Ryan Duey's story is fundamentally about one thing: a man who was suffering — 25 to 30 days of migraines every month — and found something that worked when nothing else did. After 18 days of cold plunging, the migraines stopped. That's not a marginal effect. That's a life-altering one.
The business story is interesting, but I want to stay with the biology for a moment, because the migraine finding deserves more than a passing mention. Cold exposure triggers a rapid vasoconstriction of peripheral blood vessels, followed by vasodilation during rewarming. For people whose migraines are tied to vascular dysregulation — abnormal blood vessel reactivity — this cycle of constriction and expansion appears to help train the vasculature toward more stable responses. It's not a guaranteed mechanism, and we need more clinical data. But it's not magic, either. It's physiology.
What Ryan describes — that feeling of being "cognizant and alert and clear" immediately after a cold plunge — is well-documented. Cold water immersion causes a sharp spike in norepinephrine, sometimes 200 to 300 percent above baseline. Norepinephrine is the brain's focus molecule. It sharpens attention, reduces mental noise, and elevates mood. The feeling Ryan is describing is neurochemistry, not willpower.
Huberman's work in the knowledge base covers this extensively. The cascade is predictable: cold hits the skin, the sympathetic nervous system fires, epinephrine and norepinephrine flood the bloodstream, circulation increases, and the body shifts into a state of heightened alertness. The question isn't whether this happens — it does — the question is how to use it intentionally.
Ryan's framing — that cold plunging is for everyone, not just athletes — is correct, but it needs context. The recovery application and the mental health application are different mechanisms, and they require different approaches. Athletes using cold for muscle recovery should be careful about timing: research suggests that cold water immersion immediately after strength training can blunt hypertrophy by suppressing the inflammatory response that drives adaptation. The discomfort that signals "it's working" for recovery may actually be interference for strength gains.
For mental health, mood regulation, and chronic conditions like migraines? The calculus is different. There's no adaptation penalty there. The neurochemical benefits are real and cumulative.
Start shorter than you think you need. Two minutes at a genuinely cold temperature — under 60 degrees Fahrenheit — is more valuable than five minutes in lukewarm water. What you're after is the neurochemical response, and that requires a real temperature stimulus. Three sessions per week is enough to see measurable changes in mood and focus within two to three weeks.
What I find most interesting about the Plunge story is the community dimension. Ryan mentions wanting to be around like-minded people as a core motivation. This isn't incidental. Social connection and shared ritual amplify the physiological benefits of practices like cold exposure — the accountability, the shared experience, the meaning-making that comes from doing hard things together. The contrast therapy center model, where people gather to do cold and heat together, is tapping into something ancient. The biology is real. But so is the belonging.