Jesse Coomer's central argument is deceptively simple: cold exposure is primarily a psychological practice. Ninety percent of cold training happens in your head before your body ever touches the water. That's not a dismissal of the physiology — it's an acknowledgment of where the real barrier sits. The body can handle cold far better than the mind believes it can.
Coomer came to this through lived experience — anxiety, a sedentary life, a chance encounter with the Wim Hof Method in 2014. What changed for him wasn't the cold itself. It was the decision to stop resisting it.
The knowledge base backs him up on the biological side. We have papers on cold acclimation showing measurable improvements in insulin sensitivity — in some studies, type 2 diabetic patients completing cold protocols showed significantly better glucose processing afterward. The mechanism involves brown adipose tissue activation, mitochondrial signaling, and a cascade of thermogenic adaptations that don't require extreme temperatures or extreme durations to trigger.
What's striking about that research compared to Coomer's experience is the convergence point: both paths lead to the same conclusion. The science says your body changes with repeated cold exposure. Coomer says your identity changes. These aren't contradictory — they're the same transformation viewed from different angles.
The area where practitioners diverge is around protocol intensity. Coomer progressed to ten-minute cold showers daily. The Finnish research, and much of the academic cold acclimation literature, works with shorter durations — five to fifteen minutes, several times per week — and finds robust dose-response effects at those levels. More isn't always better. The adaptation signal gets sent early. What extends beyond that is largely psychological, which, per Coomer's thesis, is exactly the point.
The community element he mentions — "when you find other comrades, it's a lot more fun" — is underappreciated in the clinical literature. But it tracks with everything we know about adherence. People maintain hard practices longer when they're shared. The social layer may be what converts a temporary experiment into a permanent ritual.
Start with cold showers. Not ice baths, not frozen lakes. End your normal shower with two minutes of cold water. The physiology begins immediately — norepinephrine release, brown fat activation, cardiovascular adaptation. The psychology also begins immediately. That's where the real work is. Do it consistently for three weeks before you evaluate whether it's working.
Here's what I find most interesting about Coomer's trajectory: he came to cold exposure to manage anxiety, not for performance. And the mechanism that explains why it works for anxiety — the controlled, voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system in a safe context — is the same mechanism that explains the metabolic benefits. You're training your nervous system to tolerate stress signals without catastrophizing. That generalization extends beyond cold water. The equanimity you build in the plunge follows you out of it.