Taking the {cold} plunge

Is a mainstream market emerging to sell us discomfort?

Every Thursday I post a [low-edited] thought about about consumer culture and/or conscious consumerism. These are just conversation starters - scratching at the surface of a deeper thing that I’d love your help in discovering. Please share any reactions, thoughts, questions, etc. below!

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The other day after my workout I jumped into a cold shower. Not only to clean my body (though that was part of the deal), but also to experience the exhilarating benefits of intentional cold exposure. 

Plunging oneself into cold water is having a cultural moment. I hesitate to call it a trend, because endurance athletes and peoples around the world have been participating in cold plunges for years; it’s the triathlete who takes an ice bath after a long run, or the Norwegian who jumps into a nearly freezing lake after sitting in a sauna. I’ve long heard about these practices (and even experimented with lugging 5-pound bags of ice to dump in my college apartment’s bathtub while marathon training), but they seemed primarily to belong to particular subcultures. 

Recently, though, I’ve noticed cold exposure being embraced and touted by the mainstream. All over my social media feeds (from LinkedIn to Instagram and Tiktok) I am seeing people of all stripes adopt the cold plunge as a way to accomplish their goals: to gain more energy, achieve faster workout recovery, suffer fewer headaches, and decrease acne, to name a few. Google Trends shows that search queries for the phenomenon have increased dramatically in the last 8 weeks.

I first noticed a growing cultural embrace of cold exposure six years ago when researching the biohacking community. I was especially interested in how this unique subculture— comprised mostly of tech folks located in Silicon Valley, but spreading rapidly to all corners of the country— was responding to the intense pressures of everyday life by relentlessly optimizing their bodies. Biohacking tapped into the idea that, though there’s only so much you can control externally, by fine tuning internal mechanisms, you can keep up with the ever-increasing demands life throws your way.

While some form of bodily optimization has been around for ages, this particular movement led by Dave Asprey (“the father of biohacking”) took form in the mid 2010s. For many, the foray into biohacking began with bulletproof coffee, a drink developed and coined by Asprey for his fellow biohackers.

Bulletproof coffee is the fancy name for blending butter (preferably organic and grass-fed, like Kerrygold) and pure MCT coconut oil (of which Bulletproof produced their own brand, aptly named ‘Brain Octane Oil’) with hot coffee. It sounds gross - but I’ve tried it - and it truly resembles a creamy coffeehouse drink, just without the sugar. However, don’t you dare pair your bulletproof coffee with a morning croissant or piece of fruit. No, the primary benefit of this unique concoction is that, served as a breakfast replacement, it keeps the body and mind humming with efficient and sustainable energy. (In fact, Bulletproof’s visual identity prominently features a hummingbird motif to communicate this idea.)

Bulletproof coffee started out as a niche, morning science experiment for people who had an extra Vitamix blender lying around. After a couple years of organic success, the brand rode the wave of mind-body enhancement and Bulletproof coffee was marketed as a ready-to-drink beverage available to a broader market.

Originally available only at specialty grocers like Sprouts and Whole Foods, the Bulletproof brand has since expanded to retailers like Target and Walmart, reaching the majority of interested American consumers.

Now, a farmer in Nebraska or a mom in Maine are just as likely to consume bulletproof coffee, laying the foundation for their own biohacking practice. And what may start out as a weird drink for breakfast may snowball into experiments with nootropics, light therapies, and extreme temperature exposure.

The man behind the Bulletproof brand, Dave Asprey, stepped down from running the company in 2019 and now lives on Vancouver Island where he runs his franchise-able biohacking gym, Upgrade Labs and corresponding Human Upgrade podcast.

The Bay Area (and the rest of the country) has now fallen swoon to another voice on body optimization: Dr. Andrew Huberman. Huberman is a neuroscientist at the Stanford School of Medicine and showrunner of the popular Huberman Lab podcast, which debuted in 2021.

I was introduced to Dr. Huberman’s work after a friend recommended I listen to his episodes on heat and cold exposure. I’m late to the listening party; the Huberman Lab podcast is frequently ranked in the Top 15 of all podcasts globally.

As I listened to these two episodes, I thought about a paper I read in grad school (in marketing, mind you, not neuroscience): Selling Pain to the Saturated Self, published in the Journal of Consumer Research. Here, the authors dig into the popularity of Tough Mudder and similar adventure races. They argue that in our modern world, race participants (often computer-dazed knowledge workers) derive many emotional and social benefits from the physical and mental rigor of the event’s many obstacles (including electric shocks, cold water exposure, and lots and lots of mud) over a multi-mile course.

In light of this thinking, perhaps the rise of the cold plunge isn’t only about physical benefits. Perhaps it is also a rigorous mental challenge that yields its own set of emotional rewards. 

After years of being sold comfort (I’m thinking snuggies, hygge, and fifteen minute-Ben & Jerry’s delivery), is there now a mainstream market for selling discomfort? (I’m thinking exclusive cryotherapy memberships, $5000 cold plunge pools, and recent book publishing trends - exhibits a and b.)

In the end, I think all of this is about how we are sold an idea of what it means to “live our best life”. Is our best life one that is hyper-productive? One that is hyper-comfortable? Or is our best life one with some discomfort, peppered with mini-challenges to sharpen our mental acuity in a modern world that seeks to otherwise numb us?

Whatever the answer may be, may we answer it for ourselves.