Fire & Ice Contrast Therapy

So why do all this temperature contrasting?  What’s the point? 

The human body evolved for millennia without much protection from the elements, compared to our luxurious lives today.  Compared to the length of our 300,000 years of having to adapt to various conditions, we’ve been living for a relatively minute amount of time in a tiny temperature range. We keep our homes at 72 degree homes, we work in 72 degree offices, and we wear clothing that keep us comfortable in a few-degree range 24/7.  We’ve conquered our environment with novel technologies … and made our brilliant biological technologies redundant in the process. 

We are not well adapted for this new-found constant comfort.  Our human bodies evolved to be adaptable and resilient to extremes.  All this modern comfort is alien to our immune systems and nervous systems.  It’s making them lazy and disordered, and making us biologically inefficient and sick in the process. 

Contrast Therapy helps us rediscover and retrain our innate capacities for adaptability and resiliency.  During temperature extremes, our bodies produce heat- and cold-shock proteins.  These proteins essentially act like emergency repair crews in our bodies.  They’re part of our body’s built-in defense system against stress.  While our culture of constant comfort has the intention of minimizing stress, it ironically actually makes us less adaptable and more stressed, leading to chronic states of inflammation and their mental manifestations depression, anxiety and burnout. 

The culture of Contrast Therapy seeks to expose us, in short and controlled bursts, to the very stresses that help make us more resilient by triggering the very mechanisms that help us self-repair.