The 'Cold Shower' Approach to Life

Those frequent international travellers can relate to the following experience. Upon checking into a hotel, it's always a splendid feeling to refresh oneself with a shower and shed some of the weariness of jet lag from one's bones. Acquainting oneself with the hotel shower is usually the first step, and may not be as easy as it seems. The fancier or more modern the hotel, the more complicated the shower taps tends to be, often needlessly so. Some of them, particularly the mixer taps, resemble something from a 19th century locomotive engineering room, with several valves and faucets to add to the confusion. Running short of patience, you tentatively pull at a lever, thinking your effort to to get the right temperature to be ever so slight, only to unexpectedly be blasted with jets of ice cold water.  You yelp, grope around in shock, and if lucky find the presence of mind to close the tap, else you just step out of the shower in a hurry. You are left in a state that can be described as bemused and jarred. Yet, there may be something in this experience you just had that can do you a world of good.

The long, hot shower that we all know and love is a distinctly modern pleasure. As soon as the water stream hits a mildly comfortable warm temperature, time seems to melt away and we can forget about life's troubles as the stream rises. Like a sly addiction, we hesitate to shut off the valve, silently coaxing ourselves to give a few more minutes of leisure. The goal of cleanliness becomes a mere cover for a prolonged period of relaxation. Our muscles de-stress, Oxytocin goes up, anxiety goes down.

While there's nothing inherently wrong with a hot shower itself, the manner in which we do so is in many ways symptomatic of larger issues with our sedentary urban lifestyle. The first problem of course is that of excess. Yes, water wastage is an issue (around 2.5 gallons are lost in an average shower) and plenty of the thermal energy literally goes down the drain. How much water is used up just to wait until the warmth level is sufficient? If you go according to the Sunnah, or just common sense, the process of cleaning shouldn't be so resource and time consuming. But there is a more subtle concern to our attachment with hot showers: the need for comfort.


It's not that we crave comfort. It's that comfort has become our unwritten purpose of existence. For our ancestors, the need for self-preservation was a dominant concern. Tough environment, food scarcity, hostile enemies, all these things meant that security couldn't be taken for granted. This is still the state for much of humanity today, but for the sheltered urbanites among us, these factors have pretty much been taken out of the equation. We are free to indulge in making our day-to-day tasks simpler and convenient, to the point that a life of convenience is viewed as a life of comfort. And comfort is somehow construed as happiness. It's hard to think of a point in the historical process when this became a norm. When the 19th century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously articulated the utilitarian principle of seeking 'the maximum happiness for the maximum amount of people', he defined happiness as 'pleasure' over 'pain'. Perhaps this may have been a starting point.

To take a somewhat contrarian view, I feel that comfort should also be something imbibed in moderation. Too much comfort can be a strange intoxicant, desensitizing us to some of life's underlying struggles. Comfort can bring relief, yes, but how much have we lost by fearing to leave the confines of our comfy little cottage? Comfort doesn't prepare us for the arrows of misfortune when they hit their mark. But to say that perhaps life was not meant to be comfortable sounds like sacrilege to a modern.

That's why we need the cold shower, both literally and figuratively. We need these occasional jolts of strategic discomfort periodically inserted in our lives, to sensitize us, toughen us, inspire us. For each person, their own 'cold shower' can be something different, from walking barefoot occasionally to eating food once in a while that we find to be unpalatable in its blandness or spiciness. If we understand that too much comfort itself can be a hindrance to our own self-actualization, we can start on a path of true personal reform. Once we find ourselves inoculated to a certain form of discomfort, we should seek something new.

To be sure, I'm not saying that taking frequent frigid showers automatically makes one a hardened warrior, or that anyone who takes a hot showers is by default namby pamby. There are at best some unreliable indicators of larger social inclinations in society. Based on trends we can see manifested nowadays, the securing of comfort as a primary social aim seems to be giving way though to the management of risk, which sociologists now call the risk society, as the faith in the project of modernity slowly fades. But then, that's a study for another day.

For the record, I am a fan of cold showers, not in least for their numerous health benefits, especially in a hot climate. The cold shock effect in particular is a great way to boost circulation and up your heart rate. For those who simply don't like any temperature that approaches mildly cold, be warned, even after months of trying cold showers, there's a good chance you may not find it any more pleasant than when you started. But then, that's the beauty of it.