Yeah. That's that. That I think is, is a really important point is, you know, whether you're an entrepreneur, or you're stressed about bills, or you, you know, you're just living, you're just living and living in the modern day, it's easy to let your thoughts get away from you. And we need to seek out ways to get out of that sort of hamster wheel brain, looping, obsessing, stressing. We know that stress leads to disease and dysfunction. And there are a number of different biohacks, processes that we can do that just give us a little reprieve from that. Obviously meditation, obviously like yoga, you know, jujitsu. You can't focus on, you know, going out on a stand-up paddleboard. There's a list of things that you can do that just get you out of your mind for a minute, that really give you an opportunity to get a little bit of respite from living in the modern world. And I think that the importance of doing that and combining it with something that's physiologically beneficial, like cold exposure, just as it's this idea of stacking these activities that you know have, you know, 10, 20, 60 different benefits, and it doesn't take that long. I mean, we've talked about it already, how quickly you can drastically affect your sense of self, your well-being, your body, your brain. So yeah, again, at the heart of biohacking, it's what minimum effective dose, what's the least amount that I can do that's going to have the greatest amount of benefit. So we've covered memory, testosterone, and hormones, stress, metabolism. I'll throw immune system in there. Are there other benefits that maybe our listeners would be surprised about?

We should talk about the immune system. D has a relationship with the immune system that is way underappreciated. And I didn't know this until after my son, he was six years old and he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disorder. So this is his own immune system attacking the cells in his pancreas that make insulin. And it's so frustrating because it's not even like it's his own body that is destroying its capacity to stay healthy. Where does that happen? I didn't know. Now, as long as he injects insulin into his body, he's going to be fine. He can achieve good glucose control. There's no reason to expect a diminished life expectancy for him now, because we've got such great technologies. What is about two years after his diagnosis, a longitudinal study came out of Finland. They were watching people for 20 years and they were monitoring those women who were taking vitamin D during the trimester of their pregnancy or during the first year of the baby's life and those women who weren't. It turns out that vitamin D insufficiency is associated with increased rates of type 1 diabetes later in life. So, vitamin D has a relationship with immune function that is way underappreciated. And I start going into this, rheumatoid arthritis, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, all have origins in vitamin D irregularities. And you might be normal now, but have, because the immune system is still developing in the first year of life, have some aberration in your immune system that was due to a vitamin D deficiency you experienced as an infant that can have long lasting consequences for the immune system. And you got to be like, well, Sean, how is this possible that people who live at Northern latitudes, Finland is one where the rates of type one diabetes were very high until they started doing vitamin D supplementation and UV light therapy during the winter. And that brought those rates down. If autoimmune disorders are associated with vitamin D insufficiency or deficiency early in life, how could people exist at these remote latitudes where there's no sunshine? And the answer is even more speculative. Cold protects the body against the adverse effects of vitamin D insufficiency. When you think about how the vitamin D comes from the sun, and there isn't going to be any sun in Finland in the wintertime, but there's going to be plenty of cold, and if you get some of that cold, it will protect the body against the insufficiency of vitamin D. The mechanism is quite mysterious, but you don't have to listen to Jack Cruz for too long. He will tell you that when you get in the cold, that you will produce your own UV light. Now I have not, I'm like where in the library does it say that? But it's a plausible for why the cold exposure would protect you against vitamin D insufficiency. And vitamin D is way oversimplified. There are like 25 different forms of vitamin D in your body at every, you know, given time. But I start from the assumption that Jack Cruz is always right and I just don't understand a word that comes out of the man's mouth, you know? And then I have to do all my homework and I have to figure out what is he saying. So if he says that cold will protect you by causing your body to make its own UV light inside your body, I'm like, that's got to be right. And it's up to me to figure it out.

Yeah. Listen to Uncle Jack. He'll tell you. Right. Well, if

he were correct, then it would make sense that we would see improvements in rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and type one diabetes. Cold would improve the management these symptoms in the body. And guess what? It does. Cold exposure is more effective than all 17 FDA approved drugs for multiple sclerosis. There's no cure for type 1 diabetes. There's no cure for multiple sclerosis. But cold exposure will reduce the frequency of MS flare-ups and it will help the person gain control of the muscles that they might otherwise not be able to control, improve their proprioception, improve their endurance, and they report a better quality of life after they start cold exposure. It is the same with Parkinson's. It is the same with rheumatoid arthritis. It reduces the inflammation, improves the freedom of movement. And these, some of these mechanisms like reduced inflammation, they're straightforward and we get it. But the cold is acting on the immune system in a way that modulates this, this aberrant immune function that is the origin of the disease. You'd think that I could write a proposal to the National Institute of Health and get a ton of money to study this. But the colleagues I have who are really good at NIH funding, they're like, yeah, no, I'm never going to fund that. You're going to have to do that research in another way. That's just not what the NIH is about right now.

Right. Yeah. Is the cold, is cold exposure, is there an archetype or somebody, are there a group of people that should not do cold exposure? Yeah.

And I'm a little irritated about this one. If you go on Wikipedia, it will cite some of Professor Mike Tipton's hypothesis about autonomic conflict and hard arrhythmia as if that was the big concern. It's not. The big concern is hypertension. If you have high blood pressure and you go into the cold, vasoconstriction is going to restrict the blood flow. It's going to squeeze all that blood out of your limbs and it's going to pack it into your core and probably your brain because that's out of the water. It's going to raise your blood pressure. Now, if you already have high blood pressure, you could wind up with an acute hypertensive event. This has been reported to me two times by medical professionals who are supervising the people and saying, yeah, I had a patient or I had a subject who went through an acute hypertensive event, brought them back, no long-lasting consequences, but not a good thing. Hypertension is the number one contraindication and the way to get around that because it can also be a hormetic stressor that helps your circulatory system that builds the endothelial cells that are responsible for vasodilation. You can bring your hypertension condition under control with cold as long as you don't kill yourself first. Start warmer. Start with partial body. Just do the legs. Work your way up to the more acute whole body cold water immersion. There are a couple of others. We were talking about the brain. The relationship between the cold and the brain is profound. And in about one in 20,000 cases, especially among the elderly, and by elderly, I'm 58 years old, Sean, I don't think of myself as elderly. But people in their 60s have experienced this. It's called transient global amnesia. They get into the ice bath. They can't remember anything. They can't remember who they are. That their brain is working on something. It is very frightening. And those people will likely never get in the ice bath again. Of all these cases, no one has ever experienced like a permanent memory loss. But the idea that you spend, you know, 15 minutes not remembering whatever it is, who's president or what your name is or what the names of your kids are, extremely scary. So I think we should consider that another contraindication. People ask me about pregnancy and and cold water bath is great for pregnancy. Inflammation is a big problem, especially late in the pregnancy. The ankles get swollen and women have trouble sleeping. They are in a physiological state of insulin resistance. If that goes too far, then it can become pathological gestational diabetes the cold Helps take that inflammation out of the limbs out of the ankles make it more comfortable to walk I've reported our women have reported to me much better sleep and it stimulates the metabolism in a way that will prevent the physiological insulin resistance that is normal during pregnancy from going too far into pathological insulin resistance, which could be preeclampsia, eclampsia, gestational diabetes. So pregnancy, surprisingly enough, is

not one

of the contraindications to ice bath.