Raynaud's sits in an uncomfortable middle ground for Western medicine. The mechanism is clear — vasospasm, reduced blood flow to the extremities, the classic color sequence of white to blue to red — but the trigger is often invisible. Cold, yes. But also emotional stress. Anxiety. Anticipation of cold. The body responding to the thought of cold before a single finger hits the air.
That's the core of what Eerily Anjavska is saying. Raynaud's isn't a disease you catch or a structural defect you're born with. It's a conditioned response. The autonomic nervous system, wired through years of experience and emotional association, has learned to interpret cold as threat. And when it does, it protects you the only way it knows how — by pulling blood away from the periphery and toward the core.
The mind-body framing here isn't mystical. It's neurological. The sympathetic nervous system controls vasomotor tone — the dilation and constriction of blood vessels. And the sympathetic nervous system is exquisitely sensitive to perceived threat, which includes thoughts, memories, and emotional states just as much as physical cold. Chronic stress keeps sympathetic tone elevated. An old fear becomes a hair trigger.
Georgie Oldfield's SIRPA work — the framework Eerily trained in — builds on decades of research tracing physical symptoms back to unresolved emotional tension. Dr. John Sarno laid much of this groundwork with TMS, showing that chronic pain and autonomic symptoms often have a psychological root that conventional treatment completely bypasses. Mainstream rheumatology hands you calcium channel blockers and tells you to wear gloves. That addresses the symptom. It doesn't address what the nervous system is responding to.
There's growing consensus that autonomic responses can be voluntarily modulated — the Wim Hof research demonstrated this clearly, showing that cyclic breathing and intentional cold exposure could influence immune and vascular responses in ways previously thought impossible to control consciously. But most clinicians still treat Raynaud's as purely structural, and many actively advise against cold exposure for sufferers. Eerily's story inverts that entirely. The cold wasn't the problem. Her relationship to the cold was the problem.
The skeptical question is always: how do we know this isn't placebo? And honestly, for the purposes of your health, it doesn't much matter. If visualization and cognitive reframing produce measurable changes in peripheral blood flow — and there is evidence that they can — then the mechanism is real even if it's mediated through belief and expectation.
If you have Raynaud's or know someone who does, the starting point isn't cold plunges. It's nervous system regulation. Breathwork first — slow exhales to activate the parasympathetic branch. Then gradual, intentional exposure to cold stimuli while maintaining a curious rather than fearful internal state. Notice what your body does. Don't fight it. Observe it.
Eerily's insight — approaching the trigger from enthusiasm and curiosity rather than dread and fear — is a form of graduated exposure therapy that any good behavioral psychologist would recognize. The difference is she's applying it to a vascular condition rather than a phobia. Which points to something profound: the nervous system doesn't distinguish between types of threat. A feared dog and a feared cold snap activate the same cascade. And the same tools that undo phobias can undo conditioned autonomic responses.
Here's what strikes me most. The people we most celebrate in cold therapy — the ones who seem to thrive in ice water — aren't just physically tough. They've fundamentally changed their relationship to cold as a concept. They've moved from cold-as-threat to cold-as-signal. That cognitive reframe isn't just motivational framing. It may be the actual mechanism. Eerily's recovery from Raynaud's and Wim Hof's cold mastery may be arriving at the same place from different directions — both learning that the nervous system follows the story you tell it about what's happening.