When Dr. Jason Buck first stepped into an ice bath, he wasn't thinking about therapy protocols or trauma treatment. He was simply trying to survive—not the cold, but the crushing anxiety of the COVID pandemic. A Doctor of Behavioral Health with decades of experience treating trauma, Buck found himself in an unexpected position: needing the tools he prescribed to others.
"During COVID time, I was really feeling a lot of fear and anxiety and panic about the potential of death that was there," Buck admits in a recent conversation on the Morozko Ice Baths podcast Uncommon Living. "I heard about this guy Wim Hof and immediately started the breathing tools. They were so immediately beneficial."
What started as personal crisis management has evolved into something more: a professional understanding of why cold exposure might be one of the most powerful—and underutilized—tools for managing PTSD symptoms.
The Present-Moment Power of Cold
The therapeutic mechanism is almost brutally simple. When you're submerged in near-freezing water, your nervous system has exactly one priority: survival. All the catastrophic thinking, the ruminating fears, the replaying of traumatic memories—they're suddenly irrelevant.
When you're in the ice bath, all your other worries have to go away because all you can do is breathe and survive. Whatever that bill I have to pay next week—glad I wrote a note on that because it's not here now.
— Dr. Jason BuckThis isn't just anecdotal wisdom from cold plunge (more on this here) enthusiasts. Dr. Marsha Linehan, the founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and one of the most respected names in treating borderline personality disorder and trauma, includes cold water face immersion in her clinical protocols. Her book dedicates an entire section to using a bowl of ice water to "snap your body out of the catastrophic cycle of thoughts."
11 Seconds to Interrupt the Spiral
How quickly can cold exposure work? According to chiropractor and bestselling author Mindy Peltz, as little as 11 seconds of cold water on the face can halt PTSD rumination. After experiencing the LA fires, Peltz found herself trapped in constant background anxiety—"a chatter in her mind of how everything awful is about to happen."
Cold plunge therapy didn't just quiet those voices. It replaced them with something else entirely: optimism. The catastrophic thoughts gave way to "Well, this good thing could happen."
Why Trauma Gets Stuck
Buck's approach to trauma treatment draws heavily on the work of Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger. Levine describes what Freud called the "compulsion to repeat"—our obsessive need to replay traumatic experiences in search of resolution.
This isn't unique to humans. Buck shares Levine's example of cheetah cubs who escaped a hyena attack by climbing a tree. What did they do for the rest of the day? They played "hyena attack"—taking turns playing predator and prey, roleplaying different ways to handle the threat.
Children do the same thing. After a scary doctor's visit, they grab their dolly and play "doctor's office"—always adopting the authority role, always in the position of control. From that position, they can process what happened without being retraumatized.
Upon resolution, you retain the memory but without the emotional attachment to the memory. In a home run scenario, the 5-year-old who had no control becomes the heroic 5-year-old who embraces a new identity.
— From the discussion of Peter Levine's workThe problem? As adults, we often lack these natural processing mechanisms. Our protective parts keep the trauma locked away, and simply talking about it—without the position of control—often leads to retraumatization rather than resolution.
The Ice Bath as Hero's Journey
What makes the ice bath unique as a therapeutic tool is this: it puts you in control. You choose to step into the cold. You choose to stay. You face a genuine stressor—one that activates every survival instinct you have—and you manage it through breath and presence.
"Getting back into the hero of the journey," Buck explains, "knowing that this quest is wrought with pitfalls and there are setbacks and there are dragons out there, but if you're prepared for them, there's nothing that you have to fear really."
The ice bath becomes a daily practice in facing fear from a position of choice. And that practice, repeated over time, builds a capacity that transfers to other areas of life.
Buck's Practice: What It Actually Looks Like
Buck maintains a cold plunge community with fellow clinicians—a "polar bear plunge collective" that meets every two weeks. Their practice includes:
- Multiple rounds of Wim Hof breathing
- 10-15 minutes in the sauna
- 10-15 minutes of cold exposure (someone picks the music)
For daily practice, he keeps his tank at 50-55°F and stays in for 10-15 minutes. For true ice baths at 32°F, he limits exposure to 2-4 minutes maximum.
The community aspect matters. "We're all clinical colleagues," Buck notes. "We have this camaraderie going on and we have cases we might be talking about." The cold becomes a container for deeper connection and professional processing.
A Tool, Not a Cure
Buck is careful not to oversell cold exposure as a trauma cure. It provides immediate relief—a break in the catastrophic thinking cycle, a moment of presence and control. But it won't, as he puts it, "go back into their 5-year-old child who is in exile."
That deeper integration work—reconnecting with the traumatized parts of ourselves and giving them new roles—still requires proper therapeutic support. The ice bath is one tool in a larger toolkit, not a replacement for treatment.
But for those dealing with PTSD's daily burden—the ruminating thoughts, the background anxiety, the feeling of being trapped in your own mind—the ice bath offers something profound: a few minutes of undeniable presence, and the reminder that you can face difficult things and survive.
Sometimes, that's exactly where healing begins.