How to Walk Through Walls

I’ve been taking cold showers for a few weeks now, and I’m surprised how quickly I’ve adapted. Now I can stand there, with almost no discomfort, in water that would make me shiver involuntarily just eight or ten showers ago.

According to the cold shower nerds I follow, it’s important not only to make the water cold, but to avoid bracing yourself against the cold, both mentally and physically. You want to just let it hit you. Don’t hunch your shoulders, don’t hug yourself for warmth, don’t make anguished faces.

If the water is too cold, and you react uncontrollably, you dial back the intensity a bit. You find that state of non-resistance in yourself, then try to achieve it at a cooler temperature next time.

There’s something about this simple practice that’s empowering — nearly immediately so — and it applies to much more than cold water.

To be clear, this isn’t a “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” thing. I don’t have a David Goggins or David Blaine type temperament. I have no desire to run a 240-mile ultramarathon or stand encased in an ice-coffin for two days. I really like comfort. I am wearing sweatpants right now, drinking decaf and listening to Enya.

I’m talking about something more subtle than pummeling yourself with pain and unpleasantness. Human beings have the ability make many areas of life much easier, relatively quickly, by consciously playing with our psychological resistance to things.

By allowing a little more discomfort than usual, without bracing against it, you can expand the territory in which you can roam freely – i.e. without suffering. Already, if I had to, I could swim in cold lakes, forget my sweater at home, or get caught in the rain, with much less misery than before. This change isn’t life-altering, but it’s significant, and it’s come after only a handful of sessions – perhaps 20 total minutes of exposure.

Also, cold is only one of life’s many difficult-to-endure sensations. The same method could theoretically be used to neuter many other forms of discomfort: fatigue, heat, humidity, hunger, nervousness, low mood, social anxiety, the spiciness of food, fear of spiders – any feeling you find yourself reflexively trying to get rid of.

As long as you have some way of controlling the level of exposure, you can find and reside in that window just below “ease,” and consciously bear a little more of it without cringing or recoiling. This can expand the range of experiences that feels easy/fine to you, in a lasting way.  

We already know that our various “comfort zones” can expand due to familiarity alone. Your first public speech, airplane flight, or horseradish experience was probably a bit wild. Repeated experiences naturally increase your comfort with the thing in question, as your system learns the physical and emotional contours of that kind of experience and stops freaking out. Some forms of behavioral therapy involve incremental exposures to a triggering phenomena, particularly phobias (of heights, open spaces, spiders), in order to expand the subject’s range of tolerability in ordinary life.

The kind of non-resistance practice I’m talking about is a step further than this sort of natural adaptation, however. Instead of just getting more exposure, you’re entering a certain just-below-comfortable window willingly, while refraining from physically or mentally recoiling from how it feels. When you can stay there without engaging the impulse to squirm or escape — or even wait impatiently for relief — the comfort zone expands nearly immediately.

It’s such a powerful and uniquely human ability, and I don’t think most people have ever even tried it. I mean, why would you think to do that, when your deepest evolutionary impulse is to escape unpleasantness?

Although the cold showers have put this non-resistance ability in a new light for me, I’m already familiar with it because it’s an essential component of meditation. In meditation, when you notice something you don’t like – restlessness in the body, the squawking of a fussy crow outside, doubts about whether you’re doing it right — you see if you can let that feeling be there anyway. You relax any bracing reflex, and release the natural urge to push it away or to try not to feel it.

Sometimes you don’t know how to do that at all. But sometimes you can, and you find yourself feeling oddly fine with some subtle pea-under-the-mattress sensation that might have driven you nuts your whole life.

There’s a specific, hard-to-describe feeling of liberation that comes with releasing the urge to recoil, like you can walk through certain walls now. It feels something like you’re suddenly allowed in the employees-only area, or you have diplomatic immunity, at least in this one place.

Another analogy is that it’s like you’ve passed the part in the arcade game where you always died before. A certain screen always seemed like an absolute wall, the end of the line, but then you pass through and the game keeps going.

This is also, in hindsight, how I learned to like spicy food. At a bar and grill one night, I had been served a tray of unexpectedly potent hot wings, and my friend, who always ordered the hottest ones, could see I was regretting my choice. He told me to stop fighting the burn, to just “let it pile up” instead of trying to cool it down. Soon after that day, I could eat pretty much any wings except for the kind that are engineered to ruin your night, and I never worry about a dish being overly spicy.

Our lives are bounded by long-standing aversions that seem like walls. You can talk to certain people freely, while others you avoid due to fear of awkwardness. You can power-walk, but the burn of running is just too unpleasant. You can do your current job, but a management role would be too much to manage. As long as an aversion is treated like a real, non-negotiable boundary, it might as well be a stone wall.

Where those walls stand is at least partly a function of our reflexes around discomfort, and their position determines a lot about our lives and our possibilities. You might notice that others often walk freely through your walls, and vice versa.

Non-resistance practice can move the place where your revulsion reflexes tend to engage. This is obviously very useful, but it’s a subtle ability that’s hard to describe. Meditation does train you in it, but meditation in general is even more subtle and hard to convey to people.

The cold (or cool) shower is a simpler way to understand non-resistance and begin to practice it. You can control the temperature, so you can easily find that threshold where you want to recoil but can also bear not to. If you can find that magic zone in the shower, just beneath comfort, where the walls begin to dissolve, you can begin to see it elsewhere.

***