Do The Hard Thing

“Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
~Victor Frankl (neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, author, Holocaust survivor)

Wim Hof, colloquially known as “The Iceman,” has climbed Mount Everest in shorts and sandals, run a half marathon barefoot in the Arctic Circle, and been submerged in ice for almost two hours. But for the sixty-two year old Dutchman, these cold weather endurance feats are the least painful of what he has endured. “I can do it all,” he notes, “because compared to a grieving heart, it is nothing.”

His wife (who suffered from schizophrenia) took her life in 1995 by throwing herself from an eight story building, leaving Hof – a young father of four at the time – to pick up the pieces. Between the grief of losing the love of his life and being forced to continue living and providing for his children, Hof had no consolation, no answers to deal with the pain, and no recourse to relief. He was paralyzed with fear, gripped by anxiety, and swallowed up in emotional agony…and nothing alleviated it.

Until he disrobed and slipped into a freezing lake one Sunday morning. While his body was gripped and paralyzed by the cold, his fear, grief, and anxiety melted away.

“Instead of being guided by my broken emotions, the cold water led me to stillness and gave my broken heart a chance to rest, restore, rehabilitate. The only thing that gave me peace,” he recalls, “was the cold.”

The Worst and Best

While I am not a devoted follower of the so-called “Hof method,” I have been employing the relatively simple habit of turning my thermostat down in my house to 55 degrees, and taking cold showers every morning for the past few months. It is both the worst part of my day…and the best. The worst, because the shooting pain of ice water stinging your frigid body with no place to hide from it is akin to a mild form of torture. The best, because it did not kill me, and I live to see another day.

The author Natalie Goldberg, when she was going through a divorce, approached her roshi (Zen master) and asked him, “Roshi, will I get used to loneliness?”

“No, you don’t get used to it,” he said, “I take a cold shower every morning and every morning it shocks me, but I continue to stand up in the shower. Loneliness always has a bite, but learn to stand up in it and not be tossed away.”

The jury is still out with the scientific community as to the verifiable health benefits of cold therapy and ice baths. Anecdotally, I feel more alert, more alive, and I suspect that there are more endorphins flowing through my body after emerging from the shower. But there is something else, though, beyond the positive physiological effects.

On the Ledge

I know the emotional agony and sense of darkness Hof experienced when he lost his wife. But in my case, I was the one standing on the proverbial ledge eight stories up, unable to find a way to escape. The moral guardrail of my religious faith restrained my desire to meet the same fate as Hof’s wife, to escape a jet-black depression that seemed like it would never end. In the darkest clutches of depression, the things that would most benefit mental wellbeing – exercise, friends and family, prayer – are the most aversive.

But what if we could will our bodies away from atrophy – doing the exact hard thing we have no desire to do?

The Will to Live

If we are convinced we can’t survive two minutes in an icy lake, and we jump in anyway, what do we have to lose if we want to die in that moment anyway? If we die, we obtain the wish of our distorted mind. But if we come out of the experience, panting and shivering, but very much alive and with a new lease on life…what if that was the spark needed to ignite the will to live again?

Indeed, in the city of Yukutsk, Siberia – the coldest city in the world – men routinely remove their clothes when it is minus 50 degrees Farhenheit to take ice baths outside. Their bodies are acclimated to the cold, and they rarely get sick. And in Russia and Ukraine, the Orthodox faithful celebrate the Feast of Epiphany in January by plunging into icy lakes. “Epiphany is purification,” one congregant of the ritual observes. “My soul is cleansed, and I’m charged with a good mood for the whole year ahead.”

There is no denying that Hof has attained a level of physical transcendence of the limitations of the body by the power of the mind that is remarkable. But he maintains that he is not unique, and that anyone can push themselves farther than they thought possible and gain mental clarity and emotional control, simply by doing the harder thing.

“As humanity has evolved and developed ways to make our lives more and more comfortable, we have lost our ability not only to survive but to thrive in extreme environments,” the Iceman notes. “The things we have built to make our lives easier have actually made us weaker.”

Do the Harder Thing

Though I’m still soft in a lot of ways, I’ve grown to love my morning cold shower. I mean, I hate it. But I love it. Every time I step into the stall, I know what is waiting for me: cold, hard pain. And every time I turn the shower handle as far to the right as it will go and pull it back, there is a part of me that feels like I am going to die as soon as those thousands of icy needles fly the wall and strike my bare torso.

But then, I don’t. I yelp, and curse, and cry a little. But I don’t die. A few minutes, and it’s over. I’m still here. I continue to stand up. And I will not be tossed away.