What Robbie Bent stumbled onto in that Toronto backyard wasn't just a wellness trend. It was something much older and more fundamental: shared ordeal as the foundation of human connection. The Othership story is interesting not because of its growth metrics — 4,000 members, a hundred thousand in digital revenue, 3,000 app reviews — but because of what drove that growth. They weren't selling contrast therapy. They were selling belonging.
The core claim here is subtle but important: community isn't a nice feature of a contrast therapy experience. It's the mechanism. Othership built an audience before they built a studio, and that sequencing wasn't an accident. It reflects something real about what happens when people go through ice and heat together.
There's a reason that the post-cold experience feels so open, so socially porous. When you step out of an ice bath, your sympathetic nervous system has just flooded you with norepinephrine and epinephrine. Then the parasympathetic rebound hits — heart rate drops, cortisol falls, endorphins rise. You're in a state of neurological reset. Your social defenses are down. Your threat-processing circuitry is quiet. And in that window, the person next to you on the bench isn't a stranger anymore.
This isn't woo-woo. It's hormesis applied to social chemistry. The shared stress of cold exposure — the anticipation, the entry, the threshold moment — creates a genuine "shared ordeal" that social psychologists have documented for decades as one of the fastest ways to build trust between people. Soldiers, athletes, firefighters all describe it. Othership just figured out how to bottle it in a sauna studio.
Most contrast therapy research focuses on the individual: cardiovascular adaptation, inflammation markers, cortisol reduction, brown fat activation. The community dimension is almost entirely absent from the academic literature. That's a gap worth naming. The Finnish sauna studies tracked health outcomes over years, but they didn't measure what happened socially in that birch-paneled room between sessions.
Bent's insight — that contrast therapy can be "class-driven and community-driven" — hasn't been validated by controlled research yet. But it aligns with everything we know about how humans process stress and reward. The parasympathetic rebound after cold or heat doesn't just feel good. It makes you receptive. Grateful. Present. Those are exactly the conditions under which genuine human connection happens.
If you're doing cold plunges alone, you're getting the physiology. But you're leaving the most powerful part of the protocol on the table. Find two or three people and do it together. The anticipation, the mutual commitment, the shared discomfort — these amplify the experience in ways that solo practice simply can't replicate. It doesn't have to be a studio. A backyard horse trough worked for Othership.
Bent mentions going bankrupt on a previous company — raised money, went fast, failed. Then he started Othership by going slow, building community first, living the values before monetizing them. That arc mirrors the hormesis principle almost exactly. Too much stress too fast breaks you down. Controlled, intentional exposure builds resilience over time.
The most interesting wellness businesses tend to operate the same way their protocols do. Patience. Consistency. Trust the adaptation. Othership didn't scale a marketing funnel. They kept filling the trough until people started showing up on their own.