The Wim Hof Method
Activate Your Full Human Potential
This is our first note on a book by Wim Hof, who you may know as "The Iceman." He holds multiple world records for his feats of endurance and exposure to cold. And, as you may not know, the effectiveness of his methods—which are now practiced by millions—have been validated by eight university research studies. This book is a great way to learn more about just how powerful his method integrating cold, breath and the power of our minds can be.
Big Ideas
- Turning Poison into Heroic MedicineInto Heroic medicine.
- A Cold Shower a Day Keeps the Doctor AwayKeeps the doctor away.
- Breathe!It does a body good.
- The Third Pillar: MindsetThe third pillar: COMMIT.
- Searching for our SoulsLook within.
“Would you like to have more energy, less stress, and a stronger immune system? Would you like to sleep better, improve your cognitive and athletic performance, boost your mood, lose weight, and alleviate your anxiety? What if I told you that you can achieve all these things and so much more by unlocking the power of your own mind? And that you can do it in only a few days? ...
The secret to a lifetime of health and happiness is within your grasp. You can safely practice the Wim Hof Method by yourself, at your own pace, and within the comfort of your own home. No pills, injections, vitamins, supplements, equipment, or specialty diets of any kind—all you need is yourself and a desire to unlock your body’s hidden potential. This book is your guide.
Are you ready? In the pages that follow, I will share the story of my journey, from a small Dutch village in which I was born to the world stage I now occupy. I will explain the ins and outs of my method, the philosophy that underpins it, and the science that supports it. And I will present examples of practitioners who have used the method to radically transform their lives. In doing so, my hope is to inspire you to retake control of your body and life by unleashing the immense power of your mind. It’s all there for you, and there’s no time to waste.
Let’s go.”
~ Wim Hof from The Wim Hof Method
Wim Hof.
Also known as “The Iceman.”
If you’re into optimizing, you’ve almost certainly heard of him.
As you may know, he holds multiple world records for his feats of endurance and exposure to cold—such as climbing Mount Kilimanjaro wearing only shorts and shoes, running barefoot half marathons in the Arctic Circle, and standing in an ice-filled container for more than 112 minutes.
As you may not know, the effectiveness of his methods—which are now practiced by millions—have been validated by eight university research studies.
In fact, leading health scientist Elissa Epel, who wrote The Telomere Effect with Nobel Prize Winner Elizabeth Blackburn (check out those Notes), and her team at UCSF have been conducting research on Wim Hof’s techniques. The results have been staggering.
She wrote the foreword to the book in which she tells us that she is “honored to introduce you to Wim Hof and what may be one of our big revolutions in health and self-care, our ability to apply and self-prescribe our own levels of hormetic stress.”
This book is a great way to learn more about what he’s up to and just how powerful his method integrating cold, breath and the power of our minds can be. (Get the book here.)
As you’d expect, the book is packed with Big Ideas. And, as always, I’m excited to share some of my favorites so let’s jump straight in!
Download MP3
Download PDFWhat lies behind us, and what lies before us are but tiny matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what lies within us out into the world, miracles happen.
Get the BookTurning Poison into Heroic Medicine
“I lost my first wife to suicide in 1995. We had four children together, and she jumped from eight stories up. I was powerless there. She had been suffering for quite some time, and all the injections and the pills and therapists in the world couldn’t help her. They only made things worse. She jumped after kissing the kids goodbye, and the emotional imprint that formed as a result is deeply rooted within the drive I had, and still have, to develop a means first to survive in the world with four kids and then, in time, to heal. It’s like a scar that fades somewhat but is always there. Driven by emotional loss, a broken heart, and having four children and no money, I was highly motivated to make a change, to offer an alternative solution for those afflicted with mental illness. Now, a quarter century later, we are getting some answers.”
The wisdom great teachers share is, of course, incredibly powerful.
And...
I think the stories about the challenges they faced on their Heroic quests are often, BY FAR, even more powerful. And Wim Hof’s story—which he beautifully shares in this book—is one of the most inspiring.
I know that my own drive to serve you and your families is rooted in my own personal challenges and the challenges my family has faced. As we discuss in various contexts (including Conquering Depression 101 and Conquering Anxiety 101), my father struggled with alcohol. His father also struggled with alcohol and ended his own life.
I know the pain. And, I know the path I took to help alleviate the pain in my life. Like Wim Hof, I was highly motivated to make a change, to offer an alternative solution for those who face similar challenges.
In The Undefeated Mind (check out those GREAT Notes!), Alex Lickerman describes this as “turning poison into medicine.”
He tells us: “From the Buddhist perspective, I told him, all of us have the capacity to make use of any circumstance, no matter how awful, to create value. This ability to ‘change poison into medicine,’ as it is known in Nichiren Buddhism, makes plausible the transformation of even the most horrific tragedy into something that enables us to become happier. . . .
Believing in your ability to transform poison into medicine when you don’t know how, and often won’t except in retrospect, is difficult, I admit. But that’s the confidence you have to find. That’s the confidence that represents your greatest defense against discouragement.”
In terms of moving from alchemizing our own suffering to encouraging others, he ALSO tells us: “We may think our advice represents the most valuable thing we have to offer those who suffer, but it pales in comparison to the power of our encouragement. Encouragement, at its heart, represents an attempt to make others feel that they have the strength, wisdom, courage, and ability to solve their problems themselves; it aims not to provide specific solutions but to make others believe that they can find those solutions on their own. With encouragement we express our belief in the indefatigable power of the human spirit to make what appears to be impossible possible, all in the hopes of awakening the same belief in those we’re trying to encourage.”
Here’s to turning poison into medicine and encouraging others to do the same, Hero!
I’m talking about our responsibility to each other. The Jews have a term for it, Tikkun olam. It means that we bear a responsibility not only for our own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society at large. That’s how I feel. That’s why these healings are so meaningful for me.
A Cold Shower a Day Keeps the Doctor Away
“How do we tackle this killer [of cardiovascular-related diseases which are the number-one killer in our society]? It’s very simple. A cold shower a day keeps the doctor away. The medical system is increasingly more driven by pharmaceutical solutions than by healing, and few would recommend this method, but it’s right there. It’s simple, and it works, and it doesn’t cost a thing. Our vascular system needs to be stimulated to achieve the desired muscular tone. It doesn’t need training, only awakening. Then, once it’s awakened and optimized, let’s say in ten days, a whole sequence of magic begins to occur within the body. ...
When you take a cold shower, all of those little muscles in your vascular system—millions of them—are activated and exercised. Within ten days of taking these showers, you will notice that your heart rate has decreased significantly, as much as fifteen to thirty beats per minute, and that it remains that way for twenty-four hours a day. That translates to a lot less stress. It’s important to understand that your heart rate increases whenever your body experiences stress. That sends a primordial signal to the body to activate adrenaline and cortisol, which sets off a series of biochemical processes that exhaust your adrenal axis, your energy, because you’re in poor vascular condition. Your heart needs to pump more, work harder.”
The Wim Hof Method has three pillars: cold + breath + mind.
The book is organized around those three pillars. That passage is from a chapter on the first pillar: “A Cold Shower a Day Keeps the Doctor Away.”
Before we jump into the protocol to get your cold shower practice installed, let’s start with some eye-popping stats.
Did you know that our vascular system, “if laid out end-to-end, would stretch nearly two and a half times the length of the world”?
Yep.
And, get this: “There are approximately sixty-two thousand miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries in each and every one of us. The vascular system is constructed, after millions of years of evolution, with millions of little muscles that contract and open the veins and the vascular channels in reaction to the weather.”
But... In our climate-controlled modern world, we rarely give those millions of little muscles the workouts they so desperately need—which isn’t a good thing.
Enter: That cold shower a day that keeps the doctor away by deliberately training those muscles to do what they need to do to keep us energized.
Wim Hof walks us through a simple way to build a cold shower protocol.
Here’s the short story: In Week 1, just turn the warm shower to cold for the last thirty seconds. Then in Week 2, make it one minute of cold water at the end of your normally warm shower. In Week 3, move it up to a minute and a half of cold at the end. In Week 4, make it two minutes of cold water at the end of a warm shower.
Boom. Done. Repeat.
Before we move on, I want to briefly touch on some parallel wisdom about the fact that a low resting heart rate is related to increased longevity.
In Breath, James Nestor puts it this way: “Mammals with the lowest resting heart rates live the longest. And it’s no coincidence that these are consistently the same mammals that breathe the slowest. The only way to retain a slow resting heart rate is slow breaths. This is as true for baboons and bison as it is for blue whales and us.”
I’ve personally been practicing my version of this for a while now and it’s always ASTONISHING to me just how quickly my resting heart rate plummets after I use our cold plunge. And, when I do it an hour to two before bed, it’s remarkable how the cold positively affects my resting heart rate AND my heart rate variability.
I’m positively addicted. As Wim Hof would say: A cold shower a day keeps the doctor away. My cold protocol is one of the 101 Heroic targets I hit a day to keep my daimon in play!
Again, the cold is merciless, but it is absolutely righteous. It goes past the mind, past the conditioning, past all comfort-zone behaviorism, past our weakness, and makes us strong. After millions of years of evolutionary development, it returns us to our optimal condition.
Breathe!
“Crohn’s disease, cancer, depression, arthritis, asthma, and bipolar disorder are all caused by deregulation of our immune, endocrine, and hormonal systems through uncontrolled inflammation. Now, by employing these simple breathing techniques, we are able to suppress the inflammatory markers in the blood. I challenge any doctor who remains skeptical, who believes it isn’t real, to try it for themselves. We’ve got strong evidence, and it’s been published in the best scientific journals in the world. As you’ll see in the chapters to come, we changed the books.
We are able to tap into the autonomic nervous system and suppress inflammation. We can regulate our mood, emotions, body temperature and more. The breathing exercises employed through this method help clean up the biochemical residue (the undesired by-products of a chemical reaction) in the lymphatic system, the deepest of all bodily systems. All the stressful activities we do in our work and emotional life leave behind a biochemical residue that causes and compounds inflammation in our cells. ...
While they can have a profound impact on your physical and emotional state, the breathing exercises themselves are actually very simple. It’s just thirty breaths taken while lying on a sofa or bed, with periods of retention.”
Breath. It does a body good!
Seriously. When I look back at some of the highest-leverage changes I’ve made in my life, training my breath is, arguably, at least tied for first.
It’s right up there with prioritizing my sleep which remains THE core practice and THE first Energy Target I hit EVERY MORNING in the Heroic App. “9-10 hours in bed” for the win, Hero!
Other key levers? Removing sugar and processed foods and GRAINS from my diet. Movement. Meditation. And... Well, it’s a long list. See Sleep 101, Breathing 101, Nutrition 101, Meditation 101, Movement 101, Productivity 101, Antifragility 101, Habits 101, Stoicism 101, Conquering Digital Addiction 101, Peak Performance 101, Goal Setting 101, Energy 101, Abundance 101, Self Image 101, Willpower 101 and Love 101 for a few more Ideas that have most powerfully shaped my life. :)
Check out the book and Wim Hof’s online stuff for more details on his breathing approach. I’ve personally fallen in love with Patrick McKeown’s “Breathe less to breathe right” approach and, after reading The Oxygen Advantageand having his 1-on-1 coaching, I’ve practiced that EVERY DAY for years. I talk about it more in Breathing 101 and in our Mastery Series.
For now, let’s take a nice, deep, relaxing breath together. In through the nose, down into the belly, back out through the nose—exhaling slightly longer than the inhale. Ah... Cells are oxygenated. LET’S GO!
P.S. For more on breathing, check out our collection of Notes as well.
For now, let’s remember Belissa Vranich’s wisdom fromBreathe:“Oxygen is sustenance in a way that food can never be. Yes, you should eat leafy greens, organic and local, and take your vitamins . . . but the best way to take care of yourself is to deal with the most important thing first: your breathing. Everything else is secondary.”
What do you want? Do you want to learn to deal with stress, or do you want to continue suffering? This method is very simple, very accessible, and endorsed by science. Many thousands of people have benefited from it. Anybody can do it, and there is no dogma, only acceptance. Only freedom.
The Third Pillar: Mindset
“There are three pillars to the Wim Hof Method. The first two are the cold and the breath. The third pillar of the method is mindset. We call this pillar ‘commitment’ in our training programs because you must have the right mindset to make the commitment to go against your ego and take the damn shower, to just breathe. You could also call this pillar the power of the mind. It includes the idea of will and the power to imagine, to meditate, to visualize—the power to send your attention to any part of your body, to observe any bodily process. We have this power. We look to the ancient yogis and shamans for the secrets of mind power, but it is simpler than all of that. It is all right here for us, proven by science. Scientific studies and personal experience give us the confidence we need to do the method. They gave me the confidence to continue on my mission. ...
We have shown through scientific evidence and comparative studies that cold exposure, in combination with conscious breathing, meditation, and a positive mental attitude, has far-reaching benefits to human health. Devoted practitioners of the method have been able to reverse diabetes, alleviate the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease, lose weight, and achieve remarkable athletic feats. But in order to reap the benefit of this method, you’ve got to fully commit your mind to it. Tune out distractions. Turn off your television and leave your phone in another room when you begin the breathing exercises each morning. Give yourself enough time so that time doesn’t factor into your thoughts at all. These twenty to twenty-five minutes a day require your complete attention. The mind is a neurological muscle that is able to influence your body’s molecular systems and aid its absorption of oxygen, which creates the energy you want. And if you want this muscle to function optimally, you’ve got to surrender unconditionally to the experience. You have to really go for it. You have to have the third pillar: confidence, mindset.”
We start with Cold. We add Breath. Then we focus on our Minds as we COMMIT and go ALL IN.
Wim tells us how he prepared his mind for the many challenges he has conquered—from a marathon on Everest (which he did at 15,000 feet barefoot for eight hours!) to spending nearly two hours packed in ice while scientists measured his core body temperature that “gradually dropped by 10 degrees to a level that would be fatal to an average person” before he was able to raise it by 6 degrees with the power of his mind.
He tells us: “It comes down to verified confidence and trusting that what I see in my mind, it is going to happen. I had applied the same mindset to hundreds of previous challenges, and I gained confidence from that.”
One of the things Elissa Epel points out in the foreword is the fact that “The method shows clearly that what we believe determines how much we can do. As Wim points out, ‘Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” And, she says that one of the studies published on Wim Hof’s work shows “that optimistic outcome expectancies are associated with some of the physiological responses to the method.”
So... What do YOU want to create in your life? Do you think you can? Remember: Whether we think we can or we think we can’t, we’re right. It’s time to get our minds right.
P.S. Check out our Notes on Ellen Langer’s Counterclockwise and Mindfulness for more on the psychology of possibility. And, check out all of our Mental Toughness and Peak Performance books for more on the power of, as the Navy SEALs would say, winning in the mind first.
This search for external validation, this need to be ‘the best,’ is truly a fool’s errand. Being the best and being the best you can be are quite different things, see. But you can become the best version of yourself when you gain the ability to regulate your own biochemistry, your own energy, and to channel that energy however you see fit.
The greatest accomplishment you can achieve is stillness of the mind.
Searching for our Souls
“It is important to recognize the gravity of this discovery. It’s reminiscent of the fable about the wise men coming together and asking, ‘What do we do about the soul, since people have made such a mess out of it?’ ‘Put it on the highest of mountains!’ one man says. But the people crawl up the mountains like ants, find the soul and make it a trophy. So the wise men decree, ‘Put it at the bottom of the deepest seas!’ But the people build underwater vessels and dive down under. They will find the thing and bring it to the surface and put it in a museum. So the wise men say, ‘Put it beyond the farthest planet!’ But the people will build spacecrafts and venture off to find it. They bring it back and make warfare over it. The wise men are confounded because none of them knows where to put the soul. And then one stands up and says, ‘I’ve got it! Put it in the people themselves since they will ever look there.’
That’s exactly where it is. The soul resides within us. It is within our reach if we know where to look for it. And now we found a shortcut into the deepest part of the brain, which is the seat of the mind, the soul. It’s amazing, and it makes you feel amazing because we are amazing beings, but we have to live up to it. We need to use this power for good.”
I love that.
Eric Butterworth tells the same story in a slightly different way in his great book Discover the Power Within You.
After exploring the tallest mountains and deepest seas, his version ends with this wisdom: “Then Brahma said, ‘Here is what we will do with man’s divinity. We will hide it deep down in man himself, for he will never think to look for it there.’ Ever since then, the legend concludes, man has been going up and down the earth, climbing, digging, diving, exploring, searching for something that is already in himself.”
Then he tells us “But you must still make that great decision to affirm your unity with the Infinite. You must still believe that I AM, and then work tirelessly to act the part. You must claim your freedom, realizing that it does not mean doing what you like, but becoming what you should.”
The soul resides within. Connecting with that best, most Heroic version of ourselves so we can live with eudaimonia (good soul!) in service to something bigger than ourselves, is, of course, the ultimate game we are playing and the focal point of everything we do together.
Here’s to Target swiping cold, breath and focus as we optimize our Energy, Work and Love and give the world all we’ve got TODAY.
There is so much more to life than meets the eye if you choose to seek it. The seeker becomes the finder, the finder of so much more than we thought was possible.
About the author
