If you only read the article summary, you might file this one under "cold plunge testimonial" and move on. But the transcript tells a different story. Ryan Hymas is talking about addiction. About stealing morphine from sick patients. About crossing lines he never thought he'd cross. About the long, unglamorous work of putting a life back together.
Cold plunging didn't save him. Recovery saved him. But cold plunging became part of the vocabulary of a new life — a daily practice that asks something of you and gives something back. That distinction matters. It's not a cure. It's a ritual that reinforces something you've already chosen.
Here's the connection that doesn't get made often enough: addiction is fundamentally a dysregulation of the dopamine system. Substances hijack the reward pathway — flooding it, burning it out, making ordinary life feel flat and unrewarding by comparison. Recovery, in large part, is rebuilding the capacity to feel good without chemical assistance.
Cold water exposure triggers a significant norepinephrine release — upward of 300% above baseline, sustained for several hours. It also produces a meaningful dopamine response. Not a spike like a drug produces, but a slow, clean elevation that lasts. For someone whose reward system has been through the violence of opioid addiction, this isn't a trivial thing. It's a way to feel something real, earned through discomfort rather than bypassed.
The Ryan Duey conversation in our knowledge base touches on this from a different angle — Duey came to cold plunging after his own health crisis and built an entire company around it. What's consistent across both Ryans is the same pattern: a before and an after, with cold water somewhere in the transition. Not as the cause of the change, but as an anchor for it.
The science on cold exposure is real — cardiovascular adaptation, immune modulation, mood regulation through catecholamine release. But the research doesn't spend much time on addiction recovery specifically. That's a gap worth naming. The studies we have are on healthy subjects, not people whose neurochemistry has been substantially altered by years of substance use.
What we can say is that the mechanisms are plausible. Consistent cold exposure trains the nervous system to tolerate discomfort without fleeing. It builds what researchers call interoceptive awareness — the ability to notice what your body is doing and choose a response rather than react automatically. For someone in recovery, that capacity is everything. The craving arrives. You notice it. You breathe. You don't act on it. Cold practice trains exactly that loop.
If you're in any kind of recovery — from addiction, from burnout, from a period of your life you're trying to leave behind — start small and make it daily. Two minutes at whatever temperature your body finds genuinely uncomfortable. Not heroic. Consistent. The point isn't the cold. The point is showing up for something difficult every morning before the rest of the day has a chance to convince you not to.
The Huberman immunity research we've indexed is worth pairing here: cold exposure when you're depleted can work against you. If you're in early recovery and your system is still stabilizing, be gentle. Three times a week before building to daily. Let adaptation happen on your body's timeline, not a protocol's.
Ryan mentions watching a Brené Brown talk on vulnerability the night of this talk. He decided to be vulnerable. To tell the real story instead of the cleaned-up version. That decision — to stop managing perception and just be honest — is structurally identical to what cold water demands of you. You can't fake your way through a cold plunge. The discomfort is real, your response is real, and there's nowhere to hide from either.
That might be the deepest reason cold practice resonates with people in recovery. Not the dopamine. Not the norepinephrine. The practice of being present with something uncomfortable and choosing not to run. Over and over, until that becomes the default. Until equanimity isn't something you perform — it's something you've built.