Robbie Bent's central argument here is deceptively simple: the context in which you do contrast therapy matters as much as the protocol itself. Not 80 minutes of sauna. Not 11 minutes of cold. The group. The shared experience. The fact that you showed up with another person who also had to get through the same thing.
That's a bold claim in a wellness space obsessed with optimization. And I think he's right.
The physiological case for sauna and cold exposure is well-established. Norepinephrine spikes. Dopamine stabilizes. Heat shock proteins clear cellular debris. Cardiovascular adaptations accumulate over weeks and months. All of this happens whether you're sitting alone or surrounded by people.
But Bent is pointing at something the individual studies don't capture: the nervous system's response to safety and co-regulation. When you're in discomfort alongside other people who are also in discomfort, something shifts. The threat signal dampens. The social nervous system — what researchers like Stephen Porges have called the ventral vagal system — stays online in a way it simply cannot when you're alone, gritting your teeth, white-knuckling through cold water by yourself.
The knowledge base here is interesting. There are two other Othership articles that trace this same thread. The origin story — a horse trough, five friends, a backyard in Toronto — wasn't a business plan. It was a social ritual that happened to use contrast therapy as its vehicle. Bent didn't set out to build a wellness company. He built a sober social experience and the physiology came along for the ride.
The addiction recovery angle is where this gets genuinely fascinating. Bent claims cold plunges help stabilize dopamine in people struggling with substance use — and the neuroscience supports this directionally. Chronic substance use dysregulates dopamine signaling. Controlled stressors like cold exposure produce a dopamine release that's real but not destructive. The spike is smaller, the recovery is cleaner, and crucially, you chose the discomfort. That sense of agency matters enormously in recovery contexts.
Where I'd push back slightly: the mechanism isn't fully proven at clinical scale. Fifty people finding sobriety through Othership is meaningful, but it's also a self-selecting group who chose a sober social environment. The cold may be doing less of the work than the community itself.
If you have access to a contrast therapy facility, go with someone. Not to perform the experience together — to be present in the same space, facing the same threshold. The conversation before and after a cold plunge is different from any other conversation you'll have that day. Something about shared vulnerability opens people up.
If you're building a solo practice at home, find a way to make it communal occasionally. A friend, a partner, a class. The physiology will accumulate either way. The social medicine requires other people.
Bathhouse culture is ancient. Roman thermae, Japanese onsen, Finnish sauna, Russian banya — every civilization that figured out heat exposure also figured out that it's a group activity. We invented it as a communal practice and then somehow, in the modern wellness revival, stripped out the community and sold it as a solo biohack. Robbie Bent isn't innovating. He's remembering something we already knew.