What an ice bath taught me about self-belief

Adam Miller
4 min readFeb 24, 2019

--

I was sitting down having lunch with a bloke called David, whom I had met at an Entrepreneur conference last year. We were talking about our lives, our habits, things we did in our daily routine to spike our energy and the inevitable and all too common, typical lunch question came up, “hey mate, you want to do an ice bath right now?”

Fuck yeah I wanted to do an ice bath. Only yesterday I had watched Wim Hoff’s documentary on the power of the mind in extreme cold.

Without hesitation, we went in our cars and drive to some random gym, to the ice bath.

I’m fascinated with the power of the mind and its relation with altered states of consciousness. I’ve heard great things about ice baths and how they related to these topics.

So the plan for the ice bath was simple: big, long, deep breaths in through the mouth and out through the mouth. I was told that the initial cold would hurt, but it would subside not too long after.

David and I made the plunge. We hopped in to the point where it was just our heads and necks above the water. Now this water was absolutely freezing cold- you’ll see in the picture that there were literal chunks of ice in the water. I kept the breathing up but the body was instantly forced into a state of shock. My hands and feet straight away went numb. Numb to the point of pain. Pain to the point of quiet desperation.

“I gotta get out, I gotta get out” was all I could think for the first minute. I told myself it wasn’t healthy, I told myself the pain was too much. Though I kept the breathing, and alongside the pain, I kept the self-belief. I told myself I HAD TO do it. I didn’t just want to do it, but I really had to do it. I told myself I knew I was going to do it. The combination of the positive affirmations and the deep breathing meditation allowed me to get to the one minute mark.

Then after around a minute, everything changed. I got to a point of deep meditation where the pain wasn’t there and I wasn’t connected to my body. It was just simply breathing, had complete mental awareness and looking straight forward. It felt nice, it felt calm. I kept the breathing and the still body.

After what literally felt like ten seconds, the bloke timing us said, “3 minutes 30 seconds gone”. When in these deep meditative states, its like time erodes and the focus of the mind makes time pass by extraordinary quickly. To finish it was a breeze. Almost effortless.

Upon getting out of the bath, I felt simply amazing. I was the primal and spiritual me. I was connected fully to the present moment and my self-esteem was at an all time high. I truely felt like I could achieve anything and conquer all. Fears, worries, anxieties were just ideas that were not connected nor associated to me. My presence and my connection to my body limited any negative thought. I had a fucking ripper of a day after that. Completely positive, energetic, excited and believing of myself.

That night I had a huge amount of positive self thought and some profoundly deep introspection.

Self-Belief is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. To achieve great things and get over challenging obstacles we need self-belief. We need to tell ourselves “I can do it, I can do it” and truely believe it, even in the face of huge doubt and uncertainty. Then when we overcome these challenges, we get rewarded with further self-belief. You just achieved something so the mind has even more reference points to understand why you have self-belief. And the cycle goes on and on.

I truely believe that because of this cycle, we can be the architects of your own belief system. Our level of self-belief is simply a choice that we make. While we do get increasing amounts of self-belief over the long-term through the progression of overcoming tasks compounding in difficulty, we are faced with a decision in the moment: Will we believe in ourself? Or will we stand to the side and let time decide our fate.

Earlier during the day, over lunch, David had told me a metaphor about self-belief. Self-belief was the hardware and our skills is the software. You can teach or attempt to teach anyone some sort of skill to put into productive use, but without self-belief as a foundation for our learning, you can’t go far. Self-belief is the mother of creation.

A life without negative self-doubt, but filed with complete self-belief and esteem is something we should all aim for. I’m going to experiment and research of ways to further increase my self-belief. Deep meditative experiences are certainly a highly effective way to develop self-esteem and diminish self-doubt.

--

--

Adam Miller
Adam Miller

Written by Adam Miller

I write about the great books I read and about idea’s that I believe are worth sharing

No responses yet