Anna Ferguson

Now, the other thing that also occurs with cold exposure, it's like that acute cold exposure is going to make you gasp.

So the first thing you do is

And then you start to regulate your breathing.

And this is where the real power comes in.

So you have that dump of like cortisol and adrenaline.

You get your heart rate up.

But as you start to regulate your breathing, your parasympathetic nervous system comes online at the same time.

So you get this alert but calm state.

So if you think of being in like a flow state of work or doing something that you love, this can be achieved through that kind of cold exposure as long as you are regulating your breathing throughout it.

And over, they've done studies on this over about 30 days of cold exposure, it actually lowers sympathetic activation and increases parasympathetic activation.

So you're literally rewiring your nervous system to be more resilient to the challenges and stresses that are coming into your life.

100% your spot on there.

And I think the biggest maybe lie that I see nowadays out on social media is like you can be calm with these techniques and the result is not that you want to be calm, it's that you want to be resilient and flexible.

And if we look at resilience as flexibility, I can rise to the challenge and then I can bring myself back down, then we have a much more functional way of navigating life, right?

One that is far more compassionate because we're not demonising ourselves

oh, so anxious or so stressed and bad, bad Anna.

I should have been calm that entire time.

These responses that we have are necessary.

Like if you want sympathetic activation, if you want to laugh, that's sympathetic activation.

If you want to engage in life in a really meaningful and playful way, that's sympathetic activation.