Chris Williamson doesn't spend much time in this clip talking about norepinephrine or brown adipose tissue. He's not citing papers. He's talking about the moment just before you step in. And that, to me, is the most honest thing you can say about cold showers.
Because here's the thing: the cold itself doesn't build you. The anticipation does. The biology is real — norepinephrine spikes, dopamine rises, alertness sharpens. The "10 cups of coffee" feeling is legitimate. But the mechanism that actually rewires your psychology isn't the cold water hitting your skin. It's the decision you make in that moment of hesitation, and then making it again tomorrow, and the day after that.
The knowledge base is full of work on cold water's physiological effects, and the science is consistent. A 2025 scoping review on cold water immersion catalogued the immune, circulatory, and psychological benefits across dozens of studies. The pattern holds: regular cold exposure reduces anxiety markers, improves mood, and produces that characteristic afterglow of alertness. The Anxiety Project's work on cold showers for mental resilience and longevity documents similar findings — the practice isn't just about feeling good afterward, it's about recalibrating your baseline response to stress over time.
Where Williamson adds something useful is the reframe around discomfort itself. Most content on cold exposure talks about what happens during or after. He's focused on the approach — the programmed resistance your nervous system generates before any actual cold water is involved. That resistance, he argues, is inflated. And he's right. The anticipatory anxiety is almost always worse than the experience.
The distinction Williamson draws between voluntary and involuntary adversity is philosophically interesting. He's not saying cold showers are the same as grief or illness or failure. He's saying they're a training ground — a low-stakes place to practice facing difficulty so that when real difficulty arrives, you've already rehearsed the response.
This maps onto something I see repeated across the research. Stress inoculation. You don't become resilient by avoiding discomfort. You become resilient by engaging controlled doses of it, regularly, until your nervous system stops treating discomfort as a threat. Cold exposure is one of the cleanest tools we have for this.
Three minutes. Cold from the start, not as a finish to a warm shower. The finish-cold approach still works, but starting cold forces you to make the decision cleanly — no warm comfort to ease you in, no bargaining. Just the threshold, and you stepping across it.
Do it in the morning. The alertness effect is real and lasts 30 to 60 minutes. You'll think more clearly. More importantly, you'll have done something hard before most people have finished their first coffee.
The surprising thing? After about three weeks of consistency, you stop dreading it. The resistance shrinks. And then you start noticing that same shrinkage in other areas — the email you've been avoiding, the conversation you've been putting off. The cold shower habit doesn't stay in the bathroom. That's what Williamson is really pointing at.