Sometimes, a brisk cold shower is exactly what you need to kickstart your day. But what if that shower also reduced your total number of sick days? It sounds like one should have nothing to do with the other, and yet, a team of Swiss researchers found that regularly taking cold showers led to a 26 percent drop in sick days.
According to research from the University of Basel, psychologist Dr. Lena Glaser gave herself a difficult task for her doctoral dissertation: so many of our modern routines are environmentally harmful, but there had to be some kind of advantages to doing the environmentally friendly thing, right?
Everyone loves taking a hot shower, but if you needed to take a cold one to protect the environment, could you reap any physiological benefits from making that switch? Turns out, yeah, they’re kind of is.
People Who Took Cold Showers Reported 26% Fewer Sick Days in a New Study
Glaser asked 719 healthy participants to blast themselves with ice-cold tap water every day for 12 weeks. As expected, a lot of them tapped out within two weeks because it sounds absolutely miserable. But those who remained reported 26 percent fewer sick days and a 31 percent drop in missed workdays compared to those who took warm showers. They also reported better overall mental health.
The study relied on self-reported data, so it had no physiological component. For instance, no bloodwork was done. This means much of it could be the placebo effect; it could be the knowledge of having survived a frigid blast first thing in the morning. Over the course of the trial, the participants saved around 8.8 metric tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of driving a car 36,000 miles, and all by refusing to take a hot shower, though none of this was based on a reading of a home’s energy meter.
Luckily, according to Glaser, there is a middle ground between an environmentally unfriendly, soothing hot shower and an environmentally friendly but teeth-chattering cold shower: just turn down the heat a little. Ensuring that your water isn’t scalding hot every time can cut emissions, save you money, and maybe tack on a few healthier days.
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