Dopamine Nation

PART III
The Pursuit of Pain

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M
CHAPTER 7
Pressing on the Pain Side
ichael sat across from me, looking relaxed in jeans and a T-shirt.
Boyishly handsome and effortlessly charming, his natural appeal was
both his gift and his burden.
“I’m an attention whore,” he said. “Any of my friends will tell you that.”
Michael’s life was once upon a time a Silicon Valley fairy tale. After
graduating from college, he made millions in the real estate business. By age
thirty-five, he was fabulously rich, enviably handsome, and happily married
to the woman he loved.
But he had another life that would soon unravel everything he had worked
for.
“I’ve always been an energy guy, looking for anything to give me a boost.
Cocaine was obvious, but alcohol did that for me too . . . gave me a euphoric
high and lots of energy, from the very first time I tried it. I told myself I was
going to be that one guy who could do cocaine recreationally and not get into
trouble. At the time, I really believed that.” He paused and smiled. “I should
have known.
“When my wife told me that tackling my addiction was going to be the only
way to save our marriage, I didn’t even hesitate. I wanted her. I wanted the
marriage. Recovery was the only choice.”
Quitting, for Michael, wasn’t the hard part. It was figuring out what to do
next. After quitting he was flooded with all the negative emotions he’d been
masking with drugs. When he wasn’t feeling sad, angry, and ashamed, he was

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feeling nothing at all, which was possibly worse. Then he happened upon
something that gave him hope.
“The first time it happened,” he told me, “it was an accident. I’d been
getting up in the mornings to take tennis lessons . . . a way to distract myself
in the early days of not using. But an hour after tennis and showering, I’d still
be sweating. I mentioned it to my tennis coach, and he suggested I try a cold
shower instead. The cold shower was a little painful, but only for seconds
until my body got used to it. When I got out, I felt surprisingly good, like I’d
had a really good cup of coffee.
“Over the next couple of weeks, I started to notice that my mood after a
cold shower was better. I researched cold-water therapy online and found a
community of people taking ice baths. It seemed kind of crazy, but I was
desperate. Following their lead, I progressed from cold showers to filling my
bathtub with cold water and immersing myself in it. That worked even better,
so I upped the ante and added ice to the tub water to get the temperature even
lower. By doing that, I could get the temp to the mid-fifties.
“I got into a routine where I immersed myself in ice water for five to ten
minutes every morning and again just before bed. I did that every day for the
next three years. It was key to my recovery.”
“What does it feel like,” I asked, “immersing yourself in cold water?” I
have an aversion to cold water myself, and couldn’t tolerate those
temperatures for even a few seconds.
“For the first five to ten seconds, my body is screaming: Stop, you’re
killing yourself. It’s that painful.”
“I can imagine.”
“But I tell myself it’s time limited, and it’s worth it. After the initial shock,
my skin goes numb. Right after I get out, I feel high. It’s exactly like a
drug . . . like how I remember ecstasy or recreational Vicodin. Incredible. I
feel great for hours.”
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For most of human history, people bathed in cold water. Only those living
near a natural hot spring could regularly enjoy a hot bath. No wonder people

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back then stayed dirtier.
The ancient Greeks developed a heating system for public baths but
continued to advocate for the use of cold water to treat a variety of ailments.
In the 1920s, a German farmer named Vincenz Priessnitz promoted the use of
ice-cold water to cure all manner of physical and psychological disorders.
He went so far as to turn his home into a sanitarium for ice-water treatment.
Since the advent of modern plumbing and heating, hot baths and showers
have become the norm; but ice-water immersion has lately become popular
again.
Endurance athletes claim it speeds muscle recovery. The “Scottish
shower,” also called the “James Bond shower” as practiced by James Bond
in Ian Fleming’s 007 novels, is newly popular and consists of ending a hot
shower with at least a minute of cold shower.
Ice-water immersion gurus such as the Dutchman Wim Hof have become
celebrities in their own right for their ability to immerse themselves for hours
at a time in near-freezing temperatures.
Scientists at Charles University in Prague, writing in the European Journal