Jacob Mark's conversation is making an argument that often gets lost in the cold exposure literature: that the real transformation happening in an ice bath isn't primarily physiological. It's relational. Your relationship to discomfort, to nature, to your own internal state. The cold is a teacher, not just a stressor.
This is worth sitting with. Because most of what gets written about cold therapy — including some of the best research in the knowledge base — focuses on the neurochemistry. Norepinephrine spikes. Brown fat activation. Immune modulation. All of it real, all of it meaningful. But Jacob is pointing at something older and harder to measure.
The physiological case for cold exposure is solid. We know from the 2014 PNAS research that trained practitioners can suppress inflammatory responses to endotoxin challenge — fever, vomiting, misery — simply through deliberate breath work and cold conditioning. The sympathetic nervous system learns. Adrenaline becomes a tool rather than a reflex.
But what Jacob is describing with addiction recovery and mindfulness lands differently when you read that alongside the research. Chronic stress keeps cortisol chronically elevated. Elevated cortisol erodes sleep, mood, and impulse control — exactly the terrain where addiction takes hold. Cold exposure followed by deliberate warming is one of the few non-pharmaceutical interventions that measurably drops cortisol over time. Not just transiently. Structurally.
The tension I see in this space is between the mechanism-focused researchers and the practitioner-coaches like Jacob. The researchers want protocols, doses, temperatures, durations. The coaches want you to develop a relationship with the practice. Both camps are right. Both camps underestimate the other.
Jacob's "less is more" framing is genuinely important. The research on hormesis is unambiguous: the right dose builds resilience, too much breaks you down. A new practitioner who forces themselves through daily cold plunges, ignoring signals from their body, isn't building discipline. They're accumulating stress debt. The nervous system doesn't care about your intentions.
Start cold, end warm. Three sessions per week, not seven. Two to three minutes at the most uncomfortable temperature you can tolerate with calm breathing — not the coldest temperature you can physically survive. The goal is to practice staying present, not to prove something. If you're white-knuckling it with clenched jaw and held breath, you're training tension, not resilience.
Jacob's background as a firefighter is worth more attention than the article gives it. Shift work is among the most physiologically damaging schedules a human can maintain — circadian disruption, cortisol dysregulation, elevated cardiovascular risk. The fact that he turned to the Wim Hof Method to mitigate those effects is a data point. This isn't a practice built for the leisured and the optimized. It's a practice that works for people under real structural stress. That's a wider population than most wellness content acknowledges.