What Eerily Angeliovska is really arguing here isn't that cold water cures disease. It's something more interesting: that the cold is a teacher. A very fast, very persuasive teacher. When you step into cold water, your autonomic nervous system fires immediately. Your body goes into threat response. And the claim is that by learning to navigate that response — through breath, through focus, through deliberate presence — you gain a kind of agency over your own physiology that transfers far beyond the bathtub.
That's the core of the Wim Hof Method, and it's worth sitting with. The cold isn't the point. The cold is just the classroom.
The knowledge base has a semi-randomised controlled trial — 29 days of the WHM — that speaks directly to this. What the researchers found was cumulative, dose-dependent benefit. Energy, mental clarity, ability to handle stress: all improved. And crucially, the longer participants stayed consistent, the more pronounced those benefits became. This lines up precisely with what Eerily describes — she didn't transform after one cold shower. She started at 30 seconds. Each session added a little more. The adaptation built over time.
The neurochemistry here is established. Cold exposure activates the periaqueductal gray — the brain's own opioid production center. Endorphins release. There's a genuine neurological reward. This isn't a vague wellness claim. It's a measurable shift in your internal chemistry.
Raynaud's disease is worth pausing on. It's a condition where cold triggers vasospasm — exaggerated constriction of blood vessels in the extremities. The conventional advice is to avoid cold. And yet here's Eerily, a physiotherapist, using graduated cold exposure as a rehabilitation tool. The agreement among practitioners is that controlled, supervised exposure — with proper breathing and gradual progression — can actually retrain the vascular response. The disagreement is around how far to push it and in whom. This is not a protocol to launch unsupervised if you have circulation disorders.
If you're new to this, the breathing is where you start — not the cold. Thirty cycles of deep, rhythmic breathing before cold exposure shifts your CO2 levels and alkalizes your blood slightly, which changes how your nervous system interprets the thermal stress. You're priming the system before the test begins. Then start with 30 seconds of cold at the end of your regular shower. Build week by week. The goal isn't to prove something. The goal is to show your nervous system that you can choose your response to an involuntary stimulus.
Wim Hof didn't develop this method in a laboratory. He found cold water in a Dutch canal during one of the worst periods of his life — after losing his wife, with four children to raise. And what he found there was relief. Presence. A moment where grief had no purchase. The periaqueductal gray that produces endorphins during cold exposure is the same region involved in the brain's response to emotional pain. The mechanism that helped him survive his grief is the same one that helps Eerily manage Raynaud's. That's not a coincidence. That's biology being far more elegant than we usually give it credit for.