There's something different about wellness advice that comes from personal crisis. Danielle Kitson didn't discover cold therapy chasing a performance edge. She found it in the middle of a breast cancer diagnosis, looking for anything that might help her body heal alongside conventional treatment. That origin story matters. It changes the frame from optimization to survival — and in doing so, it actually gets closer to what these therapies are fundamentally about.
The core claim here is cellular health. Not weight loss, not performance, not longevity as an abstract concept — but the idea that reducing the inflammatory burden on your cells creates a foundation for everything else to improve. Sleep, energy, immune function, mood. When you hear Jim say "anytime you can do something to help relieve your cells of that burden, every single aspect of your biology is helped," that's not marketing language. That's a surprisingly accurate description of what the research shows.
The 11-minutes-per-week figure for cold therapy isn't pulled from thin air — it comes from Andrew Huberman's synthesis of the existing literature, and it represents a minimum effective dose for meaningful physiological adaptation. What I find compelling about this number is that it's deliberately accessible. It removes the excuse that cold therapy requires heroic commitment. Eleven minutes, spread across the week, is nothing.
But here's where I want to add some nuance. A 2025 proteomics study in our knowledge base found that acute cold exposure measurably shifts the circulating protein profile away from markers associated with hypertension and lipid imbalances — within a single session. Not after months of practice. One session. That's the kind of systemic response that explains why practitioners like Danielle see results so quickly. Your body responds immediately; consistent practice compounds those responses over time.
The cryotherapy calorie claim — 500 calories in 3 minutes — deserves honest scrutiny. That number circulates widely in wellness marketing and it's almost certainly exaggerated. The actual thermogenic cost of a brief cryotherapy session is real but modest. The more meaningful benefit is the downstream effect on brown fat activation and baseline metabolic rate over weeks and months of practice. Don't choose cryotherapy to burn calories. Choose it for what it does to your nervous system and your inflammatory markers.
The stacking principle — combining hot and cold in sequence — is one of the areas where practitioner consensus and research align cleanly. Vasodilation from heat followed by vasoconstriction from cold creates a pumping effect in the circulatory system. Blood moves. Metabolic waste clears. The contrast amplifies what either therapy would accomplish alone. This is exactly what we see across the contrast therapy literature, and it's what we've built our entire brand around at Contrast Collective.
Where things get more complicated is in the cancer recovery context. Danielle's story is deeply moving, and I don't doubt her experience. But I want to be careful here: the research on thermal therapies during active cancer treatment is nuanced and, in some cases, contradictory. For people in treatment, these decisions belong in conversation with their oncology team. For healthy adults using these modalities for prevention and resilience, the evidence is solid and growing.
Start with the minimum. Eleven minutes of cold per week, split however makes sense for your life. Add heat if you have access — even a hot shower followed by cold counts. Pay attention to how you feel afterward, not during. The during is always uncomfortable. The afterward is where the data lives: your sleep quality, your mood the next morning, your energy through the afternoon. Track those, not your tolerance for discomfort.
And if you're choosing between red light and infrared, Danielle's framework is genuinely useful. Red light for skin, collagen, surface repair. Infrared for detox, deep tissue, systemic cellular signaling. They're different tools for different jobs. Using both strategically is better than using one heavily.
What struck me reading through our knowledge base after this article is how consistently the research points to inflammation as the common thread. Cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, metabolic dysfunction — all of these have chronic low-grade inflammation at their root. And all of the therapies Danielle and Jim discuss — cold, infrared, red light, contrast — work, in different ways, by modulating inflammatory pathways. This isn't coincidence. It suggests that what we're really building at Contrast Collective isn't a temperature experience. It's an anti-inflammatory practice. That reframe matters, because it connects what can feel like a wellness trend to one of the most well-established concepts in longevity medicine. Your cells are under siege from inflammation. These therapies are how you fight back.