What Jen Thompson is really asking us to reconsider is the grammar of resilience. Most of us speak about it as a nounâsomething you have or don't have, a fixed quantity issued at birth. Thompson reframes it as a verb. Resilience is something you practice, accumulate, and refine through repeated exposure to discomfort. The cold isn't the point. The point is the signal it sends: that you can meet something hard, stay present through it, and come out the other side without catastrophe. That signal, repeated often enough, rewires the default threshold at which your nervous system decides something is unmanageable.
This aligns closely with what Andrew Huberman has documented around cold exposureâspecifically, that the immediate adrenaline cascade triggered by cold water creates a controlled stress environment. Unlike ambient life stress, which arrives without warning and often without resolution, cold is a ritual with a clear beginning and end. You step in. You breathe. You step out. The endorphin release that follows isn't incidental; it's the body's way of logging a successful adaptation. Over time, that log becomes a record of competence. Multiple 30-day cold shower studies reinforce this: participants report measurable improvements in mood and stress tolerance that extend well beyond the shower itself and into the texture of ordinary days.
There's a productive tension in this space. Some practitioners argue the physical benefits alone justify the protocolâcirculation, inflammation, metabolic response. Thompson's contribution, and where she parts from a purely physiological reading, is her insistence that the transfer from body to mind isn't automatic. Intention matters. Without the meditation and reflection she layers into the practice, cold exposure risks becoming just another thing you endure rather than a genuine training ground for psychological equilibrium. That distinction is worth sitting with.
"Cold doesn't build resilience by itself. Reflection does. The cold just gives you something worth reflecting on."
â WimIf you're new to this: finish your next three showers cold. Not the whole showerâjust the last ninety seconds. While the cold runs, breathe slowly and observe what your mind does. Notice where it wants to escape to. That noticing is the practice. That's where the clarity lives.
Here's what I find genuinely interesting: the sanctuary Thompson describesâthat quiet after the cold, that felt sense of having met something and survivedâis structurally identical to what long-form meditators report after a difficult sit. The mechanism may differ, but the destination is the same. Cold is, in this sense, a physical door into a psychological room that contemplative traditions have been pointing at for centuries. Thompson just gives you a faster key.