Metabolism Expert Reveals The Science of Cold Therapy to BURN Fat FAST! | Susanna Søberg

The way that you think about yourself, your problems, the world before you went in has to change when you grow up because you have changed your chemistry in the brain.

Her research has focused on how deliberate cold exposure and deliberate heat exposure can be used to enhance human metabolism.

Dr. Susannah Sober, I started this kind of research where I was looking into how can we as humans without taking any pills with this, just how can we naturally activate this tissue we have in order for us to increase our metabolism? How can we lose weight, but not with any more drugs.

What would you say that change is in the brain and the body?

With consistent cold therapy, something changes and that's the brain chemistry. Right? So if you submerge into cold water, you have an increase in dopamine, it could be up to five times higher.

What is the perfect protocol for heat and cold therapy? To optimize my metabolism to burn fat, to reduce my risk of. Of disease, to live longer, to feel better?

Yeah, it's a really good question.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring Susanna Suber in the house. So good to see you. Welcome to the School of Greatness. Now this is fascinating because you have a PhD in metabolism. You are essentially a cold and heat scientist. You study this about how people can optimize their metabolism and to burn fat, to lose fat, the bad types of fat. And you've been studying this. Your research focuses on the effects of deliberate cold and heat exposure on metabolism and various aspects of human physiology. And in this interview, I want to really explore how exposing ourselves to extreme heat or extreme cold, whether it be saunas and ice, can have a profound impact on our overall health, can transform the way our body looks, how we feel, how we think, and how we attract more great things in our life. So that's what I want to explore today. And how long have you been doing your research on metabolism as a PhD? And what is the greatest finding that you've discovered from all your years of research so far?

Oh, that's the good questions, definitely. So I've been doing this kind of research for, since 2016, where I initially got into the research field of something called the brown fat. And we're going to elaborate on that just a little bit later. But the brown fat is part of our metabolism. And I wanted to figure out how can we activate this kind of healthy tissue in the body in ways to get ourselves healthier and also to lose fat. So that's the main thing. So it's a new discovery that this kind of Healthy fat. If you activate that with cold, then you increase your metabolism and you can lose weight. And even if you have type 2 diabetes, it's a really good way to lowering your glucose levels in your blood. So with that in mind, I started this kind of research where I was looking into how can we as humans without taking any pills with this, just how can we naturally activate this tissue we have in order for us to increase our metabolism?

Gotcha.

And then cold and heat came into the picture. And I started in 2016 just trying to figure out, how do people use cold and heat today? Can we activate the brown fat with cold air? How about cold water? As in Denmark, we do a lot of cold water swimming. So that idea pretty quickly came up as a fun way to activate the brown fat, but nobody has done it yet, so that's exactly where I started.

What's been the biggest finding so far in researching metabolism for the last seven, eight years and doing these studies?

The research that I did was in metabolism and brown fat activation. And we've. We found that if you activate your brown fat by doing deliberate cold exposures or winter swimming in cold water, and you do that for multiple seasons, then you can increase your brown fat activation. You will also have a better glucose balance, meaning that you will have a more efficient way of getting rid of the sugar in your bloodstream, because it's just more efficient. And lower insulin levels, which is a good thing to have low insulin levels. That means that all your cells in your body are very, like, prone to feel if there's sugar available. And if there's sugar available, we should have a fast metabolism to get the sugar out of the bloodstream and into your cells so you don't get that high blood sugar levels.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Okay, so you found that the cold. So you were first off researching about metabolism. Was it more on how to lose weight or how our metabolism works?

So more basic science, like, what is this tissue? Can it activate the metabolism? And I wasn't doing mice studies or cell studies, so I wanted to see if intervention in humans could actually make a difference on something like blood pressure, brown fat activation, glucose metabolism, and insulin levels. So I had all these measures, which are like more the hardcore outcomes, but it was also a way to see, can we use this in a lifestyle intervention, because that will help people get healthier.

And were the interventions that you were researching only cold and heat therapy, or were there other types of interventions you were studying for activating metabolism?

That's a good question. Yeah. So in research, you have to focus on some things, because it takes a lot of reading and learning on specific things. So when people do a PhD, they have to be very narrow in what they do in order for them to become really experts in what they do and understanding what they're doing. Because so much is happening in the body when you research just one cell or one mechanism, one pathway. And I was researching both the cold and the heat and even a way to use that as a lifestyle intervention. So I did a lot of field studies before.

So.

So researching how do winter swimmers go out, winter swimming, how do they use the heat, and how does that affect our physiology and biochemistry? So it was kind of both things. So it was huge for me to study all that at the same time.

Wow. In terms of the types of fat the body has, because there's brown fat and there's white fat. Is that correct? Is there a different type of fat that we have as humans?

Those are two very distinct kind of tissues.

That's true. And what's the difference between brown fat and white fat? And are there other types of fat, or is that the main fat that we have in our body?

Yeah, so that's the main fat that we have in the body. So people know about the white fat. And the white fat is the bad fat, the unhealthy kind of fat that we want to get rid of. It's on the belly, on the stomach, and around our inner organs. And it's called visceral fat. And we want to get rid of that because that's what increases our risk of type 2 diabetes or obesity, which is, like, increasing a lot at the moment. Because you can see in 2030, it's estimated that around almost 50% of the people in the US would be on the obese scale.

Really?

Yeah. So that's how it's estimated at this moment. So by 2030, and we are getting there. Right. It's soon.

And so that's the visceral white fat that causes people to be obese.

Yeah.

What causes a human being to gain so much fat? What are the main factors?

So that's. If people stop moving. So if people are not exercising enough, not moving enough, if they eat unhealthy kinds of fat, which is processed food these days, so unhealthy kinds of food and too much of it. So there's like, if you don't burn the calories that you take in, it will convert to white fat. And the body is per. Like, that's how we are built. We want to survive. Okay. So that's the Body's just built to survive. And because you used to starve right at moments, we had fasting periods back in the days where we don't have all the food available all the time, but we do today. So the body is calling for food all the time. As soon as you just get, after a few hours or four hours, five hours, you get hungry. And the more you actually eat, the more the white cells are sending a signal to the brain that you need to eat, because otherwise you would tear off from the white fat and you need that kind of storage. So the white fat is actually something we need. It's a storage to survive. But we don't need that big a storage.

Right?

Yeah. So we try to like and figure out how can we lose weight, but not with any more drugs, because in my opinion, we have enough pills in the world even for obesity and for type 2 diabetes. We also need to think about how can we help people not get this obese. So exercise is definitely number one thing that we need to do. But on top of that, it seems that if you use cold and heat therapy, then you can also boost your metabolism even more and top that up. And that's going to also tear off some of the white fat because you also activate the brown fat. And back to your question was that what is the difference between these two tissues? So to say it very short. The white fat is storing your, your fat in the body, and the brown fat is using the fat in the body so the brown fat can eat off the white fat.

Interesting. So we want more brown fat.

Yes.

And we want the brown fat to be healthier, it sounds like, or more efficient, so that it can burn the visceral white fat from our body. And I think I'm hearing you correctly, that the internal fat that's in our organs or inside of us sounds to be more dangerous than the external fat that's on the outside. Is that correct?

Yeah.

And we can't see that. Right? It's internal. No, it's affects our organs, our hearts, you know, our digestive system. I'm assuming all these different things to be efficient in our body or inefficient. So we could have a little fat on the outside, but a lot of fat on the inside and still be not well, is that right?

That is. Yeah, that is. Well, that is so true. And actually we. If you start being inactive, that is the first place around your inner organs where the white fat will put itself. So you cannot maybe see it at once that you're getting fatter. But you can maybe see that your fitness level is going down, and you can see that you are maybe also getting more out of breath, easier if you do a run or something like that. That is telling you that you are not as fit as you were before. And correlating with that is increase in white fat. And it starts around your inner organs, which is the most dangerous kind of fat storage, you can say. And then it also puts, as you said, on the outside access.

Yeah, on the outside, yeah. So when you were doing these interventions and studying cold therapy and heat therapy, what was it about cold therapy that you was a big aha for you when you started to either apply it with case studies and with yourself practicing this? What was the research telling you about the power of cold therapy and activating the brown fat, the metabolism, losing weight, all these different things?

Oh, my God. It. It taught me a lot. It taught me something on a scientific level, but also on a personal level, because when I was researching this, reading everything I could around this, doing my own research in it, started also doing winter swimming myself. And that is where I learned how this is actually connected. Because I was reading, how is our physiology affected? How is the biochemistry affected? And I did understand that. And I did understand how is our neurotransmitters activated and how's the brain and how is the physiology and also the psychological effects of this. But when I saw the winter swimmers, I didn't. It didn't really match what I read. So there was something missing there. And only when I started doing this myself, I understood, aha. It's the connection between what is going on in your physiology and your brain and that brain, body, brain connection. I felt that suddenly. And also this increase in gratitude, I think it is. Yeah. So when I felt that, I was like, now I understand the happiness afterwards. Why do people go into the water with another mood, but get out in completely another mood? I could not understand it really, but I did. When I started doing this myself, I would say it was painful at the beginning, but once you get over that, you increase your pain threshold. That's what you do. Then you start to enjoy it. And you can then feel the neurotransmitters. You cannot feel them increase, but you'll feel the effects of it afterwards. And then what you've thought about before is not as important or as bad as it was when you go up from the water. So I think that transition I did not understand from the research, but I understood it when I did it myself.

Started doing it yourself. Yeah. So you were Reading the research and you didn't make the full connections until you started to apply it yourself and see the actual effects emotionally, mentally and physically. Now, what has the science shown us and proven about the power of, you know, getting in the ice? How long should we get in the ice for? How many times a week should we get in for? And when can we start to see the impact and the results of this type of therapy?

Yeah, so there was. There are actually not that much research saying exactly how many times should you do this per week? I'm sure more will come. But in my research, we did do like a protocol for this. We had them note down how much they went into the water and we tracked them with watches and had them do this kind of diary. So we knew exactly how many times they were in the water, how many seconds. And we also recruited them based on how many times they went into the water. And that was actually based on me not being a winter swimmer myself. And because I didn't want to do something extreme because I more believe in the, you can say hormetic effect of cold and heat therapy. Just like exercise. I studied why is exercise healthy? That's because you have this healthy kind of stress. So there's bad stress and healthy stress. And the healthy stress is the acute response. So I was thinking if we can apply that to my research saying, okay, we want winter swimmers to only do this very briefly. So not studying those who winter swim for a very long time, but just very brief. Then we recruited people who had done winter swimming for two seasons to see how does their brown fat look compared to a match control group. And when we then watch them so swim for a season and measured their brown fat on multiple times. And we tested so many things and took biases and everything. But what we then discovered was that they did 11 minutes of cold water swimming per week in total, but divided on two to three days. And per day they went into the water three times. So if you divide that out in just minutes, that would be about one to two minutes each step, which is not that long.

It's not long.

It's not long. I mean, everybody can who is healthy and don't have heart diseases or unregulated high blood pressure. I mean, they can build this up slowly over time. And it's feasible, I think, even for me. I didn't want to become a winter swimmer because I was afraid of the cold myself. So I was thinking this is really good because it's actually feasible. And. And we did actually see that there was a Difference between these two groups. So 11 minutes per week for the cold.

So 11 minutes per week for the cold. You had one group doing that. And what was the other group? They were just not in the ice at all. And what were the benefits? How long did it take for them to get benefits? And what were those benefits?

So the control group were not allowed to do any kind of winter swimming.

No ice baths? No ice baths, cold showers, none of that.

No cold showers or even go to the swim hole or. And no. No saunas and stuff like that. But it was no problem because they didn't do that anyway.

Right, right, right. They couldn't do heat or cold.

No.

They had to be neutral water.

Yes, exactly. So even going to the spa was like a thing they were not allowed. That was an agreement.

How long was this for? How many months or so?

It's about. It was five, six months. Around that time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, actually it was. It was probably longer, maybe seven months when I think about it. Yeah. So it's. It was a winter swimming season.

Okay, I see what you're saying. So about six months, you got a control group, they weren't allowed to do hot or cold therapy. And then you had another control group that did roughly around 11 minutes a week of ice therapy.

Yeah.

Multiple times a week. Sometimes a minute, sometimes two minutes at a time.

Yeah.

And so after six months of these two different groups, what did you notice as the results?

So we noticed that after these six months, this must have been their third winter swimming season. So this is built upon multiple seasons, of course, but I think it would have been the same for the second season. It goes pretty fast and I can tell you why in a minute. So we saw that they had more activation of the brown fat, so we measured that with both PET CT scannings, But we measured specifically also how much heat they increase from the brown fat, because that's the end product from brown fat. The brown fat is actually our inner radiator. You can say it's this little furnace that increases our heat in the body so we don't freeze to death. So the main part, and helps you.

Burn the white fat, the menstrual fat.

Yeah. So how it works, I'm just going to tell you that. So the brown fat, when it's activated with cold, as soon as you get cold on the skin, you have to regulate your temperature in your body. Right. So you don't get too cold. So in order for us to keep the neutral set 37 degrees body temperature, you need to regulate that. So There will be a signal to the brain where we have this temperature regulating center saying, well, it's getting a little bit too cold here. So we will increase noradrenaline. And noradrenaline is a neurotransmitter, but also a hormone that will activate on the surface of the brown fat cells. And that's going to burn some calories because it takes fuel to activate those brown fat cells. Takes glucose in and fat into the cells where these small mitochondria will then use that as fuel to generate heat.

Interesting.

So we get warmer, actually.

So that's when we get cold air, cold water. Then there's an adrenaline switch in our brain that signals to our cells in the brown fat. In the brown fat. Get hotter, get warmer, get warmer. Because you're going to die if you keep freezing, right? Essentially you're going to die. So get warmer and activate yourself to be a heater in the brown fat, which will then keep your body warm. But, but use energy from the, the stored visceral white fat to, to generate heat as fuel.

It's like.

Yeah, so we want more of that to happen. It sounds like to burn that fat, essentially, right?

Yes.

Okay, so continue that. I just wanted to get clear on that.

Yes, but it was very clear. That's good. So the brown fat activated your, their thermogenesis, so increased heat. So their ability to increase heat was higher in the winter swimmers, they were just warmer in general. So on the surface of their skin they were just warmer. So that means they dump a lot of heat. So they have a high heat loss rate, you can say, and then you could ask, okay, if they are hotter, they're warmer and they lose a lot of heat, they have to generate heat in order for them not to be get cold, too cold. So we need our vital organs to stay the same temperature. Right? So in order for you to keep that temperature, core temperature up and you're dumping a lot of heat, then you will have to activate more of your metabolism, just in general. But what we then observed was that we also had them sleep at the laboratory afterwards and where we could see that even just at neutral temperatures, sitting in a bed, not doing physical activity or anything, just being there and not increasing their metabolism in other ways. They had just this basic higher increase of heat coming from the brown fat, which could indicate that also just basically had more activation of the brown fat. We would have to study that more to be more clear on what exactly is going on here. But I think it's very interesting that we saw that Basically they had more activation of the brown fat when they were cold, but also when they were not cold.

So all the time it was, all the time it was activating, which is. Which means that they were generating more energy, therefore burning more fat. Burning more fat, yeah, consistently. So that means they have a more optimal metabolism, it sounds like. Right, yeah, that's interesting. So even when they weren't in the cold, they were just hotter in general.

They were hotter in general. And that's also because they, when you do cold exposure, but also because they do the sauna, they have a higher blood flow to the skin. And because of that vessel constriction and vessel dilation, they increase the blood flow to the skin, meaning that they have a higher heat loss rate. And for that also. So it's both the sauna but also the cold that would generate that blood flow to the skin and make your blood vessels contract and dilate better.

Wow.

Because we have this increase in dilation and contracting of the blood vessels, then we can dump more heat, but we can also contract the vessels better. Meaning if you get adapted to the cold, which our winter swimmers were, they could also just shut out the cold. Even better. Meaning that over time the, they get adapted to the cold water and then they can sit in the water for these one to two minutes and in that way building up that you can say almost blocking out, almost not feel cold at all. Yeah, well, they.

Or less cold.

Less cold, Less fast cold, you can say. Because if you're not adapted, you almost just take it in.

You're freezing, you're shaking the first time.

Yeah, yeah. And your vessels are contracting, of course, but not as efficiently as an adapted winter swimmer.

Interesting. Right? Right. Wow, this is fascinating. So if someone, what happens to the body and to the brain when someone jumps in an ice tub or cold freezing water for one to three minutes, what is happening physiologically to the brain and the body when they do that?

Yes, there's so much going on, it's insane. Everything, all the cells in the body, everything is activated because this is a moment where the body thinks or acts as if you are going to die. Because it's such a huge threat to the body. You could die within 20 minutes in cold water. 15 minutes, a half an hour, depending on the temperature and how, of course you are in the water. If you accidentally fall in, then that's of course dangerous. But we are talking about deliberate cold exposure here. So if you do this on deliberate purpose and you know how to get in and up, and you should always do that you always have an escape plan. Then you should think about this as a healthy way of shocking the body. So you shock the body and that is activating all your cold receptors on the body when you submerge into the cold water. And that's going to send a signal to the brain. Talked to that just before. And that's going to increase dopamine in the brain and all the cytokines. That's noradrenaline, which is activating the brown fat immediately. Because now you are activating your sympathetic nervous system and that is your fight and flight response. So everything is activated in the body. The brain is. You would imagine that because you are jumping into cold water, you. You will have a higher blood flow to the brain. A lot of people say that, I've heard. But quite the opposite is actually happening. So when you go into cold water, you have a decrease of blood flow.

To the brain restriction. Is that a good thing or is that a.

But that's a risk. I would say it's a risk that you don't get as much oxygen to the brain as you did when you're normally just walking around. Meaning that you will have to be mindful around how you go in. How are you holding onto something? Are you new to this? And never do it alone because you could get lightheaded. You can even faint. Some people do. And especially if you do some kind of breath hold before you go in or hyperventilation, I would just not recommend that. Always try to do slow nasal breathing in the water if you are new to this.

You probably challenging your first time.

Yeah, yeah. Try to slow down your sympathetic nervous system by activating your parasympathetic nervous system. But that is really hard in the beginning. But you can try. So. But one thing I would just say that people should avoid is doing hyperventilating breath work before and in the water, because that's definitely going to activate your sympathetic nervous system even more, decreasing the blood flow to the brain and oxygen to the brain and increase CO2 and you will have less oxygen delivered to all your cells in the body. And that's a risk. Right. So what you want to do is slow nasal breathing. Or you can even do in through the nose and then out through the mouth. If you can do that and try to keep calm and thinking about that. There's nothing wrong in just breathing through the mouth. If you're panicking, that's of course one thing you have to do. But then go out and make it a good experience. And then you can go in again, sure. But what you do is activate the sympathetic nervous system. If you can breathe through the cold shock response, then you are definitely good. You can rehearse that. And then you will activate more the parasympathetic nervous system. So what is going on here? Well, the first thing, you activate your fight and flight system, the sympathetic nervous system. All your stress hormones are going up. Noradrenaline and dopamine. You have even oxytocin going off, actually, which is also making you grateful. And you have this love hormone in your brain. But you should just be mindful that it only takes thing that you can use to get control of your sympathetic nervous system is your breath. But if you can do that and you can breathe through the cold shock response, you will get calmer afterwards. And if you put water to the face, also on your face, then you will also activate your vagus nerve, which will help you a bit.

So don't just go, you know, below the neck, also put water in the face when you're doing it.

Well, you could. Yeah.

It's hard, though.

It's hard, though. Well, one thing I think that people should maybe try to avoid is the head dog, if anything.

Really?

Yeah.

Avoid it.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Even if you're more advanced or you've been doing it for a while, you still think avoid it.

Well, it's just because avoiding it will help you keep your heat up in the body. So it's to avoid hypothermia. And hypothermia is at risk. And it's a process. As soon as you go into the water, you are on the process of hypothermia. Wow. You are.

Yeah.

So. And you don't want your core temperature to go down to 35. But we do see research showing that if you submerge to the neck, then you will have all this. You have your fat, you have your tissue, bones, everything is protecting you from a very rapid heat, heat loss of the core. But that rate will still be high because the water is cold. Right. But if you then dunk the head, then you will increase that heat loss rate up to 36% extra.

Wow.

So you don't want to lose heat that fast because it could be dangerous potentially and also because you could faint when you don't get that oxygen to the brain. So I'm just saying that the head dunk is not necessary. You will get all the benefits just by going into the water up to the neck, and it's more safe. And of course, you should do that with Other people around you to keep it safe.

Is there a certain temperature we should be at when we get in the ice or cold therapy?

So cold water is, per definition, 15 degrees Celsius. And under what is that?

Fahrenheit? Tino, I'll look it up later, but 1576 or something. Okay.

I don't, I don't know because I.

Usually, I usually go in around 44 degrees Fahrenheit. What is it, 59 degrees Fahrenheit?

Yeah.

So under 60?

Yeah.

Under Fahrenheit? Yeah, yeah. Because I usually go around 44 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yeah.

I'm not sure what that is. That might under 10 degrees, but that's under 10 degrees.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's cold.

And it's cold. Well, the thing is that if we look at how the metabolism is activated, because really that shows that you have activated your sympathetic nervous system. And if you want to get the benefits, you would just have to look at when is your sympathetic nervous system activated. And you can do that with higher degrees than that. So you don't have to go that cold all the time. You could also go a little bit warmer, then a little bit colder, just to keep increasing that exercise for your cells, where you increase that hermetic stress and you increase the heat shock proteins in the cells, which repairs the cells and the enzymes and make that cell stronger.

It repairs it.

It repairs it. And if you don't overdo it. So if you overdo it, sit in a cold tub for 10 minutes or something like that, I would suspect that that would be too much for the body if you do that over a longer time. We do need research which shows that how is the higher threshold for this and both temperature wise, but also timing wise.

Sure. So I've been doing cold therapy or ice baths for about 22 years. I started when I was 18.

That's a lot, right?

I started now it's been off and on for 22 years, but I started when I was 18. All through college I did it probably three times a week after football practice. I would do it almost daily. And it was probably in the high 50 degrees. So it's probably like 58, 59 somewhere around there. It was 55 every now and then. And it was usually a waist below. Yeah, it was a tub, like, you know, cold plunge tub that we had for sports. It was kind of waist below. And I always felt the physical effects afterwards where it was like, I practice and train very hard. My legs were tired and they were sore. Yeah, I get in there for five minutes, waist below. And I'd feel like recharged. I'd feel like, you know, my muscles were lighter. They were recovered.

How long did you.

Five or six minutes.

Five, six minutes? Yeah. Okay.

And it was always waist below, so it wasn't as cold as if it was up by the neck.

Yeah.

So you could tolerate it more and with just the legs and. And I always felt better. And I felt better the next day after. I would get some sleep after that and recovered. I felt like, man, I can. I can hop around, I can use my legs better. They were more efficient. So I got the benefits from that, you know, over those years of college. Now, over the last 10 years, I started to get more into it just from understanding, okay, how do I optimize my life? How do I burn more fat? By learning more about some of this. But when you did the controlled studies, the two different studies, those that did ice therapy and those that did not. For those six months, did you see more fat loss in those that did the ice therapy in this study, did you see that they got stronger muscles? Did their blood change? Did they feel younger? What were the other benefits to the control group that jumped in the ice throughout that time?

That's really good question.

So did it help them reverse their age, their biological, you know, clock, or did it do any of these other things?

Yeah, well, you can say that if you have a lower blood pressure, I think it's really good. Blood pressure is. Sounds a bit boring, but it's actually a super interesting outcome and a very stable outcome when you look at how well your metabolism is, how well your cardiovascular is, cardiovascular system is functioning. So if you can lower your blood pressure by some intervention, then it's an intervention that you should appreciate at least, because we did see that the winter swimmers had a lower blood pressure and heart rate, baseline level. So that means that they probably have lower inflammation and also a better metabolism, which we also did see from measuring the brown fat. But we also saw that they had a better glucose metabolism. So. Meaning that they were. When they drank this sugar drink, it's.

A glucose tolerance test, they processed it better. Right. It was more efficient.

It's more efficiently getting rid of the sugar from the bloodstream.

It's not storing the fat, it's getting it out.

Yes, exactly. So we did that test and we did see that they had a faster glucose metabolism. They also had lower insulin levels. So the insulin levels have to be as low as we can because that means that our cells are very sensitive to sugar and that's good because then you don't have all that sugar floating around in your blood circulation.

Sure.

What else did we see? So they actually also built up. And this sounds a little bit contrary in intuitive. I would, I would say maybe that they built. They had. We. We took some biopsies from their white fat to see how does it look. And it seems like they have this higher lipolysis, but also lipogenesis. They. Sorry. They had higher lipogenesis. So building up the white fat. So that could be because they increase their metabolism so much that the body is trying to keep the storage up. So the lipogenesis meaning that the white fat cells try to restore the fat cells that they are losing all the time.

Really?

Yeah. And we did see the winter swimmers had a lower fat percentage. We, of course, because of the nature of this study, we could not tell whether it was because they did one half an hour, one hour of more exercise per week or if it was because they did. But it's not that much of a difference, I would say. But they also did the winter swimming and also the sauna, the heat as well. Yeah, exactly. So. And that's going to top off your, your metabol, your exercise and metabolism even further. So it makes sense that they probably have a bit of a lower fat percentage and at the same time we did see in the white fat that they had higher lipogenesis.

So what is lipogenesis?

Hypogenesis is a way to measure. So how fast or how much does the body want to increase the fat in the white cells to say?

That's interesting. So, so the. Those bodies that were during the cold and heat, their white fat cells were reproducing faster is what it sounds like it.

Yeah.

Because they were also burning cells off.

Burning it off. Yeah.

So they're like, okay, we need to stick around here to protect you if there's a. Yes, you know, a fast. And so they were building fat cells just as fast as they were burning them.

Maybe not.

Okay. But it was stronger.

It was trying to.

Right, right. But it was burning them so fast more than it was keeping them because.

We also need that depot to survive in times of fasting. And this body is just old, you know, it's an old DNA where we were going hunting and we didn't always have that much food that we have today. So the body is still the same. We try to keep the storage. And we were hunters and gatherers once. Right. So it was like our periods of time where we didn't have anything. So we need that storage in order for us to have, like a little bit of food. Some when we don't have any food. So we still have that. So we still try to build that. And I mean, as long as you can say, as long as you are aware of your hunger during cold and heat exposure, you will get more hungry, probably, and you don't overeat, then you are prone to lose weight, I would say. But why don't we see winter swimmers losing a lot of weight? I don't think we see that in Denmark. I don't think that winter swimmers are particularly thinner or skinnier than others.

You still have to know how much you're consuming and eating. You could. You could swim in the ice tub.

Yeah.

Five times a week, but be eating 5,000 calories a day. And you're going to be obese.

Yeah, exactly.

You're going to gain more weight if you're consuming more than you need. Now, I'm curious about mental health and ice therapy or ice and heat therapy. I don't know if you studied the gratitude levels, the level of, you know, harmony and peace that people were experiencing, or maybe you can't talk about the science of it, but did you notice any differences between the two control groups, those that were doing cold and heat therapy versus those that were living their lives and not doing that? Was there a level of happiness that was increased or gratitude or appreciation or level of calm and peace from those that were doing cold and ice? Or were you able to notice that at all?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

What did you find in terms of mental health around that?

So this is just the observations now. So I did notice that our group of winter swimmers were definitely just also telling us that they are more happy now and they are more calm now than before. Really, what we did after this study that we published in Cell Reports Medicine was a randomized controlled trial. It's not published yet. But what we saw here was we did an intervention where we had all the winter. All the subjects in the study wanting to winter swim, but half of them became the control group of. Half of them became the intervention group. So none of them had actually tried this before. And this is where we really did see the difference. So I could not see that in the other study I just mentioned because they were already winter swimmers when I met them.

Yeah, this was a new group that never died.

This was just a new group. Yeah.

So half of them got to do it, the other half didn't get to do it.

Yeah, exactly. So what we did see here was that as soon as they started winter swimming, they changed the mood when they came into the lab. And also when we were meeting up with them out on the daddy, they.

Were just happier human beings.

Yeah. So I think the most you can say, the best story of this was this guy who was. He was kind of like a very firm one. Like he. And he was angry. I think he was a bit angry when he met in. He was angry, but he knew what he wanted and he had his company, he had a lot of employers and he was busy, but he wanted to be in this study. And I was amazed. I was like, wow, you want to spend time in this when you were so busy? And. But of course, he was very good at pointing on time and that's a good subject. So I wanted him in the study and also just to observe how would that change his mood. He told me before we started the winter swimming part, he told me that he always yelled at people in his car. So I had this rage.

Road rage.

Road rage, yeah. And that's. That's not fun. I mean, it's not fun for him to be.

He was an angry person. He was frustrated, irritated.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he was irritated. But then he told me after he started winter swimming and we met in the lab again to lab test. I think it was a one month or two month into his winter swimming and he came into the lab flying, I would say, like, ta da into. And he was like, I cannot describe how much this has changed for me, my mood. And then he told me a story about now where he went to swims before he goes to work, goes into his car and he just. What is this called? Like, you just.

It just goes with the flow.

Yeah, it goes with the flow. Just says to the other car, come in and turn on the car.

It's all good.

Yeah. So more easygoing, more balanced maybe. And then he told me that in the meeting. So in the morning he had his employees always at this first meeting, but one of them came to him and said, we have been talking and something has changed with you and we cannot tell what is going on, but something has changed.

Did you fall in love somewhere? Exactly.

What has changed? And he had not told them that he started this study, really this study. So he told me this story and he was like, I didn't know that I was projecting this kind of like more easy going or balanced mood or. He didn't know. But he was definitely more relaxed when he came into the meetings.

Wow.

So I remember this. This particularly this subject made an impression on me.

Interesting. Wow, that's powerful. Now, is there a benefit over being submerged in cold water versus a shower cold shower? Is there a difference in the impact and the positive effects of that?

That's a really good question and many, many people ask me that because it's the one thing is that cold showers are available for most people. Right. So it's a good place to start if you are more, maybe not. If you don't have access to the ocean and you need to buy a tub and that's expensive, maybe. So start off at the cold shower is a great thing because you activate your sympathetic nervous system. You activate your brown fat.

You are doing that. Okay.

Definitely. You could do that just by going outside in a T shirt.

Interesting.

Yeah. As soon as you get you change the temperature on your body, you will activate your CO receptors and that's going to increase and turn off and balance out your temperature by activating the brown fat and eventually also the muscles if you need to increase temperature further. Right. So the cold showers will be a great way to start, but it will probably not activate your parasympathetic nervous system. On the contrary, probably because it's just making you very cold and you don't get the activation from your diving response, which you do when you submerge into the top. You could help it with splashing water to the face by activating the vagus nerve. But eventually it would be too different ways of activating your both your neurotransmitters and also your nervous system and your metabolism. You don't need to do cold showers for more than 30 seconds.

Really?

No, you don't have to do that long.

Yeah, but what about the cold tubs or the cold rivers or the cold lakes or whatever? Is it better to be submersed in cold water or is a cold shower equally as good in your mind?

I think submerging the body has more benefits than just the cold showers. And this has much to do with the physiology. Also, because when you submerged into cold water, you will have the, what do you say? The exercise of the blood vessels. So you will have the constriction and when you then go up, you will have the dilation afterwards. If you then only do the cold showers, you will only have activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Mainly you have that mainly if you activate the sympathetic nervous system in the cold water. If you submerge, you could. If you can get over the cold shock, you will have the paris, the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. So if you don't have any heart problems. That will mean you will you increase your fight or flight response, but then also you will feel the rest afterwards in the parasympathetic activation.

Got it? Got it.

But if you do have heart problems and you do have unregulated high blood pressure, it's not recommended that you submerge into a cold bath. I wouldn't recommend that because there is a conflict when you activate the sympathetic nervous system and also the parasympathetic nervous system at the same time. So the heart is like increasing. Right. So sympathetic nervous system makes the heart rate go up and the parasympathetic wants it to go down at the same time. It's a bit of conflict for the heart. So that means that you will experience arrhythmia to the heart. So for people who are uncertain about their heart health or maybe don't know their blood pressure, I would definitely recommend that you just get your blood pressure measured. It's non invasive. It's something. You can even buy these things and.

Do it, do it yourself.

Yeah. I mean, and you can also just go to your doctor if you're uncertain about. Is this for me? Because you have something, then ask your doctor.

What I'm hearing you say is when someone is getting in the ice or the cold therapy consistently weekly over many months, something changes in their brain and it affects their mood.

Yeah.

And their overall brain changes their chemistry and their body changes and things start to shift. What would you say that change is in the brain and the body with consistent cold therapy?

So I think. Yes. So we can talk about neurotransmitters. Because I think that something changes and that's the chemistry, the brain chemistry. Right. So if you submerge into cold water, you have an increase in dopamine. It could be up to five times higher or two and a half times higher to up to five. But you also have the increase in noradrenaline. And noradrenaline is what I talked about before is also activating the brown fat, but gives you all that energy. And the dopamine gives you that drive and that motivation to do this again. Even so repeating something that you felt good about. And that's why we say in Denmark that winter swimming is addictive. Because eventually when you have done this a couple of times you would. The body and the brain will connect this to a very good experience. And you have this increase in oxytocin, which is a stress hormone. Right. So you will have this increase in oxytocin makes you feel this Love towards yourself, the nature, each other. And that's going to make you more grateful. And imagine now that you have increased all these neurotransmitters, that makes you feel on different levels, more feel better. Right. That was just the stress hormones. So we also have serotonin, which is activating when you activate the parasympathetic part of your nervous system. So if you have all these, you can imagine how that changes your baseline way of thinking about yourself, your, your problems, the world, when you go out, the way that you think about that before you went in has to change when you go up because you have changed your chemistry in the brain. So you view the world in another way. You have to, because you just changed all this, all that chemistry.

Yeah. So all these chemicals are turned on when you submerge yourself for a minute, a couple minutes in the cold therapy, cold water. And if you do that consistently, you're just automatically going to be a happier, more positive person. Your body forces you to love yourself and love others more, is what I'm hearing you say.

Yeah, it sounds a little bit magical.

But it's forcing self love and love for others.

Yeah, it could be that. I mean, even though it sounds a little bit magical when we talk about it like this, but this is just chemistry, science, just science, science. This is what happens. So when this increases in the brain, it has to change the baseline. And imagine when you do this multiple times per week, this would change the way that you see yourself. The gratitude to the world, yourself, others, your family, and how you project that, your way of seeing things, you project some energy and that energy will be received by others. They will cast that back at you. And in that way you will be able to change the way you work around in your own world and with others. So it could really change a lot if you could just change the way you see the world, see yourself or your problems.

Do you feel like cold therapy allows you to heal your body but also allows you to heal your mind?

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, this is not my, the way it's healing the mind is not part of my own research, but this is what I talked about in the beginning. The connection between these two, the body and the brain, is really not that it's not divided. So I figured out that if I was studying this metabolism, I needed to understand the rest and I needed to understand how, how the brain is connected also to the brown fat, because it is, it's activated by your central nervous system. So it's actually the, you can say Something in between. Right. So even though I studied metabolism, I also studied the brain because I had to understand how is the body affected in this cold water and the brain is affected and how you feel afterwards will be affected because of the chemistry that happens. Yeah, just the body thinking you're about to die.

This is amazing. So you're forcing gratitude in the body. Chemically you can't even control it. You're just going to feel better, you're going to have more love, more patience, more gratitude, the more consistent you do this. I love this. And I've definitely felt those effects myself. I'm curious about heat therapy and we talked a little bit about ice therapy, but I'm curious about heat therapy. I've got a sauna. I finally got my first home this year.

Oh, you do?

So I never, you know, I had to go to the gym to use the sauna.

Yeah.

So now I have a space that I can, I have my own and I have a Swedish style sauna, not an infrared sauna. So first I want to ask, is there a difference between types of saunas? And then what are the main benefits that you've seen from studies on heat therapy as well?

Great questions because I mean, the way the heat is, the way we receive the heat is going to determine what outcomes that will be.

Really?

Of course, yeah. So if you do the traditional Finnish sauna, then there will be some other outcomes then compared to or what we know of today from the infrared saunas. So infrared saunas should also be divided into if it's near infrared, middle or far infrared. So getting advanced. Yeah. So you can say that the near infrared saunas, they penetrate the heat, the body, the skin deeper, but it's not getting your skin hot. So that means that you won't feel the heat, but it is working deeper in your tissue. Right. So you have the middle, that's something in between. But the far infrared, that makes your skin heat up. It's only around 40 degrees Celsius, I don't know, in Fahrenheit.

Sure, no worries.

Someone will figure it out.

We'll figure it out.

So it will make your skin feel warm but not too warm. So it's a mild kind of a sauna. But what the good thing is about that is it is going to affect your blood vessels. So meaning it will dilate your blood vessels and you will have that better blood flow to the skin. And there's research showing that it increases the collagen and elastin, the elasticity in.

The skin, the collagen Collagen.

Exactly. And it will make the skin appear younger. So these studies have shown this. And also it works good on eczema. So there are studies on eczema. Eczema.

Eczema.

Eczema.

Yeah.

It's just like Suba. Yeah, I struggle too.

Yeah, it's all good.

So these studies on young boys shows that they have reduced symptoms or less eczema. No, I didn't.

That was great. Eczema.

Good. And redness. So that means that it actually is good for wound healing. So there are studies showing that this. Infrared saunas are great too. I would say that if you are not very keen on the very hot sauna, which is the Finnish style, then I think that infrared sauna is great also because it's milder to your cardiovascular system.

Less intense for the heart rate.

As intense. Yes, exactly. So if you. If you don't want that very intense heat and sitting there sweating in your. And sitting in your own sweat even, then I think that infrared sauna is great. You just sit there a little bit longer. But you will also have some of the benefits on your cardiovascular system. You also have the benefits on your skin and. And you also have the increase of, I wanted to say nitric oxide. That was one of them. So it makes your blood vessels more elastic because the endothelial cells will increase. So you will have a better contraction and dilation of your blood cells, which will help your cardiovascular system as well. So you will have some of the benefits as well on the infrared stuff.

Okay.

Yeah.

But what's the Finnish or Swedish style? I guess saunas? What are the benefits of that? Do you feel the. The steam, the heat?

You feel it?

Yeah. I usually put mine up to like 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yeah.

198 to 200, which. It gets hot right away. You feel, whoa. It's like an oven, you know.

Do you pour water and then.

I pour water on the rocks and then it's like, oh, it feels like another 20 degrees every time. And I try to go in there for about 20 to 30 minutes at a time. And what are the. What are the. So what are the differences or the benefits of doing that style of sauna?

Yeah, but it's a good rate. It's a good. It's a good timing, I would say. So if we. There's more research on the finish style to the infrared, I would say. And on the infrared, it's more on the skin thing and what I just talked about before. But on the finished style, which is. Which Is hot rocks and, and pouring water over the stones and steaming and stuff like that. It's more hard on your cardiovascular system. But definitely there's more research on that showing some really good outcomes. And here I refer to some Finnish sauna studies where this cohort study where they have followed 2 to 3,000 sauna bathers in Finland starting from 1982, I think it was. So they followed them for many years and in 2015 they published this amazing study where they looked at all these people who have done saunas. How many times per week did they go into the saunas? They divided them into groups of how much sauna, so how many times per week and how many minutes per time. And what they saw was that the control group did it one time per week. So I think that's amazing because a control group could be something totally different. And you mean. I mean we could almost not compare. Right. But in this study I think it's great that they did some. They did some. So they were not completely other people's style, the same phenotype as we say.

So and they did this for like 20 year study or something, right?

Yeah, that's 25 years, 28 now. I think it is.

Yes, Long study.

So what they found in 2015 was that if you do saunas two or three times per week, you will have a lower risk of Cardiovascular diseases of 27%.

Really?

Yeah. And if you do it seven times per week, which is like one time every day. Yeah, it's a lot. But if you do that, it's up to like 56, 46, I think it was. So it's a lot.

46% decrease, decrease of cardiovascular diseases.

Really, Compared to those who were doing it one time per week.

Really?

Yeah. But you also have to keep it within a certain time window.

What's the time window?

Yeah, I looked at that because it's like. Is there like a higher threshold for when it's not good for you anymore? And it seems like at 30 minutes, if you stay in there for one session, 30 minutes, it plateaus out with the benefits. So meaning that we did see, we seen an increase again in cardiovascular diseases.

So it means after that time.

Yeah. So homatic stress. Back to that. So if you overdo the healthy kind of stress, it becomes bad stress. Interesting, because you overdo it and then the cells become exhausted and they age faster. So you want to give them that burst of like the healthy kind of stress. Shock them a bit with the cold or with the heat, but don't overdo it because Then it becomes more of the chronic one that we know about.

Right, Chronic stress.

Yeah.

So no more than 30 minutes at a time.

No more than 30.

What's the temperature range? And can you do 30 minutes back to back in the same day? Like if you go hot, cold, hot, you know, what is. What does that look like?

Yeah, So I think the lowest time there was like 10 minutes.

Okay.

Which is a good timing because if we look, compare with my studies, we saw that if you do 57 minutes per week. So now I just jump from the Finnish sauna studies to your study, to my study.

57 minutes total in total per week.

Divided on 2 to 3 days where you alternate between the cold plungers and the sauna. And if you divide those 30, 57 minutes out on these two to three days and only two saunas per day, then that divides up to 10 to 14 minutes each session. Which, if you then look at the sauna cohort study, the window there for where we see the most benefits is actually around 10 to 20 minutes. So it's like if you can keep it. It seems that if you can keep it within this time window, you should be doing healthy kind of stress to your body, but overdoing it is not good if you stay longer than that.

How much total time in one day should someone do in the. In the heat? Like if you wanted to do multiple rounds.

Yeah.

How much? What's the maximum? If you got out after 20, 30 minutes, could you go back in later? Or is it too much, you think?

It depends on how many times you want to go. So 37 minutes per week, you can divide that out. So how?

57 minutes, right?

57 minutes, yeah. So if you divide that out, you can do it as it fits you, of course, but maybe not over or go over the 30 minutes.

I see what you're saying.

Yeah. So you can play with this a little bit. If you look at the study and you compare this. But doing 10 to 15 minutes should be feasible and should be enough per session. So if you do that, you can do that two times in one day and that adds up to 30 minutes or something.

Now, what's the benefit of doing hot therapy and cold therapy at the same time? I mean, in the same day, alternating.

Yeah. The benefits of that.

Yeah. Are there benefits? Is that not a good thing to do? Is it better to do cold and hot at the same day? Alternating?

Yeah. So the alternating thing is what I studied in my study. So that's actually based on plunging going into the cold water. Then you go into the sauna, cold water, sauna, cold and cold water, and then you end on the cold water. That's what I recommend.

Should we always end on the cold?

Yeah, I think so.

Why is that? What are the benefits of ending in the cold?

Well, if you end on the cold, then you activate your metabolism once again. Right.

Oh, man. It's always more painful. You just want to be warm and just be like, all right, I'm done, you know.

Yeah, yeah, I understand, I understand. And, and I must say that the only reason why I did this myself and practice this is because I didn't have access to a sauna. So I went to the open sea in rain and snow and went for a winter swim. And in the beginning, I didn't have a sauna, so I couldn't really try this out myself. But what I realized was that I had to go up and walk home, and that was cold. But eventually when I tried this a few times, I. I started to realize that I warmed up quick, quicker, but also that I felt like have done a workout. And then I started to figure out, well, this must be my metabolism still going on. And it, it, it seems that. Still burning, burning, just burning. And it lasts for these 48 hours afterwards. So you have this after burn. You can almost say this after exercise. So if you end on the cold, you force your body to heat up naturally. And if it heats up naturally, you activate the brown fat for hours afterwards. Because the body is trying to, like, heat up the temp, crank up the temperature again. But it takes energy to do that. And doing so, it takes glucose and fat from your bloodstream. It has to. And the muscles are even helping to do that. So if you shiver a little bit, that's okay. And it's good because you burn off calories.

So if, if someone watching or listening said, you know what? I want to be the best student I can be. I want to be, you know, Susanna, tell me exactly what I should be doing for the next six months of my life. If I can fully optimize heat and cold therapy, if I've got access to this, you know, I can find the gym that's got the plunge and the sauna, or I've got one. What is the perfect protocol for heat and cold therapy to optimize my metabolism to burn fat, to reduce my risk of disease, to live longer, to feel better. What is that perfect protocol? How many times a day or week should I be doing all this? How? What should I start with? How long and how should I finish?

Yeah, it's a really good question. And I would love to like, say this is the perfect protocol, but I don't think we can actually say that there is one. Maybe not at the moment, but we can say that we have some guidelines here. And I think it should be individualized, depending on who you are. How is your nervous system? Do you have anxiety? Do you have any other diseases that affects you? Do you have depression? Do you have. There are so many things that I think also determines should you do this this much or how should you even start this. But. But I think a guideline could be 11 minutes of cold per week and 57 minutes of heat per week divided on two to three days. It could be a protocol that you could go for or aim for. And ending on the cold is maybe also advanced. So maybe wait with that or start with it if you feel that you can. So it really depends on who you are, I would say. But it's a guide, you could go for it. That.

Sure, sure. And if there was someone that was like, you know what, they're already in great shape, they want to push the boundaries per se, without going over the boundaries. What would you prescribe to them as something to try? Obviously it's all individual and they need to test it, but can they go over 11 minutes of cold therapy a week and over the 57 minutes, or would you say try not to go over that, even if you have perfect health, you know, great biomarkers and all that stuff?

Yeah, I love that you asked me this question because it's also about how can you both. How can you optimize your health? But also is there any extra benefits of doing so? But do we even know that? Maybe we don't. We don't know if above 11 minutes is beneficial for you. Maybe it's actually where we see the benefits. Talking about the hermetic stress before. So we have like this window. We do see that for heat. So it's very possible we would also see that for cold and the alternation between the cold and the heat. So if we want that perfect window, we would need more research, I would say. But we could aim for the 11 minutes per week. If you do 12, you will be fine. I'm pretty sure it's not like that. It's just a magic number 11.

Sure, sure.

It's just in the paper and. But you could go for around that number. But I would say there is no need to do more because if you also want it to be healthy for you don't want to risk anything. Then why do more?

You don't need more.

You don't need it. It's, like, not necessary to take the risk.

So if you do this 11 minutes, 57 minutes, your metabolism is going to be optimizing itself. You're going to be burning these excess calories that you don't need, and it's going to have the afterburn effect as well when you do this. And if you compound it week after week, I'm assuming your body just becomes more efficient.

Exactly. In your metabolism. And your nervous system will also open that window for both pain and for stress. So you won't feel pain and stress as efficient or as hard as you did before because you increase that pain threshold. So by doing so, you work on so many different levels of your nervous system, so your tolerance is just increasing. But that doesn't mean that you should push yourself too much.

I see yourself.

So there's some competition going into this as well, because everybody, we are competitive human beings.

Let's push it. Let's go farther.

Yeah, exactly. But. But be mindful around doing so will push maybe your nervous system out where it shouldn't be and also maybe increasing risk of things that we have to learn about.

Yeah.

So it's like competition should not be part of this.

Yeah, I like this. This is something you mentioned here that I think is really important because I think a lot of society in general has become too comfortable and doesn't focus on intentional levels of stress to create more emotional agility. Right. There's a lot of emotional weakness, I think, that certain people have who haven't conditioned themselves to tolerate pain. And like you mentioned here, when we deliberately stress the body and the mind or the brain with cold and heat therapy in a contained amount of time, we increase our pain threshold, which makes us less reactive in the world, more compassionate, more kind, more generous. And we aren't going to be on fight or flight consistently throughout the day. We're going to have more calm and peace when there's chaos around us. And it sounds like your test studies, the control group that implemented the cold and heat therapy over six months was they were able to tolerate pain more. Is that correct?

Yeah. And also increasing that pain threshold makes them more. You can say, oh, it makes them less prone to stress. So you will be less prone to mental stress and also feeling that physical stress. So any kind of pain?

Actually, yes. So because stress causes physical pain, you hold on to the stress, Your body, your heart, your chest feels heavy.

Yeah.

You get heav headaches, all these different things. And that's why it's important to deliberately inflict pain on your body.

Yeah. And it creates this motivation of doing things that are actually hard because you have already done it and you have overcome it and you have now realized, oh, it's not as painful anymore. So you maybe run 2km, but then you find, find out, well, I'm not that sore anymore, and then I can run 3 and 4 and 5, and then suddenly maybe you're running 10 kilometers. I mean, you increase your pain threshold by opening that window for whatever stressor you are taking in. So now I'm talking about some physical stress, but it could also be a mental stress. So we know from research that if you get adapted to physical stress, you open your window also for mental stress. Meaning that you can tolerate more pressure, you can tolerate more. I don't know.

Sure. Yeah. Things that are happening in your life now, when, when some, when a human being has a low threshold for pain and they are unable to take the emotions of the world, the physical challenges of the world, the demands of their relationships, health, career, different things. When they have a lower threshold, are they more susceptible to have a higher increase of disease later in life? Or what do they have when they have a lower threshold for pain?

Yeah, definitely. Because if they have a lower threshold for pain, stress, that's within the same window. Because if you have lower pain threshold, you will also be more prone to stress, right?

Yes.

So if you have that, then you increase your stress or your anxiety and you will be more prone to depression. You will be more prone to have cardiovascular diseases. Because if you don't have open that window for the pain to get uncomfortable, then you will probably also have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. So we know that if people don't exercise, for example, that is a way to open that window for stress, Right. And pain. So if you do that, so if you do that, you would also have less risk of getting depression and anxiety. And if you increase that hormetic stress in the body by exercise, cold and heat therapy, then you will lower your risk of depression and anxiety and cardiovascular disease. And it works together. It's like when you do that, you lower the inflammation, right? You increase the TNF alpha, which is lowering the inflammation. That's also what you experience as an athlete when you submerge into cold water. That lowers the, the inflammation because it activates the immune system. And because of that, you increase your pain threshold and you can take tolerate more. You open that window for stress, but both physically but also mentally. So I think it's something that is really important to think about for the future when we do more research in this, that just because it's a physical thing that we do doesn't mean that it doesn't do anything really, really good things for our mental health. Because physically being able to tolerate pain means that we will lower the anxiety level and depression. And we do know that inflammation and depression is associated.

Really?

Yeah.

So if the body has more inflammation, we're more susceptible to depression.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

And so is it's new research from this millennium.

Sure. Do you feel like that's why. I mean, do you feel like that's why there's more people on, I guess, medications than ever before, because they have more inflammation in their body and more excess, I guess. White fat. White fat. And that's linked to depression?

Yes, definitely. It's completely linked together. Because if you. We could. If we go back to 1980s time, we definitely see that that's where the increase starts from in obesity, but also depression and.

Really?

Yes. So and it comes with also technology. Right. And it comes with social media.

Lots of things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So many things.

So it's not the only reason why you're feeling depressed is because you have more inflammation, but it's linked to it.

Yeah. But all these things are causing the inflammation, right?

The stress.

Yeah. So this is the root cause. The root cause could be, is of course, everything around us, what's happening, our way of living a modern lifestyle.

But excess foods, all these things, everything.

But it's like the root cause of this is inflammation. And inflammation increases both cardiovascular diseases, which is number one killer in the world. And then we have the depression, which is like one of the top 10 also killers in the world. So if we then look at why depression is increasing, there are studies showing that those with depression also have higher inflammation. So inflammation also causes in itself then depression and dementia. And one of them is also Alzheimer's disease.

Right. So if you drop the inflammation.

Yes.

You are also most likely decreasing depression or anxiety and stress. It may not fully get rid of that, but you're highly likely to decrease it a lot.

Yeah, right.

Because there's still. There's people who are extremely physically fit with low body fat who have, you know, who look to like they have healthy bodies, strong muscles, athletic, who also have mental health and depression.

Yeah.

So it's not only associated with that. They have other challenges and issues that you need to heal and process, but it's also a big factor in causing depression.

Exactly.

If you have obesity and A lot of excess fat.

Yeah.

And inflammation.

And it's. I mean, like you just said, it could also be depression for some other reason, genetics and everything, but our genetics has not changed that much since the 80s. Come on. Yeah, it's not possible. It must be environmental changes that happens and that's the way we live today. So if. Which is causing them inflammation and inflammation is then causing the obesity and the depression and the obesity is also causing that. So it's like it's just linked so much together then. What I wanted to do in my research is looking at how is metabolism affected, like, basically. And how can we lower that information? I mean, so one of the things that I observed when I was working in the hospital, before I became a PhD student and even thinking about cold and heat therapy, I was working with patients in the hospital. I was a nurse and not for a very long time, but I was there and did see patients have. It was really a hard place to be to see patients. People that suffered that much. And they all have one thing like in common. They had inflammation.

Really.

Yeah. They had high inflammation, blood clots in legs and arms and got amputated because of that.

The legs and arms amputated because.

Oh, legs, legs because of high blood, because of inflammation, blood clots and. And it's hard to see that people, some of the people could, if they only knew and had help also increasing their. Or changing their lifestyle, they might not. They probably wouldn't have ended up in that ward and, and getting the surgery. So I think at that time I was like, when I was talking to them about their lifestyle, many of these basic things that I was thinking, this is basic, you know, this. They didn't know, really. Yeah. And. And also they didn't know how to implement this into their life. So it's like, oh, we know that exercise is good, but I kind of like don't know how or when or. I mean, is it that important? Yeah. Is it that important? It's like this kind of.

Or it's too painful and I'm more comfortable in this situation.

Yeah, exactly. And that's this way of building our society around. We have to work a lot and we, we maybe not have incorporated exercise into work time. And I mean, there's a lot of things that we could optimize in order for us to prevent disease instead of just curing it. When it's, I mean, when it's there, okay, then we have to do something about it. But what about looking at how can we help people not even go there? So that was one of the main things I wanted to study when I went back to university is preventing what.

Was your life like personally before doing this research and implementing the research yourself in cold and heat. And what is your life like now afterwards?

Yeah. I cannot stop laughing because I was such a boost. I was just. I was such a cold sissy.

Yeah, yeah.

I was so scared of the cold. But not only that, I was also scared of dark water. I think I still am a bit.

Sure, sure.

Yeah. So I was living in just by. I was living by the sea but not using it. I was watching was beautiful and I did see people go in the summer into the water. But I didn't go because I didn't like the dark water. I didn't like that it was even cold still. So I was just so comfortable myself. I did exercise but the thing about the cold and even the heat was so disturbing to me. It was like, oh, it's so uncomfortable. That is just too much for me.

Right. I'll work out and I'll do yoga and I'll train. But I'm comfortable with this discomfort.

Yes, exactly.

There's other discomfort I don't like.

It's too. It's just too potent. It was just too much. It was too stressful for me. So I do really understand why people today, some people say are like that is just too much. That is crazy. I cannot do it. But now I have done it for a long time now and I have seen how this actually changed my life. It changed the way I feel about cold and heat. I'm not as cold anymore. I am feeling comfortable at colder degrees than I did before. I easier just say I'm going to go out in nature. I don't feel as restricted anymore about temperature. So if I forgot my jacket, I'm more okay. I'm actually just more okay with a lot of things. So I think that.

But you seem like you're, you know, you seem physically healthy. I'm assuming you probably were before. Were there any emotional or physical benefits before and after besides being able to walk around in cold air?

Yeah. So the one thing I'm just warmer. Yeah. But I also feel more in connection with nature. So I. I do my cold plunges in nature. I think the connection with the nature thing was not in my life before. So I realized that going out in nature really, really made me make my mind reset. And I do this every day. But in the weekends I do it with my family. So we do it together Saturday on Sunday, go for long walks and bring our dog. So using nature and getting outside, getting sunlight and getting out in, swimming in the sea with my family made us reconnect in another way. So it has brought a lot of things with me. It doesn't have to be my family. It could have been my friends or it could have been. So sometimes I go with my friends as well. It's just to say that it has changed the way I live because I now see that I can use it in another way. It makes me happy, it makes me more balanced, which, I mean, in times you're out of balance. Right. But this can definitely get me back in balance. If I do this in the weekends, I know that I'll be better.

You'll be a better person.

I'll be a better person.

Yeah. Did you feel like you had emotional or mental challenges before this study or did you feel pretty. Like you were a pretty solid human being before this?

Yeah. So I would say so, yeah.

You felt pretty good.

I felt pretty good, yeah.

You feel even better now.

But I feel really. I would say I had moments where I could see today I would have benefited from just going out in nature. Right, right. And just use it as it is. Because, I mean, 20 minutes walks has shown to increase or decrease your stress levels and in by noradrenaline levels and cortisol levels. Just 20 minutes of nature. It's a nature pill. Right. 20 minutes lowers your stress levels. This is measured and proven with science. So that walk is even enough to change your biochemistry. Just like I talked about before with the cold water, using nature, using the cold water, using the heat is all going to do that. And I think even though I felt pretty stable before, I feel better now. So I think it's for everyone. Everyone can optimize this and feel better. And I'm not good every day. I have bad days too. Everybody does.

Right.

And there's been some tough times during my Ph.D. i would say. And also there I used it. And that's where I realized that this is actually just getting back to balance. It really helps me, just going out there in nature and just thinking, okay, at least I know this is helping me. It's going to help someone else one day.

Absolutely. Is there anything else around cold or heat therapy that we should know about? Around metabolism, hormone balance, optimizing our health. Is there anything else you think we need to talk about or cover?

I think we covered a lot.

Is there anything we're missing that you think about?

Is there anything we're missing? I think we've been around A lot of things, even the breathing part, I think that breath work is one of the things that actually reconnects the body and mind, and it's a great tool. This is the way I got into, like, learning about the breath work and how breathing in a certain way or in a certain technique is connecting the body and mind. Because when I started to research and writing my ethical protocol, I needed to figure out, how do I teach people how to go into the cold water?

Right.

And some tools needed to be found in my practical way of thinking about this, this, this research. So I was thinking, okay, what. What is it that I need to do? And I was starting winter swimming myself because I had to learn what is going on. And one thing I realized before I went into studying this is my breathing when I went into the water or even before, totally determined the outcome of this plunge. So if I didn't, if I wasn't mindful around it, then I would have. Not as good as an experience as if I was mindful around it. So I started to practice a bit with how to breathe before and after and in the water and figured that if I do it slow and try to slow it down, I also do that when I exercise, actually. So after like a sprint or something, then I try to, like, do like a slow inhale, and then so try to slow down the heart rate, and then you actually catch your breath way quicker. And you also do that in the.

Cold water by doing slow breathing.

Yeah, exactly.

What is the optimal way to breathe to put your brain and your body in harmony and balance when you're feeling stressed and overwhelmed?

The best way to breathe.

Yes. Is there a breathing technique? Is there some type of.

I think there's several, but I think nasal. Nasal. Slow nasal breathing and doing it just for a couple of minutes actually is enough. If we should do something like very short and practical, but slow nasal breathing.

In and out of the nose.

Yes, yes. And you can also do box breathing. I think that's very efficient. 1. I have used that a lot. So doing this kind of like practice this every day. Box breathing is actually very good, I think.

Can you explain box breathing?

Inhale through the nose for four seconds and then exhale, and then you exhale a little bit longer, then do maybe six seconds, and then you hold your breath. You hold for four, and then you can start over. Yeah. So you can play around with that a little bit. But it's a really good thing if you can do the exhale a little bit longer than the inhale, because that slows down the heart rate. So if you are anxious about something, if you are going to do a talk or you are going to a meeting or something, and you are a little bit nervous, you can do this right before, just for a couple of minutes and your heart rate will go down and you can think because then you have oxygen going to your brain and then you can answer.

Actually, if our heart rate is up and we are shallow breathing, what is happening to the brain?

If you are shallow breathing through the mouth, for example, you. You are activating your sympathetic part of your nervous system and you don't want to do that. If you want to go in and do something or you need to use your brain and going on a stage or going to a presentation or you want to go to a job interview, you want to be calm because that's going to increase the blood flow to the brain and that means also oxygen, and you need the oxygen to think. So doing shallow breathing is going to activate the sympathetic part of your nervous system that decreases the blood flow to the brain. So you should try and calm down by doing the nasal breathing or box breathing before. Yeah. So get more oxygen to the brain. Keeps you focused and keeps you more alert also, but it keeps you focused and that's the main thing you want to be.

This is inspiring. I love this stuff. I've been, you know, studying and implementing a lot of these things myself over the years. And so it's. It's helpful for me to understand more of what is, what is helping me, how I can improve it or adjust my strategies and also just understanding how it impacts my body, my brain. So I'm so grateful for all this information. Where can we follow and support you the most right now, Susanna? Where? You're on Instagram, you're on Facebook and YouTube and all these places. But where can we support you the most today?

Well, actually, I have. I'm just finishing up an education that I've been working on for. I think it's more than a year now. And this is aimed for instructors and spars. So if people want to learn more on how all this works and how to implement this for themselves and to use for their customers or something like that. So I've made this education to teach the physiology and the biochemistry, but in layman terms, meaning. Because I think that people need to learn more about this in order for them also to teach this. And I think there's a lot of teaching going on. So, yeah, so I'm making this education. It will be available by the end of the year.

Where can we go for that? Or get on the waitlist for that.

That's on my website on soberginstitute.com and there you can go and sign up to get a notification for the education. And I'll send that out.

So sober. Sober institute.com. right. Soberinstitute.com okay, so make sure to check that out. You're also. You post mostly on Instagram, right? Is that your main place?

Yeah, but I'm everywhere.

You're everywhere. Yeah, exactly. We'll have this stuff linked up as well in the Description, but sober institute.com is the best place to go. S O E B E R G Correct. Hinstitute.com this has been inspiring. I'm. I'm excited for the work that you've done and the research you've done. It took, you know, six, seven years of research to be able to get this information for us. So thank you for dedicating your whole PhD to helping humanity improve through this information. I can only imagine how patient you must be to get, you know, research and, you know, a scientific study complete in seven years of doing this and all the different people that you have to coordinate and all the different data points. That's a lot of life. It's a lot of time of waiting, of, like, hoping you get some good intel back. So I want to acknowledge you, Susanna, for making a decision and a commitment to doing that research for that long, for staying dedicated to this in the ups and downs. Because I'm assuming there's a lot of challenges in it. You got to. You got to get the funding. You got to deal with thousands of people you're, you know, doing the data with. But I acknowledge you for taking on this challenge and giving us these tools because. Because otherwise, a lot of people could be doing ice or heat, and they could be harming themselves. They could be doing it incorrectly and. And hurting their bodies and their. And their minds. So I really acknowledge you for doing that work. Seven years is a long time to. To dedicate your life to one thing, and. And I'm grateful that you did this because so many people in the last five years have been getting more into ice and heat therapy, and now they have, you know, tools and science backing it even more now. I think they were feeling the benefits and seeing it, but now they know the benefits based on your research. I've seen Huberman talk about you and your research, and so it's really cool to see the impact that you're starting to have in a big way. I and I'm excited to see more of it coming in the future.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome. You're welcome. Susanna, this is a question I ask everyone at the end. It's a hypothetical question. It's called three truths. So imagine you get to live as long as you want to live in this world, but eventually, it's your last day. You're as old as you want to be, but it's your last day on this earth, and you've accomplished everything you want to accomplish. Whatever direction you go, family, career, life, all of it. It happens for you. But for whatever reason, on this last day, we don't have access to any more of your content. So this conversation doesn't stay here in this world. It goes away. Your research goes away. All the conversations you've had that are recorded, we don't have access to anymore hypothetical scenario. But on this last day, if you got to leave behind three lessons with the world, three things that you knew to be true that you would want to share with the world, what would be those three truths for you?

Oh, my. That's a really good question. So I think that. Oh, it's most life lessons, I would say, because it's not maybe that much about my science, because. Well, my science has showed me. And what I want to show, then give to the world is follow your passion. Because if you do what makes you happy, it's gonna work out somehow in some way. And it can take seven years.

Yeah.

Or more. I don't know. But if you follow your interest and your passion, something good will come out of it. You just stick with it. It's not even. Doesn't have to be greener on the other side just because it goes faster or better or whatever for others. And then I would say also, if you want to be successful and you want to. Yeah, you want to be successful. I think one of the things is, try not to look for validation too much. Try to validate with yourself. Is this what I want to do? Am I focused on something here? Is am some kind of external things trying to lure me out of the way, or am I going off track here? Am I following my path that I think is interesting? I don't need to ask everybody for their validation to get what I. What values, what would be valuable to me in my life. Right.

Yeah.

So validation is a. Is. Can be a little bit of a dangerous thing. I think it's validating with yourself. Is better. You cannot. You cannot expect other people to completely understand you. That's one thing. Right It's, It's. If you expect that, then you have to wait for a very long time.

Right.

And you won't do anything because you're scared the people would. Would judge you or won't understand you or. So, yeah, I think that had a lot of people not understanding me, but I did understand myself, what I wanted to do. And not only with my research, but maybe a lot of things. So it's like. But I've been happy with my choices and just following those paths. So stay true to yourself.

Okay, what's the third thing?

The first thing? What would that be? I would say your family. Be with your family. Even though that you think that there are so many things you need to do. I think that family is just so important. My boys are growing up and they are 13 and 11 and 13 right now. So I'm just thinking they're moving away very soon. And I have them right now. So I also want to spend time with them. But luckily they love to do what I love to do.

That's nice.

So I just bring them. So finding things that you can connect with and do together is actually giving a lot of love and a lot of value in your life. If you can find that, that's beautiful.

I appreciate that. Susanna, final question. What's your definition of greatness?

My definition of greatness? Oh, God. Greatness is when you do something with passion you love. And you also have an ability to do that every day. And you can just follow that path. I mean, if it brings you joy or money or it brings you success in some way, good. But as long as you can just do it and you can strive with that and be happy with it, that's greatness.

Susanna, thank you so much for being here. If you think about it, we didn't have shoes shoes for most of our existence, right? So if anything, we would have had something to cover our feet to protect it from abrasions. But this idea of wearing, you know, big sneakers that are meant to kind of buffer, you know, or spring us is a relatively modern phenomenon. That's like a less than 50 year ago phenomenon.