There was a period in my life when I believed that if I could just make my mornings harder, the rest of the day would follow. Cold showers. Iced water before caffeine. The shock of it all felt virtuous. Like proof that I was disciplined, awake, doing something right. Discomfort had become a shorthand for progress. And cold water, especially first thing in the morning, felt like the cleanest expression of that belief.
It’s not difficult to understand why cold exposure has become such a revered ritual. In a culture obsessed with optimization, cold water promises clarity, alertness, resilience. It looks decisive. Masculine, even. The body jolted into readiness, the mind sharpened by sensation. There is something reassuring about rituals that hurt a little. They make us feel as though we are earning our equilibrium rather than asking for it.
But over time, something didn’t add up. The more I shocked my system awake, the more I noticed how tense I felt before the day had even begun. My body braced. My breath stayed shallow. My thoughts moved faster than I could keep up with. I wasn’t energized so much as activated. And activation, I began to realize, is not the same thing as balance.
Cold water, by design, triggers the sympathetic nervous system, the branch responsible for fight, flight and vigilance. This isn’t speculation. It’s well-documented physiology. Sudden cold exposure increases the release of stress hormones like norepinephrine and cortisol, heightening alertness and preparing the body to respond to perceived threat. In controlled doses, for certain bodies, this can be beneficial. But when stress is already the baseline, as it is for so many of us navigating burnout, anxiety and chronic overwork, the question becomes less about optimization and more about accumulation.
What happens when we stack stress on top of stress and call it wellness?
There is a growing body of research suggesting that people experiencing chronic stress often exist in a state of persistent sympathetic dominance. Their nervous systems are already primed for threat, even in the absence of immediate danger. For these individuals, adding another physiological stressor, no matter how fashionable or well-intentioned, may exacerbate dysregulation rather than resolve it. Some neuroscientists and endocrinologists have cautioned that interventions designed to “wake up” the body may be counterproductive for systems that are already awake to the point of exhaustion.
And yet, the wellness conversation rarely accounts for this nuance. Cold water is marketed as universally good, a moral good even. If you can tolerate it, you’re disciplined. If you can’t, you’re weak. There is very little room in this narrative for nervous systems that are already overloaded, bodies that are already bracing, minds that are already running ahead of themselves before breakfast.
Warm water, by contrast, has never been particularly aspirational. It doesn’t photograph well. It doesn’t promise transformation. It doesn’t feel like an achievement. But from a physiological standpoint, it tells a very different story.
Warmth is associated with parasympathetic activation, the branch of the nervous system responsible for rest, digestion and repair. Gentle warmth can support circulation, soften muscle tension, and signal safety to the body. In many traditional medical systems, including Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, warm water has long been recommended in the morning to support digestion and internal balance. Not because it shocks the system into submission, but because it invites the body to wake gradually.
What’s striking is how out of step this approach feels with modern wellness culture. Gentleness has been rebranded as indulgence. Ease as avoidance. Slowness as lack of ambition. We have learned to distrust practices that don’t demand something from us, even when the thing we need most is regulation rather than stimulation.
This is not an argument against cold water in all contexts. For some people, at certain times, cold exposure can be invigorating and even therapeutic. The problem is not the practice itself, but the assumption that what sharpens one nervous system must sharpen all of them. Bodies are not interchangeable. Stress histories matter. Burnout leaves residue.
The more honest question, I’ve found, is not “What’s optimal?” but “What does my body need this morning?”
For me, the answer changed when I stopped treating mornings as something to conquer. Warm water didn’t fix my life. It didn’t suddenly make me calm or productive or healed. What it did was remove one unnecessary demand. It allowed my body to enter the day without flinching. And that, quietly, felt radical.
There is something revealing about how uncomfortable we are with softness. We praise resilience but often confuse it with endurance. True resilience, neuroscientists will tell you, depends not on constant activation but on flexibility, the ability to move between states of arousal and rest. Systems that never downshift eventually break. Recovery is not a reward. It is a requirement.
Cold water teaches us how to tolerate discomfort. Warm water teaches us how to listen.
Perhaps the real provocation here is not about temperature at all, but about what we believe health should feel like. We have been conditioned to equate wellness with effort, discipline and visible struggle. But healing, especially from burnout, rarely announces itself with adrenaline. More often, it arrives quietly, through practices that don’t look impressive and don’t demand proof.
The case against cold water, then, is not a rejection. It is an invitation to reconsider the reflex to shock ourselves into functioning. To ask whether we are waking our bodies with intention or with aggression. To notice whether our rituals are helping us regulate, or simply reinforcing the very stress patterns we’re trying to escape.
Warm water won’t make you better. But it might make you kinder to yourself. And in a culture that treats self-compassion as optional, that might be the most subversive ritual of all.
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From Matt's Rituals:
The Function Flow Cleanser is a pause in motion. Designed to cleanse without disruption, it refreshes the skin while keeping its rhythm intact. Simple, grounding, and restorative — the kind of clean that doesn’t ask for more.
