The first time I tried this gave surprising results. Hold it as long as you can while staying relaxed and then take a full breath in and hold for another 15 seconds. Where you use your consciousness as a wedge to drive between your automatic gasp response that kicks in when you’ve been holding your breath. Scott Carney calls it “the wedge” in his book. When this starts to happen the goal is to relax your body. The goal is to wait for the gasp reflex to kick in – wait until your chest starts to convulse in an attempt to get a breath. You’ll hold your breath like this for as long as you can. I take this to mean visualize energy flowing to the parts of my body that aren’t tingly. Wim says to push energy toward parts of your body that aren’t energized. When I do this I’ll feel tingly all over – I believe this is caused by the flood of oxygen from basically hyperventilating. The goal is to stay focused in a meditative state and connect to your body. Either way the idea is to take in quick, deep breaths while releasing only about half of your breath in rapid succession for 30 breaths.įollowing the 30 breaths you breathe out fully and then hold your breath. I’ve read conflicting methods – this Higher Existence page tells you to forcefully push out half your breath while Scott Carney’s book says to let air escape your lungs effortlessly. The breaths should be full belly breaths followed by a quick exhale of about half of the air in your lungs. The breathing routine is to take 30 rapid breaths. I started by incorporating his breathing routine into my morning meditation. Wim Hof has made claims in interviews that he believes his method can cure depression and that he can consciously control his immune system.
My goal with the cold exposure is to see what if any effect they have on depression and whether I can consciously control my immune system to alleviate the symptoms of seasonal allergies. The timing was perfect too because I was going to spend a week in Colorado house-sitting a mountain cabin in the dead of winter.
It had enough guidance on the method and anecdotes from others Scott and others who have found the method to be beneficial that it convinced me to give cold exposure another go. I won’t spoil the ending for you but it’s a good book. Scott is an investigative journalist who spent six months practicing and researching the Wim Hof method for his book. I came across Wim Hof again this year with Scott Carney’s book What Doesn’t Kill Us. The cold was painful and I didn’t stick with it. I was intrigued and decided to try taking cold showers.
That lead me down the YouTube rabbit hole where I watched Wim stay submerged in ice-water for 73 minutes without a drop in his core temp(the average person will die in 15), run a full marathon in Finland in -4F temperatures shirtless and barefoot, and make a bunch of crazy sounding claims about how he can consciously control his immune system and generate body heat at will. I first discovered Wim Hof two years ago from a link on Reddit that showed this crazy dutch man setting a world-record for swimming in a frozen lake.