Cold Water
Super Moon Cold Plunge
“Fuck it’s cold!”
The only way I enter the Salish Sea in November is by making an offering of expletives, focusing on the delivery of said expletives, and running – not wading – into the water.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Goddam, it’s fucking cold!”
It goes like this every time. Last Friday night it went like this. A few strides into the salt water I stacked my hands one atop the other, tucked my head, and dove. I forced one, two underwater strokes with arms and legs, then surfaced with a gasp. Euphoria tinged relief flooded me. Spotlit by the pale yellow of the newly risen super moon, a stillness settled in.
I’d had a hard day. Not for any specific reason, not for any particular stressor or misfortune, I was just off. Agitated. I’ve spent entire winters feeling this way, so the arrival of these feelings – vague unease, the inability to focus, disinterest in nourishment of any kind – set off alarm bells. How long is this going to last? I wondered. It’s not even winter yet, what do I do?
But I know what to do. I felt the restlessness sluicing off my head and hands along with the streams of fifty degree salt water.
I found Alex, who’d entered the cold water with considerably less fanfare, bobbing serenely up to his neck. We soaked for just a few minutes, hands and heads above the water’s surface, everything else below. The afternoon’s king tide – an unusual high created by the gravitational pull of the super moon – was ebbing again.
A sea lion snorted from somewhere in the nearby darkness and I whirled around looking for the moon’s reflection off a domed head. I could see nothing beyond the path of moonlight on the water.
“That might be my cue to get out,” I said, warily.
Sea lions are friendly, curious creatures. An open water swimmer I met in the spring showed me pictures of a threatened steller sea lion swimming below her in deep water on a sunny day. She gushed about the experience. Still, they’re the size of grizzly bears with as many teeth. That, and my own teeth, far fewer in number and blunter of tip, were beginning to chatter involuntarily.
We waded to shore and scurried back across the road to the 200 degree heat waiting for us. “There’s a sea lion out there!” I reported to Mikal, our host and owner of Fire + Floe, the mobile sauna parked near the Shel Chelb estuary at Pleasant Beach on the south end of Bainbridge Island.
“Do me a favor and don’t mention that to the group of women who just showed up?” she requested, smiling. I pulled my thumb and forefinger across my lips and slipped back into the blissful heat.
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Depression + Inflammation
Katherine May’s 2020 book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times first tipped me off to the effects of cold water immersion on depression. There, I encountered mention of the work of Cambridge neuroscientist Ed Bullmore, who is interested in the connection between inflammation and disordered mental states.
Dr. Bullmore’s exploration of the prevalence of depression in patients with chronic inflammatory diseases has led him to an interesting hypothesis. In a 2019 article for Psychology Today he writes,
Physicianly disengagement from psychological symptoms is not surprising in view of the mind-body split of Western medicine, but it is surprising given that most physicians have some first-hand clinical experience of the mood-boosting effects of anti-inflammatory drugs… An antidepressant effect of anti-inflammatory drugs in patients with comorbid depression—that's exactly what you'd expect if their depression was directly caused by their inflammation.
In other words, one way to think of depression might be as inflammation of the brain. And like inflammation of the body (which, after all, is not separate), it might respond well to decreases in systemic inflammation. Anti-inflammatory drugs, the focus of Dr. Bullmore’s research, are one way to decrease systemic inflammation. Cold water is another.
“I’m treating my brain like an inflamed joint,” cold water swimmer Dorte Lyager tells Katherine May in the pages of Wintering.
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If You Can’t Get Out of It, Get Into It
I first heard this aphorism from an ex-boyfriend who was a wilderness guide. He claimed it was the prize catchphrase in a guide’s toolkit, effective at getting clients to find and meet their edge within difficulty. It’s become my mantra for the seasonal shift from the light to the dark half of the year. The way through is in.
As air gets colder and wetter, and days get shorter, and moods grow darker, I turn to the wet woods, I witness sunrises and sunsets, and I cold plunge. This place holds exactly the medicine I need. When I welcome it in, in all its briny chill, my capacity for it all – the cold and the depression – increases.
Contrast therapy is not new. People of northern climes have exposed themselves to cycles of extreme cold and heat as a matter of health for centuries. Our relatively recent sophistication in understanding and communicating the effects has spotlit the practice though. Among the benefits of cold water immersion listed on Fire + Floe’s FAQ page are increased focus, lowered inflammation, and a 250% increase in dopamine lasting 4 - 6 hours.
Alex and I cycled through the sauna and salt water three times that night, chatting with new friends and neighbors about building projects and raising chickens and personal plunge records. One woman stayed in the water for every bit of ten minutes and reentered the sauna, visibly moved by having felt the pull of the outgoing tide on her legs. Yes, I thought, admiring her glow. If an openness to feeling deeply lets me feel that, then yes.
