happiness. Your health, strength, and happiness, how these things can benefit you, and then you can agree, disagree, get your takeaways, do your own research and see how you can implement it.

Sounds good? So first thing I want to do though is a disclaimer that I’m not a doctor and anything that I share here, please take it with a grain of salt, please do your own research, consult health professionals, and so on. Don’t just blindly jump into this stuff because you can actually get quite hurt if you do it wrong or if you do it right but in the wrong situation or whatever. So none of this is medical advice. So purely for entertainment purposes, and knowledge sharing, sharing what I learned, my opinion.

So, all right, what is this all about? There’s two parts to it. There’s breathing, super important, and there’s the cold. Which is like an add-on on top of the breathing, which makes things, like your body progress faster and this whole process much faster. So, the breathing, it all boils down to, and I didn’t understand for a long time but with this workshop it really made things clear. And don’t use this as a substitute for the workshop, if you enjoy this podcast, check out the Wim Hof workshops, you can find them all over the world, they’re in all languages and there’s his direct students or his students’ students that run them. Very fascinating things. And you get to jump in an ice bath, which is cool.

So, breathing. Didn’t understand this for a long time, workshop cleared it up. So it all starts with the fact that our nervous system has two parts. The sympathetic and the parasympathetic. And I knew about this four years ago. I remember in 2015, I heard about this and I didn’t understand it well enough so we’re going to clear that up first thing. Your sympathetic nervous system is your fight or flight nervous system. Your parasympathetic nervous system is your rest and digest nervous system.

So you can remember it because sympathetic is shorter, the word is shorter, and you want to run fast, so you want a short word for that. Parasympathetic is longer and when you rest and digest you don’t care about the word being longer. Just one way of remembering it. Because it can get confusing because they are so similar, they sound similar.

Anyway, so the sympathetic nervous system, it’s not just like … These two terms are not just like voodoo things or conceptual maybe type of philosophical things, this is actually how your body works and it’s actually two different parts of your spine. You can just think of it like that. So we’ll share an image in the show notes and basically it’s the nerve endings that go from your spine, some of them go to your arms and legs, and they together, plus your brain of course, and they together combined are your sympathetic nervous system. So when your sympathetic, they work in conjunction. So when your sympathetic nervous system kicks in, all those are activated and you want, you feel like you want to run, you feel like you need to get out of a situation, like you feel frightened, maybe something scared you and you decide, all right, time to jolt, and you just feel your arms and legs start to move. That’s your sympathetic nervous system.

On the other hand, all your organs, like your liver, your kidneys, your digestive system and so on, they are linked together in a parasympathetic nervous system, with other nerves, and they combined create the parasympathetic nervous system, which means that when you’re in a calm place, when you’re resting, they kick in and all your internal processes start, you start digesting better. They still work kind of like … Sometimes they overlap but whichever one, they don’t do a good job when they overlap. One of them is usually the main one. One of them is usually the one that’s working full on at a certain time, either the sympathetic or parasympathetic, so you’re either running away from a tiger like in the prehistoric times, or you’re sitting there digesting, relaxing and your body’s restoring itself.

So, it’s not to say, of course this is a very trivial description. Of course there’s overlap, these nerve endings are sometimes, like they are intertwined and your arms can work while your kidneys work, of course these things happen but conceptually on one hand you’re either in flight or fight response, which is sympathetic nervous system kicking in, or you’re in rest and digest, which is your parasympathetic nervous system kicking in. That’s all there is to it, that’s what we need for understanding these breathing things and so on.

And so, Wim Hof’s method is not just like … When you look at it scientifically, as you know from the courses, I like to dig deep into things and get the essence out of it. So the essence is using breathing to control which part of your nervous system kicks in or is active at a certain point in time. So basically he’s developed certain breathing techniques that allow you to switch between being in sympathetic and parasympathetic and the other way around.

So, an example, a fantastic example is if you are … Like you are nervous before an exam or during an exam or at a job interview or you’re nervous because something scared you or you’re worried about something and you cannot fall asleep or you just got into an ice bath or your whole system is jolted or an ice cold shower and your whole system jolts and you want to get out of it. In all those situations, what is happening is your sympathetic nervous system is in … You are in a fight or a flight response.

So, you want to get out of that situation. Like, you cannot relax yourself and focus. So, he’s developed breathing techniques that allow you to switch and all of a sudden become in a parasympathetic state where you’re relaxed. The prime example here is getting in an ice bath. That’s one of the most challenging things. If you get into a bath or in our case, it’s a pool full of water that is around 1 degree and there’s a whole ton of ice that’s … Not a ton, like kilos, hundreds of kilos of ice that they put on top.

So you get inside and you have this like half a meter depth of ice, half a meter of ice that you’re sitting in and then there’s that water there as well, which is freezing cold. The first thing that your body does, is it goes into the sympathetic nervous system and wants you to get out of it. You feel you want to run. But using the breathing techniques you can slowly calm yourself down and get yourself into a rest and digest state and be in a parasympathetic state, and what that does is it brings blood back to your organs instead of thinking just about how do I run out of here, your body starts thinking okay so this is what we’re doing, we’re going to sit here, we’re not leaving, all right, let’s get the blood back into the liver, the digestive system, and all the tissues that might otherwise get frostbite and that way you can stay longer in that environment and guess what? If you can do that in a very freezing ice bath, then you can learn to do that, you can use the same skill in other parts of your life, like being nervous at a job interview or not being able to fall asleep because you’re worried about something or other place where you can’t calm yourself down.

So, that’s one part of it and the other part is the other way around where you want to move from a parasympathetic state to a sympathetic state where you want to move from a rest and digest state to a very flight or fight state. So, again, so why would you want to do that? For instance. Well, you’d want to do that, for example, to suppress your immune system. Sometimes an immune system can cause for instance inflammation, like your immune system is having a response to something and it’s causing inflammation in your body, in your gut, in your legs, in your joints, wherever.

That is not good for you, that can be detrimental, actually, to your health. So that’s your immune system is doing its job but it doesn’t know the situation, the circumstance, it doesn’t know that maybe you have everything under control, maybe it’s having one of those very prehistoric type of responses that you don’t want happening right now. Basically you don’t want that inflammation in your body, how do you do that? Well instead of being rest and digest you put yourself into fight or flight, and again there’s breathing techniques to do that.

So that’s also good for situations, as far as I understand it, for when people have joint pain or when sometimes, some autoimmune diseases, that can be helpful, and other ways. So basically it’s good to know you can control your body. So Wim Hof has demonstrated, like there was an experiment, very famous experiment where they injected him with an endotoxin that is supposed to make your immune system go crazy, you get a fever, you get a cold, you start vomiting and things like that. He was able to suppress his immune response and not allow all those things to happen. So he’s basically able to control his immune system, which is really crazy.

But the even crazier thing is that anybody can do that. He teaches people how to do that within 12 days, he can teach anybody and within one basic workshop or doing some breathing techniques anybody can do it pretty fast. Not maybe to the same extent that he does it but can get some great results.

Yeah, and so the breathing techniques vary, for instance when you get in an ice bath and you want to go from sympathetic to parasympathetic, so you want to go from fight or flight to rest and digest, one of the breathing techniques is you breathe in for four seconds, like that, and then you breathe out for seven. Like that. So seven’s like a magic number, you breathe in and then you breathe out for seven seconds and that will … And you keep doing that, that will calm you down, that will slow … I know it sounds maybe very basic but it works.

And then on the other hand … Like works even in an ice bath, I tried it. I sat in that ice bath for three minutes, totally fine. Totally calm and could control my response. And on the other hand for the … To going from the parasympathetic, from the rest and digest, to the fight or flight, to the sympathetic state, there is a breathing technique that you can find on YouTube, it’s better to watch Wim Hof do it. It’s like 30 breaths, three rounds of 30 breaths where you breathe in all the way and then you let it go. Instead of breathing out all the way you just let it go, and then you breathe in all the way, like … and then you let it go. And then you breathe in all the way again, and then you let it go, and so on. And then some other things like how to hold your breath when you let go, when you breathe out and so on.

So a place I recommend is the Joe Rogan podcast, Wim Hof’s first appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, or you can look at the Joe Rogan snippets, where Wim Hof is explaining this to him, really cool. That’s the place where you can find a great example of how to do it. Or some of Wim Hof’s online free workshops, which you can also find, like online free video tutorials.

So, yeah. That’s a way that he can control his immune system and in fact, he’s shown that by lying down in bed and doing that second exercise, that second breathing exercise, he can generate more adrenaline than somebody who’s going for their first bungee jump. Which is crazy. Like you’re lying in bed, just through breathing techniques you generate more adrenaline, meaning you’re putting yourself into that fight or flight response, you’re generating more adrenaline than somebody who’s about to do their very first bungee jump ever. So, that kind of stands as a testament.

So, what’s the summary of this? What’s the cold got to do with all of this? Well, why is the episode title The Cold is My Master? Well, because with the breathing techniques you can control which way you go, but the cold is like a teacher, a master. It’s a way for you to practice these things. You don’t always get to be nervous at an interview every day or you don’t get always to be nervous or not being able to fall asleep every day because you’re worried about something. Or you’re not always running away from a tiger or something like that.

So those situations are quite extreme or maybe out of your control when they happen. Whereas with the cold you can always go and go into a cold shower or go into a cold pool. Oh and by the way, don’t do any of these breathing exercises if you’re driving or if you’re in water because … like, unless you know what you’re doing, especially that second one because you can knock yourself out and then … If you do it while you’re lying down then it’s kind of all right, but if you’re doing it while you’re driving or you’re in water, can be very dangerous. Especially that second one with the one that puts you into an adrenaline filled state, with the flight or fight response. The calming one, different story but once again, don’t take my advice as a call to action, look at Wim Hof’s recommendations online.

Basically what I was saying is that with the cold you can always go and have a cold shower every day and learn how to control your response to that. So basically the cold will help you expedite the learning process. If you can challenge yourself with the cold and if you can climb a mountain, maybe not Mount Everest but you can climb a mountain, Wim climbed some mountains I think in Poland or somewhere there, and he brings every year, there’s a class that he does with 30 or 40 people, I don’t know, different ages, different health conditions, who all climb the same mountain in shorts with him. If you can climb a mountain, a cold mountain in shorts then you’re pretty in control of your body. That’s a very cool challenge, the cold poses a really cool challenge.

So, one of the takeaways is you can try these things, once you find out a bit more about him online and how these things work, maybe do a workshop, maybe not, but understand this better, you can try these things in a cold shower and learn to control your body better. How long can you last in a cold shower? Can you last 30 seconds? Can you last a minute? Can you last six minutes? I’ve been going to the cold pool, it hasn’t been an ice pool since the workshop, they only put the ice in for the workshop, but still it’s been like 6 degrees Celsius. So let me find out what that is in Fahrenheit. So, 6 degrees Celsius, about 42 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s how cold that pool is without the ice.

So, I’ve been going there almost every day and sitting there progressively longer periods of time, with the breathing techniques, with this understanding that I’m not sitting there in fight or flight response trying to battle myself and shivering. No, actually, I sit there very calmly, very relaxed, thinking about positive things, whatever I want to be thinking about. And I can sit there, it started with like a minute, two minutes, three minutes. Yesterday I sat there for eight minutes. Eight minutes in 6 degree water, 42 Fahrenheit degrees water. Which is cool to know that I can control my body and get there. And plus of course, has all these additional benefits, except apart from this mental state that you’re in and this capacity to control your mental state, apart from that training it also has huge benefits for your body, for your joints, for all these other things. The hot and cold. But once again, check that with your medical practitioner.

So there we go, that’s a quick jump into the world of Wim Hof, The Iceman, they also call him The Iceman, and this whole cold training breathing exercise and so on. I think it’s very valuable for anybody and especially if you are in a profession such as data science where you need to use your brain a lot and it’s important to be able to control your mind and your body and be healthy and also, not allow your mind to completely take over you and your automatic responses to kick in because we can get so carried away with the work that we do in data science or machine learning, AI, and so on, that we completely neglect our body.

So if you’re interested in exploring your body and building some sort of habits, routines, some sort of like building up your strength, as Wim Hof says, strength, health and happiness, and getting that mental clarity, then I highly recommend checking out his work. His work has been tested by science many times, on multiple locations he’s been under tests and in medical facilities doing these tests and giving blood and all these other things to make sure that it’s all legit and from everything I’ve seen, it looks incredible and from what I’ve experienced actually all doable.

So, I highly recommend checking it out. I hope you enjoyed today’s podcast once again, make sure of course to check with your medical practitioners and all these things. You’ll find all the show notes for what we talked about, any links to the Wim Hof things and documentaries that I mentioned at www.superdatascience.com/270. That’s www.www.superdatascience.com/270. On that note, thank you so much for being here today, I look forward to seeing you back here next time and until them, happy analyzing.