I’ve been hearing A LOT about hot and cold therapy lately. Multiple social media accounts, influencers, and business professionals that I follow have talked about it. Then I received this video in a newsletter this morning from, Azure Standard, a farm in Oregon that I’ve been reading about lately. My daughter and I have been dealing with a lot of congestion lately so I really want to try this. One application for this therapy that I heard for the first time this weak was using this therapy to work through grief. That was profound to me. I’ve heard high performance people talk about it in dealing with daily stress and building stamina but to relieve congestion and to cope with grief were totally new applications to me.
This is the video from the newsletter this morning. What I really like about this video is that it doesn’t take a full bath. You aren’t doing a plunge or standing in a freezing shower. Which tells me that isolated use of this therapy is also possible. I have not researched any of this beyond reading how a few people are using it. I comprehend how it works, you are dilating and constricting the blood vessels and pores. You are putting your body into a physical state of stress with the cold and relaxing it with the heat. You are shocking the body by going back and forth between the two extremes. I can see how this distracts the mind and puts you in a survival mode so you are switching from back and forth between sympathetic to parasympathetic systems. I think it is amazing and I am eager to see what it can do for me and my family.
One woman that I’ve started following recently talked about using hot and cold therapy to cope with the loss of her preterm baby girl. It was a total shock to her because she has 2 (maybe 3) healthy and high spirited daughters. I remember really fearing losing my baby in the beginning of my pregnancy. I guess every woman goes through that thinking that they can safeguard themselves from breaking down if it were to happen. It’s an insurmountable loss and one that I did not understand until having my own baby girl and wanting her with every particle of my being. This mother lives in a very cold climate so she would go outside in a bathing suit and lay in the snow then go inside to a sauna. She said it was very powerful and after months of not sleeping and grief that was swallowing her alive this was what helped her to overcome the despair.
I am eager to hear your own stories about how hot and cold therapy has had an impact on your life. Please share those with the community. You never know who else it may provide support to in a time of need.
