How Cold Showers Help Us Do Our Most Creative Work

I am fascinated by cold showers. I say fascinated because I don’t want to say that they are enjoyable. But it’s an amazing process to train your mind to deal with jumping in with the most effortless action possible. And I feel like this is a metaphor for doing your Most Creative Work (MCW).

When the water is running and you’re looking at the stream flowing out, your mind goes in all kinds of directions. It will come up with any delay tactic for not going in. So the faster you enter the cold shower, the less likely you are going to let air in the jar. That is my way of saying the longer you delay doing the work that needs to get done, the harder it gets (air in the jar creates mold which makes the food in it unappealing).

Something else that you can experiment with is how you label the cold shower. You can even start by not referring to it as “cold” anymore. It’s just a shower (without intervention of a heater, of course). And rather than saying that this is going to be “difficult”, which you will typically combat by saying it will be “easy” afterwards, instead you can just say that this will be refreshing. Because that is actually the result of what will happen in the moments after you’re been submerged in the water.

Rather than label your Most Creative Work as being difficult, you can say that it is meaningful instead. It gives every day a purpose. And to go many steps beyond, try removing the labels altogether. It’s not easy or difficult, it just is the way it goes. And instead of calling it work, start to connect it to the act of living and breathing itself.