Brad Robinson comes at cold showers from an angle most of the research doesn't touch: anxiety recovery. He's not a physiologist or a sports scientist. He's a CBT coach who discovered that deliberately stepping into discomfort was training his nervous system in ways that talk therapy alone couldn't reach. That framing matters. The core claim here isn't really about norepinephrine or T cells — it's about practicing the act of choosing difficulty.
That's a different argument than most cold exposure advocates make, and it's worth sitting with.
The physical mechanisms Brad cites hold up. Norepinephrine surges with cold exposure — Andrew Huberman has gone deep on this, and the numbers are consistent across multiple studies. The immune benefits are real too, though dose-dependent in ways Brad doesn't fully explore. A few other articles in our library — including the two-year daily cold shower account — corroborate the cumulative effects on immune resilience and cold tolerance. These aren't outlier claims.
But Brad's emphasis on the psychological dimension is where this piece offers something distinct. He's essentially describing exposure therapy applied to the shower. You identify something that triggers your stress response. You approach it deliberately. You survive it. You repeat. The nervous system recalibrates its threat assessment. That's textbook CBT — and it works.
The research community agrees on the norepinephrine release and the mood-elevating effects. Where things get nuanced is the anxiety claim specifically. Some researchers would argue that cold exposure activates the sympathetic nervous system — the fight-or-flight system — which is the same system that drives anxiety. There's a legitimate question about whether you're training resilience or repeatedly triggering a stress response.
Brad's answer, implicitly, is that the key is voluntary exposure. You're the one initiating the cold. You have agency. That changes the neurological equation entirely. Involuntary stress depletes. Chosen stress adapts you. The research on psychological safety and stress inoculation supports this distinction.
Start at the end of your warm shower. Twenty seconds cold. That's it. The goal isn't to suffer — it's to practice the moment of decision. The pause before you turn the dial. That hesitation is the work. Do that every morning for two weeks before worrying about extending duration.
Brad mentions that cold showers disrupt obsessive thought patterns. This is under-discussed in the literature. The mechanism is probably attentional — cold water is so sensorially overwhelming that rumination simply can't compete. Your prefrontal cortex gets crowded out by afferent signals from ten thousand cold receptors firing at once. For anyone who's ever been trapped in an anxiety spiral at 7am, that interruption isn't a side benefit. It's the whole point.