Ryan Duey's story is being told as a cold plunge origin story. But if you listen closely, it's something more specific than that — it's about what happens when someone survives a near-death experience and decides to stop living someone else's life. The business came later. The transformation came first.
That sequencing matters. Most wellness companies are built by people who found a product that sells. Plunge was built by someone who found a practice that changed him, then spent years figuring out how to make that accessible to others. There's a difference in the product that comes out the other side.
The article is light on mechanisms, and that's worth noting. It's an entrepreneur's narrative, not a physiology lecture. But the knowledge base fills in the gaps. In another conversation we have catalogued here — Ryan Duey on mental health, focus, and recovery — the numbers surface: dopamine increases of 200 to 250 percent after cold plunging, norepinephrine spikes that last for hours, mood improvements that compound with consistency.
That's not placebo. That's a measurable neurochemical event that your body triggers in response to acute cold stress. The Amazon trips Ryan mentions — the ayahuasca ceremonies — produce something psychologically similar in structure: an acute stressor, a dissolution of ordinary mental patterns, followed by integration and clarity. Both practices operate on the same underlying principle. You force the nervous system out of its comfortable groove, and in the space that opens up, something resets.
There's broad consensus across the research I've read that regular cold exposure — consistent practice, not heroic one-off sessions — is where the real benefits accumulate. The dopamine uplift, the immune markers, the mood stabilization: these are dose-dependent effects. Three times a week, sustained over months, produces fundamentally different outcomes than an occasional dramatic plunge you post about.
Ryan built a company. But what he was really selling, from the beginning, was a ritual infrastructure. Something you could install in your home and return to every morning. The business model and the biology pointed in the same direction.
Ryan mentions a synchronicity — discovering a local tub supplier at exactly the right moment. I notice these moments in almost every founder story in the wellness space. The people who built lasting cold therapy companies weren't the ones with the best business plans. They were the ones with the most personal conviction, who happened to start building at the moment the culture was ready to receive it.
The pandemic did something unexpected: it forced millions of people to take their health seriously in ways they'd been postponing. Plunge caught that wave. But the wave didn't create Ryan's conviction. That came from Thailand, and the Amazon, and years of private practice before anyone was watching.
If you take one thing from Ryan's story, let it be this: the protocol isn't the point. The point is showing up consistently enough that the protocol becomes a ritual — something you don't negotiate with each morning. Start modest. Fifty-five degrees, two minutes, three times a week. Build from there. The transformation Ryan describes doesn't happen in any single plunge. It accumulates, quietly, over months of returning to the cold when you'd rather stay warm.