You do not have time for this. You do not have time to sit in a 200-degree box, as if you were a slice of leftover pizza. You do not have time to spend a half-hour in a hotter-than-even-standard sauna, then immerse yourself in a bath of water that is extremely frozen if not actual ice, shocking the eggshell of your sanity from the membrane of your gelatinous insides. You — meaning I, who have lately been thinking of myself as a you — truly do not want to do what is called cold-plunging.
And yet, when cold-plunging becomes so ubiquitous than you make a joke about it vis-à-vis the inanity of a bored existence to your friend Maria, Maria tells you that she has been going four times a week. Four. Times. A. Week. In your memory, she tells you this gripping your shoulders, though that can’t be right. She definitely does, however, look deeply into your face and say, “It cured me.” Of what, you ask. Of … everything, she says, and begins to list the ways that cold-plunging has helped. And yes, this aligns with what people have been telling you. That cold-plunging, it cures you. It cures inflammation, panic attacks. It cures food-control issues, life-control issues. Depression, rage, arthritis, eczema.
And, well: You have stress. You have inflammation. A few months ago, you had your first panic attack in years. You are, lately, feeling held together by chewing gum and inertia. In this state, your snideness and irony dissipate and you begin to wonder if despair is a thing that can be heated up, melted down and washed away.
So you tell Maria, Let’s make a date.
To be clear, there’s little to back up anyone’s claims. You could point to some analyses about muscle recovery and stress reduction, but you would not want to mislead the reader into thinking that what you were able to find was particularly compelling or comprehensive. All the studies you read use the words “slightly” or “marginally,” so including them here would just be a trick to suggest that science has gotten involved. It hasn’t. Scientific research is mostly fueled by the need to sell drugs that will cure diseases, and society is not yet dumb enough to pay more than the $5-a-bag market rate for ice.
You go on a Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. That is the time, Maria says, just before the place takes on a club vibe. You buy a three-pack — a plunge at what is called a “contrast therapy spa” can run you north of $50 in Manhattan — because you love a bargain and just in case and Maria says that trying it means you have to do this two days in a row in order to really get it.
You enter and change into your bathing suit. Then you enter the sauna, the hottest place you’ve ever been — here you mean yes, it feels like 200 degrees but also “people in their 20s in bikinis are just sitting there” hot. A side note is that you have lived in New York most of your life, and so you do understand income disparity. But it is something else to realize that the place is filled, packed, and that the entire process takes 90 minutes — that all these people were just … available in the middle of a Wednesday.
The methodology goes like this: Sit in the cedar sauna for 20 to 30 minutes, until you are starring in both “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Ishtar.” There’s a weird woolen hat you’re supposed to wear so that your brain and hair don’t fry. Again, you’re no scientist, but is that how you’re supposed to get your brain to not fry? A serene woman enters and breaks a “snowball” of different essential oils over the business end of the mechanism that heats the room and then waves a giant towel around so it sweeps over you and into your nostrils and your pores, which have been steamed to the size of manholes.
You leave and walk into the cold-plunge room, where, upon Maria’s advice, you don’t wade in, you just do it.
You plunge.
The ice comes in like a hundred knives and you are so deeply unhappy, but then so deeply scared because none of this feels right. Why did you do this to yourself? Do you hate yourself? Does everyone else here hate themselves? This line of thinking only buys you 20 seconds or so, and so you are back to watching a giant clock as the seconds tick backward. You sit in the water for two full minutes, because you are a journalist and some of your colleagues are sent into war zones.
In those two minutes, you ask yourself existential questions about what time even is, what a body even is, what a feeling even is. It’s just a sensation, right? But knowing that pain — and there is pain — is just a sensation does not help you right now because that took three seconds to figure out and you still have a wild wagon-train trip to California to go.
Did you mention that there’s a man with a ukulele there? He appears to work for this cold-plunge outfit, and he is wearing that dumb hat and quietly strumming — is that? — Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”? You love that song and have never enjoyed it less. Your hatred for this man only buys seven or eight more seconds, and as you cast your mind about, looking for something else to get you through, a strange thing happens.
You no longer care.
And then Maria calls it! Two minutes! It’s over! And you return to the sauna to repeat the cycle all over again.
The next day, you return with Maria, and now you stay in the cold plunge for three minutes because you can. You go through the two cycles. But the second time, you leave the tub and suddenly you feel so good, so shiny, so glorious. Something has happened to you — something has happened to me — and I am a bright spark of energy and happiness. I stand in my stupid wool hat and my wet bathing suit and I’m not cold, I’m just alive again. And I hug Maria, wet in her bathing suit, and you would think I would cry with the amount of emotion that welled in me but instead I feel such joy, such absolute wholeness — I feel as if I will never in my life cry again. My body has forgotten how to be sad or worried.
Now it’s a month later and I swear that this was all true when I thought it. And yet, as I get away from the experience, I roll my eyes about it. I say it’s all black magic and naked emperors. I forget what I knew when I was in there, which is that I don’t always need to explain how the thing that I enjoy is enjoyable, how the thing that helped me is helpful. I forget how, two days later, my knees didn’t hurt when I climbed the stairs. I forget that I am not so Calvinist that everything I partake in has to be helpful. And I put off writing this as long as I could because I do not want to be reminded of things that can happen when I make time for them, when I take a chance on something with no guarantees. I don’t want to be asked to make sense of it, because it doesn’t make sense. But I did buy that three-pack, and I’m going to go back again and I don’t want to hear a word about it.
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