10 min
Ice Baths and Epiphanies Andrew Sillitoe Show
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- Entrepreneurship
When something is working, we don’t often think about it. If a car starts smoothly as soon as you turn the key, we don’t think: “Thanks, car, good work today... And thanks to all the engineers and inventors who have pushed this vehicle’s design forward and thanks also to the workers who built the roads-”.
We do not. Because we would be late for where we are going to and soon be thanking our clients for not doing business with us so swiftly and our family for leaving us with such speed.
My point is When things are working, we don’t notice them. When things go wrong, we do. If the car doesn’t start, we are late and annoyed and probably swearing. If the lid of our takeaway coffee comes off as we rush to work, our fingers might get burned and we might swear again. My point is that because of this we carry around a lot of negative emotions with us and often far fewer positive ones. We notice when things go wrong and we remember them. They affect us. They change our mood for the worse.
In the same way that a child carries their favourite soft toy with them everywhere they go, we carry emotional baggage and daily stresses with such regularity we might not even notice we are doing it… Until we are told to let go. In today’s episode of The Andrew Sillitoe Show we are going to be talking about ice baths and epiphanies. Come on in and join us, the water’s lovely.
Titles for The Andrew Sillitoe Show.
I’m going to talk to you now about a living legend. Wim Hof. Not only does his name sound like he should be a heroic character in a Terry Prachett novel but he is basically as brave and otherworldly as that BUT he exists in real life. He is nicknamed the Iceman. Presumably, Iceman is the only name cooler than Wim Hof so he was rightly awarded it. If you can’t tell, I’m a fan. If you’re not a fan, it is probably because you don’t know who he is. That’s about to change…
Wim Hof runs half marathons, bare foot, on ice. Wim Hof set the world record for swimming 57.5 metres completely under ice. Wim Hof climbed 5,700 metres up Mount Everest wearing just shoes and shorts. Wim Hof has also changed my life. He didn’t get an award or medal for it at the time so I am going to give it at least some of the recognition he deserves by talking about it in today’s episode.
A couple of years ago I sat in a bath full of iced water whilst on a Wim Hof Method workshop. During the day, in the few minutes I sat surrounded by freezing cold iced water, I had an epiphany. Although this sentence might, rightly, make you question what sort of person would do that to himself voluntarily, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Like many good ideas it did not feel like a good idea at the time. It felt like one of the worst. Your body goes into shock. Your brain,that is sending messages to your body is screaming at you to “Stop doing what you are doing, immediately” like a panicked parent when you come into the room and see your child spreading jam on the sofa…
Your brain is there to protect you but, as we have mentioned before in previous episodes, with far fewer tigers roaming wild on our streets and the increase in supermarkets, things are slightly less “high stakes” in modern life but our brains have been slower to adapt in some ways.
When I was in the ice bath my brain went into panic mode. It assumed I was dying and in a way it felt like I was. It was reacting in the way it has evolved to do, to get me out of danger. The danger, though, as I have said, was not a tiger or a stampede of mammoths, it was an ice bath.
My breath quickened and got shallow. I began to tense up and became unable to focus. I was struggling. The man who was leading the exercise, Jakub, was trying to get me to focus, to listen to him. He was telling me to breath, he was telling me to concentrate but I couldn’t. Then Jakub said two words that I not only heard but was able to respond to. He said “Let go”.
These wo
When something is working, we don’t often think about it. If a car starts smoothly as soon as you turn the key, we don’t think: “Thanks, car, good work today... And thanks to all the engineers and inventors who have pushed this vehicle’s design forward and thanks also to the workers who built the roads-”.
We do not. Because we would be late for where we are going to and soon be thanking our clients for not doing business with us so swiftly and our family for leaving us with such speed.
My point is When things are working, we don’t notice them. When things go wrong, we do. If the car doesn’t start, we are late and annoyed and probably swearing. If the lid of our takeaway coffee comes off as we rush to work, our fingers might get burned and we might swear again. My point is that because of this we carry around a lot of negative emotions with us and often far fewer positive ones. We notice when things go wrong and we remember them. They affect us. They change our mood for the worse.
In the same way that a child carries their favourite soft toy with them everywhere they go, we carry emotional baggage and daily stresses with such regularity we might not even notice we are doing it… Until we are told to let go. In today’s episode of The Andrew Sillitoe Show we are going to be talking about ice baths and epiphanies. Come on in and join us, the water’s lovely.
Titles for The Andrew Sillitoe Show.
I’m going to talk to you now about a living legend. Wim Hof. Not only does his name sound like he should be a heroic character in a Terry Prachett novel but he is basically as brave and otherworldly as that BUT he exists in real life. He is nicknamed the Iceman. Presumably, Iceman is the only name cooler than Wim Hof so he was rightly awarded it. If you can’t tell, I’m a fan. If you’re not a fan, it is probably because you don’t know who he is. That’s about to change…
Wim Hof runs half marathons, bare foot, on ice. Wim Hof set the world record for swimming 57.5 metres completely under ice. Wim Hof climbed 5,700 metres up Mount Everest wearing just shoes and shorts. Wim Hof has also changed my life. He didn’t get an award or medal for it at the time so I am going to give it at least some of the recognition he deserves by talking about it in today’s episode.
A couple of years ago I sat in a bath full of iced water whilst on a Wim Hof Method workshop. During the day, in the few minutes I sat surrounded by freezing cold iced water, I had an epiphany. Although this sentence might, rightly, make you question what sort of person would do that to himself voluntarily, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Like many good ideas it did not feel like a good idea at the time. It felt like one of the worst. Your body goes into shock. Your brain,that is sending messages to your body is screaming at you to “Stop doing what you are doing, immediately” like a panicked parent when you come into the room and see your child spreading jam on the sofa…
Your brain is there to protect you but, as we have mentioned before in previous episodes, with far fewer tigers roaming wild on our streets and the increase in supermarkets, things are slightly less “high stakes” in modern life but our brains have been slower to adapt in some ways.
When I was in the ice bath my brain went into panic mode. It assumed I was dying and in a way it felt like I was. It was reacting in the way it has evolved to do, to get me out of danger. The danger, though, as I have said, was not a tiger or a stampede of mammoths, it was an ice bath.
My breath quickened and got shallow. I began to tense up and became unable to focus. I was struggling. The man who was leading the exercise, Jakub, was trying to get me to focus, to listen to him. He was telling me to breath, he was telling me to concentrate but I couldn’t. Then Jakub said two words that I not only heard but was able to respond to. He said “Let go”.
These wo
10 min