#2 Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (Part 1)

I think the cold exposure and the breathing are helping. Certain the weightlifting is helping. Now that I'm able to do that again, it stops me from being able to become anxious. I'm not healthy. I'm still running only at about 50%. And so— and I'll do anything to fix this. He holds 26 world records for achievements that for most people seem impossible and dangerous.

The cold is my teacher. To me, It's like God.

He might well be one of the most unique humans currently alive. Wim Hof is changing scientists' understanding of how the body works.

I created a method. The components are breathing, mindset, and cold.

Wim Hof, the Iceman.

Hi guys, I'm Wim, Wim Hof, and every time I go into the unknown, through my podcasts, exploring, exploring life into the depth, breaking the ice to go where nobody has gone before.

You're listening to the Wim Hof Podcast, a Monk Studios original.

And on my side, my son Einar. He's here to keep me on track, which he's not able to do, by the way, but He will try it, and together we got a great chemistry. And we got Ann, our producer. She makes things really work.

Today's guest is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a clinical psychologist. He began to receive widespread attention in 2010 for his views on cultural and political issues. He's a successful author and has sold over 4 million copies, and his new book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life was an instant number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list when released this March.

So, Dad, I asked the team of Jordan to do this podcast with you because you told me, like, after the last encounter you had on his daughter's podcast together with him, that you guys had a couple of things in common. And I, yeah, I was like, you guys have a couple of things in common?

What are you talking about?

But Can you say something?

Kind of strange, it almost looks like. But we met on a sub level. Like, he's the voice of the depth. He's the voice of so much what is going on. Only he gives it the voice. And that's why so many people love it. Love to hear him. And sometimes he is even, you know, you can't understand. His speed, his knowledge. But what is most intriguing is the depth where he comes from. It's old wisdom, and it comes in a new way to us. And I recognize that. And then talking about science, hey, they say I'm not a scientist, but I'm a digger. And I've been digging as deep as the Ancestral genetic codes and proteins is where we came together. He understood where I come from, from the fieldwork of 40 years of fieldwork outside in nature, and he did clinical research for 40 years. And that is coming together like two hands, and they understand each other from the depth.

So I thought it was a great guess to invite because as you guys had something in common after your last encounter.

Oh yes. Last time I— and that was the first time I met him in a speech. I recognized his soul. He's a rock. He is the voice of the depth coming to us and his physical health. Hey, maybe there, but physically also he is a rock. And I'm good in that, to bring that back, the physical part. You know, the cold and the breathing, that's all physical. So let knowledge and knowledge of the physiology come together. That is what is going to happen. So I made him a poem about the Jordan River, biblical. It goes deep, it goes there at the shores of Petra. Which is the stone, the stone temple.

Well, that's great timing because Jordan is here, guys.

There he is. The last time we met on the 21st of December, we did this breathing. And these— I'm curious if you kept on exercising that month just to see the physiological reactions therefrom. Within your physiology?

So yes, I probably did the breathing exercises for 2 weeks after we first talked. And then as well as the cold exposure in a shower. And then I stopped for about a month and then I started again. And so I've been doing it regularly now every day, twice a day for the last 2 months, but I'm not sure I'm doing it right. So what I do is I, in the shower twice a day, I expose myself to cold water for 30 seconds while I'm breathing out and in 30 times. Then I breathe all the way out, then I hold my breath, and I seem to be able to hold my breath for about 60 seconds, although I'm trying to push that. And I do that twice a day. So does that seem about right?

Yes, and we can tune more. I thank you for prolonging the, you know, the discipline. And yeah, I got great respect for you. And it accumulated through the months because I did not know who you were before. I heard it of my wife that you were a very renowned person in the world talking about great subjects into the depth. And so, but that once I began to psychically get to know you, It only grew from there. And I see, like, you got your hardships. You are a person. You are in the world. And they say here in the Netherlands, high trees catch a lot of wind. And that's what you did. It's very courageous what you did. So I made a poem, a poem just to show my respect for you as according to what I feel. And this is the way I wrote it down this morning. The Jordan River, son of Peter, the gate to the heavens and back. It must have been a long journey working the stones of wisdom past the callus of your hands. Rest, your mighty being. More to come, no sentiment. Just love. Corona times, no confusion. The crown. Where dwelleth thy presence. To be aware and lead. For the myth has cleared like clouds by the sun. Oh, son of Peter, the Jordan flows. This is what I wrote as what I feel for your presence and being.

Well, thank you. I certainly didn't expect that. And I would like you to send that to me by email, if you would.

Yes, sir.

It's much appreciated.

Wim, I love it how you wrote down this poem on a piece of paper that on the other side seems to be your grocery list.

Grocery list? Yes. The best things, they come up spontaneous. You don't know where. It's on toilet paper. But, you know, it changes the history. And that's the way it goes, by epiphanies.

Yes, and you have to write them down when they occur or you risk losing them.

Exactly, yes, sir.

Yeah, I have to get up in the middle of the night sometimes, not so much lately, but when I'm actively writing because I'll think something through and then I know if I don't get up and write it down that, you know, you don't remember everything, that's to say the least, and so you lose it. You have to catch those things when they happen. You said about bravery, you know, and people comment to me about that fairly often, but I'm loath to accept that terminology because I think I, partly because of my training as a clinical psychologist, I can, I believe I have the facility to detect future trouble. And so the reason that I've said the things I've said, say politically, is because I think that not saying them will cause a lot more trouble than saying them. And so it's more like what I think of as properly placed fear than it is bravery. I talked to this girl yesterday who is a refugee from North Korea. She has a very harrowing story, to say the least. And she wrote a book called "In Order to Live," and her name is Yun Mi Park. And she talked to me about North Korea, and then she talked to me about going to Columbia University. And she said she wasn't able to freely speak her mind in North Korea or at Columbia University, which was very distressing to hear, but You know, I asked her what she thought contributed to the rise of the totalitarian state in North Korea at the individual level, and she said that it was people's unwillingness to say what they thought. They kept quiet when they should have said something. And so, and that produced a catastrophe. And it's not like that's the only place where that's happened. And so that's how I view my impulse to speak. It's not courage. It's it's properly placed fear. I hope that's the case anyways.

Sounds great. I remember riding my bike through Amsterdam after I had been on television showing for the first time in medical history to voluntarily being able to deeply influence into the autonomic nervous system which was considered to be outside of the will of humans, and the innate immune system after taking bacteria injected within me. And that came into the journal that is the news. And I thought the other day, riding my bike through Amsterdam, I saw these images like a gunshot with a silencer on the roof of a dangerous person that could jeopardize the institution of pharmacy, because there's a natural method to make people able to tap into the immune system, which was considered to be not done, and the autonomic nervous system. That means really deep. And that changes the perspective of what we as humans can do. And then at that moment, I saw that like Hollywood kind of images. And then a cleaning party popping a bullet in my head. This was the image I got. It's like fear, but then I said, "No, I'm not gonna succumb to that fear. I'm gonna keep on going because I will not be able to live with that fear and silence myself and to listen to, 'Oh, sorry, I maybe woken up a big giant here or something.'" No, I don't wanna live by fear. I live by faith. The right to know what is my soul and pass that on to my children and to everybody else in the world.

So Jordan, do you recognize this? Have you ever felt unsafe?

Well, it's actually happened. So I mean, I've been attacked a lot online. That's not in public, but we'll get to that. I've been attacked online constantly.. And it's very unpleasant. You know, I've watched people who become the target of moderate-sized Twitter mobs, let's say of 20 to 30 people commenting very negatively about something they've said and sometimes attempting to threaten their livelihoods, especially if they're professors, sometimes if they're journalists. And, you know, people are very likely to react with high levels of fear and guilt and shame and to backpedal very rapidly and to apologize. And it's quite shocking to be the subject of an attack by a group of people, even if it's mediated online. In public, I've been in the center of very agitated demonstrations on university campuses in particular, and that's exceedingly stressful. You know, I don't particularly show how stressed I am in those situations. I'm on high alert in terms of my attention and watching everything, you know, and I've been in relatively extreme situations emotionally as a clinical psychologist, so I'm somewhat used to that. But after a particularly threatening demonstration at Queen's University, there was 250 of us sitting inside a building that was quite a lot like a church. It had rows of seats and stained glass windows along the side. I was speaking there with a law professor And as I said, there was about 250 people in the audience and the speakers up front, and there was a mob outside, and they climbed up on the stained glass windows and pounded on them non-stop for the whole 90 minutes that we were in there and barricaded the doors, commenting as they did so that it would be quite lovely if the building caught on fire and none of us could get out. And the Talk was interrupted by protesters who draped banners and who yelled from inside and sprinkled the crowd with water, I presume, while they walked out. And then afterwards, on the way back to my car, one of the main demonstrators from inside the crowd, a man who stood up in the middle of the talk and started to yell his own viewpoint, let's say, He was in my face, a foot and a half away from me, extremely aggressive and hostile for as I walked for 2.5 blocks with my son beside me. And I had security guards from the campus with me, but they didn't have any idea what to do. They weren't trained for that sort of thing. And he was extremely aggressive and hostile, and it never came to any— I mean, I He really did enrage me, you know, particularly because my son was there, but also because of the way he was behaving, and he was so provocative. And at the same demonstration, one of the people pounding on the glass windows broke them and started to bleed, and the police arrested her later, and she had a garrote on her in her purse.

And so—

A garrote? Yes, I've been Yes, it's like a rope that you would put around someone's neck, a string, a wire, a real wire. Yeah, oh yes, it's not a defensive weapon, it's a murder weapon. And you know, it was all in good fun, of course, except for the garrote, let's say. And so, but I should say, when I'm out in public, people are invariably extremely polite to me, and I've had virtually nothing but positive encounters with people on the street. And I never encountered anything that was dangerous on my tour. I went to about 160 cities, and there were crowds of anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 people, and they all went very, very peacefully. And so I haven't worried about it. People have come to my home But they've been okay so far. I haven't worried about it, you know. It's happened to me, but it hasn't made me afraid of being attacked. I think if I was attacked, then I'd be afraid of being attacked, you know, but so far that hasn't been a fear.

Did it damage your belief?

Well, look, my last week I was written into a comic book. Captain America comic book by a radical leftist writer. I was written into the comic book as this magical supervillain Nazi, Red Skull, who's like the worst criminal in the whole Marvel comic universe. And that caused quite an uproar publicly and also in my household because it was very stressful when it first occurred. I came across it on Twitter. Someone alerted me to the existence of the comic and I looked into it and concluded, as this person did, that I was being parodied or slandered or, you know, or accurately represented, I suppose, depending on your viewpoint. But those sorts of things throw me for a loop and certainly throw my whole family for a loop. You know, it's very distressing to my wife and to my kids and I mean, it's happened dozens and dozens of times, but each time it happens, you know, we're aware that this could be the time where one of these slanderous mischaracterizations succeeds, in which case it's a complete catastrophe. We maneuvered our way around— through that, let's say, not around, through it. Very, very carefully, and I think very successfully, we produced— well, I won't go into the details, but look, but then I talked to my wife because I'm going to answer your question here. My wife afterwards, you know, she said, I'd like some peace in our house. And I listened to her, you know, she wants some peace, and she has gone through hellish health problems in the last couple of years. She was at death's doorstep for months on end, and amidst many other very complicated life events, let's say, happening at the same time, she said, I really want peace in my house, and this keeps happening. And I thought about that a lot. I mean, I think about it all the time, but you know, peace is not that easy to attain. And she has children and she has grandchildren and she wants peace for them too. And that means that not only does our household have to be peaceful, but so does our city and our country and Western society and hopefully the world. All of that peace, you know. And so you can't just hide in your house and hope for peace. And she wasn't saying that. My wife isn't that naive by any stretch of the imagination. But I could hypothetically withdraw, although practically it's impossible because this is my life and you can't just withdraw from your life. That isn't how life works. Practically, hypothetically, I could pull back, but that doesn't address the underlying problem. I mean, you know, I told you just at the beginning of this conversation that I talked to this young author, this heroic survivor, uh, emigre from North Korea. You know, when I asked her specifically about her experience at Columbia University because she sacrificed so much to get there, I said, surely— and I meant this question genuinely— I said, surely in the entire 4 years that you studied humanities at Columbia University, there must have been one class There must have been one professor who rose up above the rest and taught you something of value where you felt that you'd been enlightened and ennobled as a consequence of the teaching. You know, and she's read. She knows the difference between a high-quality book and a low-quality book. She was profoundly influenced by George Orwell's Animal Farm. And she couldn't bring a single class, course, or professor to mind. And so what does that have to do with peace? It's like, well, those institutions aren't functioning the way they used to. They've been taken over by an ideology that's resentful and shallow and bitter and wrong and based on lies. And there's no peace when that's happening. Exactly.

So I can see, I can see. So they say in the Netherlands, maybe also in Budo, they say the attack is the best defense to bring peace home. And that means go and live your passionate, purposeful Yeah, whatever the goal is, and my goal is to kill or to attack or to get onto and control depression. That's my goal. I lost my wife in '95 after she was kissing her kids goodbye. She jumped from 8 stories down, and there I was without money with 4 children alone. And heartbroken. And I came from there, from the darkness. Out of there, I began to do this cold training, these deep breathing exercises. And where psychiatry could not treat her with all injections, therapies, medicines and pills and all, I, I had to be there for my children. So I survived because my children had to survive and the cold water, it healed me. And now 20 years later or 25 years later, or it was 3 years ago in Detroit, Detroit near to Toronto, just over the border there, Wayne State University with Professor Divakar and Professor Music, we did We showed in brain scans the ability to go into the deepest part of the brain, which was considered to be not done by humans, and robustly activate, say, the periaqueductal gray hemisphere, which is the place of the opioids and the cannabinoids and all the serotonin and dopamine, anything you need for feeling or regulating your mood in very distressful situations.

Central to pain control.

Yes. And for mood regulation. This is what they said, and they published it. This is psychology over physiology, which I want to give to you here as an entrance, sort of coming from nature. I'm a nature man. I look like Timberlake. I go to the lake and I get it done, you know? That's me. But in the meanwhile, I'm thinking too. And I brought those thoughts to science. And appears to be that in nature, our answers, which we are not capable of finding within, say, city limits, or in our comfort zone behavior, it had to be somebody who was hit so deeply with the love of his life, being gone, staying back, going into an intuitive practice that could still its mind, his mind, it was mine, 'cause the only thing you can do when you go into the cold water is survive. It suddenly then disconnects from this internal agony, which is a heartbroken being and why, why, why, why all the time. That stopped and it brought me apparently into this deep activation of deeper parts of the brain, which is also the seed of the emotion. And emotion, when it is hurt, it should be healed. But we don't know in our society how to get there because we always live in comfort zone behavior. What you did with your 12 rules Beyond Order, and the first one is giving people a A way to learn to control from within. And we came together the last time on the genomes, how to get into the genomes, which is connected with the deepest part of the brain where we are able to learn how to deal with trauma, not only of this life, but also of past lives. This is total new science, but this is the way they, they, they published it in this paper. It says, now we have the compelling evidence of the key components of the autonomous processes in the brain related to mood regulation. So this is what we want— mood regulation within stressful situations. Could be heartbreak, heartbroken, mental stress, bacterial stress, viral stress, stress In the end is cell biological stress. And I come from nature. I go to brain scans, they take my blood, and I show we as humans have an innate capacity to deal with stress deeply.

And let me, let me ask you about the cold.

Okay. Yes, sir.

So I'm still not operating optimally. I was diagnosed this month with central sleep apnea. So it turns out that I was waking up about 25 times a an hour. And so now I'm using a breathing machine and that's probably— that's improved me from about 5% to about 50 or 60%. So it's made my life— it's transformed my life from impossible to just difficult. But I am using your cold exposure and I want to ask you some specific questions about that. Okay. So I stopped 2 weeks after we talked because I found because my nervous system is damaged and hypersensitive, I'm hyperacute to stimulation in general. I found the cold exposure extremely aversive. I know people do, but it was aversive enough so that I stopped doing it. And even now, although I'm back doing it, I have been for 2 months as I said, The water isn't ice cold. It's cold like a cold lake. It's not— I don't turn it all the way to cold. And it's still early enough in the year in Canada. So cold water would be, you know, 4 degrees, 5 degrees Celsius, something like that would be cold. I don't go all the way to cold. And I—

4 or 5 degrees is great.

Right, but I don't go that far down. I probably go to maybe 50 degrees Fahrenheit or maybe—

So 10 degrees is great. It's great still. It is thermogenesis. We want to use the cold to make the body's physiology in the depth going to work. That's what is happening.

And how crucial is the extreme cold? I mean, it's uncomfortable. The cold I expose myself to, it's cold. It's enough to shock me into that deep breathing pattern. You know, that kicks in right away when you jump into cold water. It's enough to shock me into that, although I'm also doing that voluntarily. And so that I do that for 30 inhalations and exhalations. Now you just suggested, you did the last time we talked too, that— but you expanded the story, I believe, this time. You said you were desperate. You were living for your kids. That you'd taken a really hard existential blow. And that you were fighting to survive. And your idea is that by exposing yourself to emergency conditions, essentially, which is the ice-cold exposure, that you're calling on these deep, deep mechanisms of survival to make themselves manifest. And that that generalizes to other— hypothetically generalizes to other crisis situations in your life. It's a really interesting idea, you know, that And the periaqueductal gray that you referred to, that brain area, that's a very interesting brain area, and it is crucially responsible for pain responses, and depression and grief are pain-like responses. And so the fact that that area showed activation, was that as a consequence of a cold stressor, or how was that activated?

By going regularly into the cold, The person goes willfully, consciously, neurologically, then is connecting with the brainstem, with the periaqueductal, because you don't want to experience the pain in. And you will learn that you will be able very soon to not experience pain anymore or to neurologically connect with that area. And then when in daily stress comes in, then suddenly you find yourself being able to fend off the stress just at will, because that's what you have been exercising.

There's a very long history of depression in my family, and so I used antidepressants for 20 years after I started suffering from depression, especially in the winter. So it was seasonal affective disorder, and it got to the point where it was debilitating, and it hit my father as well and hit my daughter and a number of first cousins and aunts and uncles. It's very thoroughly populated on my father's side. And so, but I stopped taking antidepressants 5 years ago when I changed my diet because I was also suffering from autoimmune disorders of various sorts. And so it's a long story and lots of things happen, but I also used an anti-anxiety medication after a particularly severe immunological reaction, I think to something I ate, but I've never been able to be sure of it. And then I suffered from complications that were extremely severe when I tried to stop using the anti-anxiety drug. So, and that propelled me into, well, a terrible, terrible situation. I developed this condition called akathisia, which makes it impossible for you to ever relax. Ever. It's like being prodded by knives, like many knives. And you know how now and then you're sitting and you have this impulse, you have to move because your body tells you that you're, you know, that you're uncomfortable in that position, and so you move. Well, that happens all the time because you're shifting position constantly so you don't wear out your joints and your muscles. And well, Ramp that up by a factor of 1,000 and then make it happen every 5 seconds non-stop, and that's akathisia. And like, akathisia, the case reports indicate that people are driven to suicidal ideation within an hour of akathisia onset. It's that unbearable. And I had it all the time, although I did get— it's not quite true because it would improve through the day and I get some relief at night, and some people don't. I had it for 18 months. I'm in pain pretty much all the time, and it's quite severe. I think it's a consequence of neurological damage. So my feet, my hands in particular, feel like they're in extremely hot water all the time. And that varies. And, you know, sometimes I have it—

I got something for that. Those are the extremities. The feet and the hands, they have a different physiology. If you train them for 2 minutes in icy water and get them out and do this, the neurology of the hand is connected to the vasodilation, the opening and closing of veins. So if you only do the hands, then the rest of the body is not jeopardized with the cold, which is danger. Then the first thing that is going to be shut down, those are the extremities. They are going to be sacrificed. So right now, because of the neurology, for whatever sake it is, medicines, pills, this or stress or whatever, the first thing is, are the extremities that will be affected. And so The thing is, 2 minutes. I just had a woman, for example, listen to this example. A person comes, a bodybuilder, top of the world comes and his wife, he comes with his wife and he asked me, she has cancer, but she cannot be treated. She cannot be treated and she has no white cell count enough to be treated with chemo. She's not strong enough. And can you do something about it? I say, just go into doing this breathing and the cold showers. And I've been hearing so much anecdotal evidence of people with breast cancer, et cetera, and they had a low white cell account. Suddenly, within a week's time, just in a week's time, the white cell account multiplies by 10 times, 11. In her case, in 10 days, 11 times. 3 weeks after that, she was treated with chemo like on a regular basis because she had an enormous amount of white cells. And she's good now after 3 months.

Okay. No, it's interesting.

So, okay, so I'm almost there. Almost there. And now her mother, the mother of the guy, she She had these problems already for 20 years in her hands. Her hands, they always neuropathic pain because of the rigid vasoconstriction going on for 20 years, always having to suffering from a little blood flow. And she just did the 2 minutes and it's gone. I mean, I heard this many times. Oh, it's a whole department in many universities just to treat the extremities. They are into riddles while nature gives us very simple things and it, and it's all over. Why mystifying so much within a mental— from mental depressions to physical ailments to neuropathy. We have a possible innate, much deeper control within ourselves and it's waiting for us. And I'm trying to get this out. You do that. Through your great contemplations. They are outstanding, and sometimes I cannot follow where you all go because you're amazing. You go into these myriads and come back like a spider. You got all this, but I can feel what you have done. High trees catch a lot of wind. That's what you did, and now you've got physical consequences out of there. I think because I've been in nature, I see things simple. I bring this simplicity to you. Amen. I see that you got to take a little bit of herb of this and there is a tree and you take a little bit of the bark. It's out of experience. And that's what I see. So if you do put the hands 2 minutes in a bucket with ice water. Then the rest of the body will go okay.

I'm in a sauna, hot sauna for an hour, and I walk 7 miles, and then I work out for an hour, and it's a hard workout. And then in the shower, I use this very, very rough scrubbing device for about 20 minutes, and I do every square inch of my body. And my nerves seem to crave this hyperstimulation, and I've been using a massage machine for my feet, which I'm in about an hour a day. And I have this vibrating table, which is really well made. It's really powerful. And I've found— I've been experimenting with it since we talked— and I can stay on it for up to an hour. And it just vibrates extremely rapidly. And it's adjustable in terms of its speed. And I've learned that if I stand on it, or put my hands on it, or sit on it, that I can move the vibrations throughout my body with an accuracy of about 1 inch. Like I can get my little finger to vibrate or my fourth finger if I tense and relax. And that actually seems to be helping. And so, you know, when you weightlift, you have to push yourself to the point of some tissue destruction before you reap the benefits. So you do some creative destruction and then some regeneration. We talked last time, and I discussed with you the fact that in psychotherapy, especially behavioral therapy, but not only, you find out what people are afraid of and then you expose them to that voluntarily. You know, in graduated doses according to their ability to tolerate it. And that's radically curative. It's extremely effective for dealing with fear. And so you're doing the same thing with physical stress rather than say psychological stress. So like the pain system is older than the anxiety system. Anxiety is sort of a replacement for pain, right? Because you get afraid of things that might cause you pain. But pain is really deep and really, really old. And so I could add that 2 minutes. That's interesting. So you think I could put my hands in cold ice water? Would it be water with ice? Yes. And do the same with my feet?

Yes, exactly. They are part of each other.

Okay. And would I do that? What if I did that before bed? When would be the best time to do that, do you think?

Would be great. Would be great. Okay. Do you feel the breathing helps?

Well, look, the breathing machine has helped a lot. Like, it clearly moved me, like I said, from about 5% function to about 40 or 50. These machines, the massage machine, that helps. I can feel my feet and hands getting better. That's probably neurological damage from the withdrawal process, although I can't be sure. It's very complicated. My life has been really, really stressful for 5 years, and so I don't— emotionally and practically speaking, for a variety of reasons, Partly as a consequence of these sorts of attacks that I talk— like, my name has been in the press linked with, you know, horrible epithets constantly. And so— and then I've also been quite emotionally affected by all the people that I've interacted with, you know, because my book and my lectures got extremely popular and widespread and And so I hear a lot of people's intimate life stories in very brief bursts, and that's generally very positive in one sense because they're telling me because they're getting better and, you know, their lives are improving, and that's really good. It's really wonderful. But I've also been exposed to, like, what would you say, a surfeit of human psychological misery. And so that's also been overwhelming, I would say. And I can't tell how all of these things have come together. All the things I'm doing seem to be helping. I've only been using these machines for about a month, and I had no— nothing was helping me at all. I couldn't find any strategies that were giving me any relief before that. I think the cold exposure and the breathing are helping. I'm certain the weightlifting is helping now that I'm able to do that again. It stops me from being able to become anxious even if I'm worried about something. My physiology has settled enough because of the stress, I think, because I've stressed myself and then recovered so that that doesn't seem to go beyond a certain limit. But more, I'm not healthy. I'm still running only at about 50%. And so, and I'll do anything to fix this, including putting my hands in cold water for 2 minutes. I'll try that tonight. And my feet. That's a really good idea.

That's great. I mean, what you have written and what you have done, that's putting your neck out and going past your fears and write it so beautifully down and for everybody. It's a great guide. Now it's time for yourself, time for you, because you will be able, or you should be able, to do so much more in the future, not only for the world, but also, or more, for your own family and for yourself. So I'm a family man myself, 6 kids, and we have gone through tragedy and we have come back and now we are a world company and thriving and it's all great. But we know where we have been in that trauma and coming back out of the depression. Depression is our goal to relieve the world of depression and and make things happen which were not present when we lost our mother, my wife, our beloved. The whole of psychiatry was not able to do anything then. And now I hear so much anecdotal evidence of so many people who have been in such a long time in the darkness, in the depression, coming completely out of it. It is anecdotal, of course, but it is by the thousands. And I want studies. And I say to the— and I challenge the science all over. And we are doing the study right now on depression with the San Francisco University top researchers. It's coming out in June, the results on hormesis. And it works. This is the cold and the breathing. So I want to make sure that you actually are doing the breathing exercises well, because it is able to deeply activate the adrenal axis more than somebody who's going into, in fear, going into its first bungee jump. It has been compared, the blood proof, they compared both the studies of people going into their first bungee jump and people doing these breathing exercises. If they are done well, then there is much higher activation of adrenaline going through the body. And we know what adrenaline does when the activation is there. The adrenal glands, pituitary gland, hypothalamus, that axis, then it resets the body. And anything that is in the body that is not serving the functionality of the body because it faces the danger, that's why there is adrenaline. Will be expelled out of the body. And that, that made in 2014 all these people after 4 days of training able to change medical history because they were injected all with bacteria and they brought it down within a quarter of an hour. That is the adrenal axis activation. And I want to see how if you take it on, you with your knowledge, with your wisdom, With your experience and as a family man, you should be the best to be able to make the right interpretation of what this really is.

Well, there is a literature on dealing with chronic pain. And basically what behavioral psychologists do with people who are experiencing, say, chronic back pain is get them active again. And it's pushing them to and beyond their limits voluntarily that helps bring their pain under control over some time. And, you know, often if people are in pain, they have lower back pain, they want to rest. But the behavioral approach to pain management is activity, and it's certainly— well, and the data are quite clear that it's helpful. So now, exactly why it's helpful isn't clear, but the probability that it has something to do with relearning how to just act in the face of the pain and not being so afraid of the pain that it stops you, that's part of it. But part of it, I suspect, is also physiological. And so I'm very interested in the idea of voluntary limit pushing as a way of activating these deeper brain areas that you describe. I mean, there's no reason to assume that that's impossible, and it's a very interesting mechanism. So I'll definitely try the cold water exposure. And so why 2 minutes?

2 minutes should be enough to make the physiological reaction going. We can talk about this, it's called called induced vasolidation. By the cold, it triggers the veins first to close and then after, say, within 2 minutes to open. And then because the trigger is quite deeply stressful, which normally people avoid. Now going into the same principle you just explained, it wakens up the physiology the way it should be. And suddenly the condition is gone. The rigid vasodilation is gone. The Raynaud disease, for example, is one of them. Within a half hour or something, they suddenly get their hands where they normally go white after exposure of a little bit of cold. Now they become red. The blood flow comes back.

I have family members with Raynaud's, so I'll talk to them about that.

Oh yes, please do. Then you see.

That's extremely interesting. What do you think of this? Like, has anybody experimented with using— because I thought, well, there are pain nerves that are specialized for temperature sensing, and those seem to be the ones that are mis— malfunctioning for me. It's not pressure, it's temperature because the sensation is burning. I was thinking I could use cold water and then hot water and then cold water and then hot water to recalibrate the sensations. Do you know, have you experimented with the alteration between cold and hot? And do you know if there's any physiological danger associated with that?

Going directly into the cold? Is better than altering. Like, once you go into the cold, you go into the cold. It's your neurology from the willful control that is going to connect once again with the deeper part of the brain, with the hypothalamus, which is the thermal regulator in the brain. And the vascular system is a closed system. So If you do the hand, you actually affect directly with the hypothalamus and willful control.

So, okay, so let me ask you another question. Yes. Okay, well, so when I'm lifting weights, when I'm doing anything physical that when I can concentrate, I'm really paying attention to what I'm doing. So when I lift weights, I do it very slowly and purposefully, and I try to attend to the entire motion and use a full range of motion. So I'm not just doing it while I'm paying attention to something else. I'm trying to focus and feel. And, you know, I use dumbbells because they help exercise the small muscles and joints because you have to balance them. And it seems to me that that focused attention and care increases the utility of the exercise. And When I'm sitting on this board I told you about that shakes, I'm really paying attention to the vibration and moving it through my body. And I can feel when it hits a spot where there must be nervous damage because there's pain. And I can focus the vibrations there. So I'm attending. When you go into the cold, are you avoiding paying attention to the cold? Or are you concentrating on the pain? What are you doing mentally? Apart from just being there.

So they had in a brain scan. So they saw on a monitor what kind of areas of the brain are working. So when I go and expose myself to cold in a— with a perfusion vest, which firefighters use to stay cool, cold water was pumped in— and 74 subjects, they showed that the skin temperature was going down and stress was being shown. The prefrontal cortex was very on because there was stress going on and insula was very down, but the rest was not really on in the brain. In my brain, when I do nothing, I show the same thing. Now, when I put my intention, and suddenly you see very little stress or no stress, it's like a red area, insula lightens up and the periaqueductal gray lightens up. And this is consciously done. The power of our intention.

Okay, so that's when you're intending. What are you intending exactly?

I am going into the cold. Buddy, I'm the captain of my vessel. You do whatever is necessary and I let you. I just get— we don't need to think all the time about it like a mantra or something. No, just I go into the cold and I'm the boss inside. And what happens? I'm able to go out, say, a whole night in my shorts in freezing temperatures. So that is the power of our intention.

That's very interesting because, so for example, when I'm in the shower and I turn the cold water on, I'm distracting myself. I see that I'm distracting myself. I'm waiting for it to be over. I'm counting the breaths knowing that it's gonna be gone in 30 seconds. And so I'm avoiding. Now look, when you're a psychotherapist, imagine that someone's afraid of an elevator, okay? And so they won't take elevators. And so you want to train them to not be afraid. So what you do is you get them to stand 10 feet away from the elevator and look at it. Like, look at the elevator. Look at— you point, say, look at the line between the two doors. Look at the doors themselves. Look at the color. Look at the button. Because if you watch people who are afraid when they are standing near the elevator, they'll look up at the ceiling or they'll look at the floor. They'll They'll distract themselves so they don't have to attend to what they're afraid of. So then after a while, maybe you get them. You say, look, you can walk inside the elevator. I'm going to hold the doors open and you can get out anytime you want. And there's no tricks. Like, I'm not going to stop you because they have to trust you. Then they're in the elevator and then they're looking at the floor. And so you say, no, no, no, you look at the buttons. You look at the door. You say to yourself, I'm in this elevator. No avoidance. And so, and that works. That works. And so, really what you're doing when you're training someone to not be afraid is that you're having them practice mastery in the face of threat. And what they learn is the mastery and then they become more globally confident. It doesn't just cure their elevator phobia. Exactly. It makes them more courageous. Okay, so you're doing this with intent and used a metaphor. You said you're the captain of your ship. So your advice is that I should focus on the cold, but also focus on my ability to withstand it, to practice the mastery.

Yes. Our will is neurology, and it is connected with the neurology of our body and also the rest of our brain.

And we— Well, there is a large literature showing that if you— measure brain activity when someone is accidentally exposed to a stressor compared to when they expose themselves voluntarily, the pattern of neurological activation is profoundly different. Even though the stressor, hypothetically, the objective stressor is the same.

So yes, and this is the way I use cold. I use the cold to learn to get a control, a grip of my emotional distress when I lost my wife and it helped and it was based on intuition. It just bloody helped. So I did it and I kept on doing it. But then I found this universal principle, which you just mentioned. It helped me also to have a lot of energy suddenly because I was not in distress. I was not distressed anymore. I had no blockages inside. I stumbled upon a universal principle that enables us to have innate capacity to control our lives. And I needed that at that moment with 4 kids and little money. But there it was. And then at a certain moment when that becomes habitual, then you begin to think about it. You begin to contemplate about it. And you see everybody suffering or having difficult times with stress. I never feel stressed. I'm never sick. I'm never into, you know, always so much energy. And I'm there. And my goal is after that suffering there from that darkness, from that depth, being on the level where she decided to go down because she was in terror. And from that depth I came. And from that depth I emerged. And now I know how these stress mechanisms inside the brain learned by going into the cold. Cold is a stressor trigger and you learn it, but you learn about the universal principle of the stress mechanisms inside the brain, and they are very capable of dealing with any kind of cell biological stress causing depression, inflammation, whatever.

Would you like to hear more? In just 2 weeks, part 2 of this conversation will be available on your favorite platform. In the upcoming episode, Wim and Jordan practice one of Wim's breathing exercises that enhance the lung capacity. And Jordan is moved to tears when he shares the struggle he went through while writing his new book: Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. Thank you for listening to the Wim Hof Podcast, a Monk Studios original.