Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Do This Every Day to Reduce Stress, Boost Immunity & Increase Resilience | Dr Susanna Søberg #453

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Cold showers, icy plunge pools, outdoor swimming – are you a fan, or does the very idea make you shiver?  Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 322 of the podcast with Dr Susanna Søberg. Susanna is arguably one of the leading researchers on the topic of cold water immersion therapy. Her research on the physiology of deliberate cold and heat exposure is helping to back up what many cultures have known instinctively for thousands of years – changing our temperature is good for us. In this clip we discuss some of the new science around one of the biggest wellness trends of the past few years and Susanna gives some great tips so you can get started. CAUTION: If you have uncontrolled hypertension or heart disease it is not advised that you start practising cold water immersion. If you have any doubt at all as to whether you are fit enough to give this practice a go, please consult a qualified healthcare professional. Thanks to our sponsor https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/322 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel

packs to 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 322 of the podcast with Dr. Susanna Sobig. Susanna is arguably one of the leading researchers on the topic of cold water immersion therapy. And in this clip, we discuss some of the new sites around one of the biggest wellness trends

of the past few years. And Susanna shares some fantastic tips to get you started. Please note, if you have uncontrolled hypertension or heart disease, it is not advised that you start practicing cold water immersion. If you have any doubt at all as to whether you are fit enough to give this practice a go, please consult a qualified healthcare professional. In our society, we are now in a time where we don't want to get uncomfortable.

We are so used to seeking comfort all the time. And we want that. We want everything to be warm. We want everything to be easy, easy food, fast food. We want everything to be right at our hands. And we have taught ourselves that the cold is not something that is useful for anything. But every time you go into the cold, you're pushing yourself to the uncomfortable state.

And every time you do that, you get a little bit stronger, not only in yourselves, but also in your mind. You can take this way of conquering a stressful situation and other life situations, and knowing that I could get through this, then I can also get through something else. I guess this whole thing, this whole idea of a controlled form of stress

is talking about exercising and working out your nervous system. Yeah, exactly. Training your brain to get more comfortable in a stressful situation. Yeah, you're training your body, you're training your mind at the same time. And I think it's kind of amazing. And the more I research in this, the more I dug into it, the more I found out that this is not only, this is of course not only from a physiology level, a good thing, but it's also it's like pushing your your confidence in yourself and we see that a lot yeah when i can get across that stressful situation every time i go i know that i can also do that in all other situations for sure for sure i think the research you've done is phenomenal. I think you are really bringing some solid scientific evidence to something that many cultures have known for many years. should consider intentionally exposing themselves to that cold. I kind of put these benefits into three different categories, the physical benefits, so things like your metabolism, potential benefits

with weight loss, type 2 diabetes, the immune system, things like brown fat, which we're going to talk about, joint pain, all these things then i think about our mental health and well-being so our resilience mood anxiety depression and then i think about athletics and i think about recovery and endurance so it's quite incredible that one modality one thing cold exposure can potentially have so many different benefits, right? Yeah. And you need to think about why is actually this one thing, why is it that it can do so many good things? Why is it that we cannot get a pill to do exactly all those things? But you can go into the cold and you can use it in very much very different ways so there's definitely physiological

reasons why people should do this because it can actually benefit your health right away there's like this acute response that you will benefit from but also on the long term so this could actually prevent lifestyle diseases and also on a mental, you can say that you can use this as a way of increasing your stress threshold, actually, and getting more confident, actually. So if you have pain, you can go into the cold and you will have less pain. And that will last for the day, at least. And if you are in a bad mood, you can go into the cold as well and you will feel much better. It can do so many good things. And there is always something that the cold can repair for you in your body.

So going into the cold, this is in our DNA. I mean, we evolved in the cold. So if people say that, well, the cold is not for me, well, you evolved in the cold. The cold and your ancestors did this all the time. This is the reason why not for me. Well, you're involved with the cold. The cold and your ancestors did this all the time. This is the reason why we are here. So if they can do it, we can do it. Yeah. You know, you mentioned comfort. Comfort is killing us. You know, as humans, we've always been wired to make things easier, to seek out comfort. But until recently, even though we're wired that way,

we would have been exposed to discomfort pretty much every day. You know, every little bit of discomfort has been engineered out of our lives. Movement, escalators, lifts, right? All these things. Now, you don't have to move anymore. You can still function. I think the cold is just a brilliant example of that.

I think for many of us, we've narrowed our experience of life. Let's talk about temperature. We've got heating or air conditioning at home and in the car and in the office. So we've never been exposed. So our whole world is coming inwards, which is why presumably we have this low tolerance to anything, low tolerance to stress, low tolerance to heat. And I absolutely agree with you that regularly with these controlled doses of exposure to this form of stress will little by little start to widen that window. So over time, yes, you're more tolerant to the cold,

but you'll also be more tolerant to the stress that you experience in everyday life. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, exactly. So taking the cold out of your everyday, which we have done, we have warm clothes on, we have very warm rooms, we sleep with big pillows and blankets and everything. So we are not exposing ourselves to something that we were actually born to do, to be involved in different temperatures.

And we actually know this from a very special organ that we have in our body. Nobody knows about this organ. It's not something that we have explored that much, but it's called the brown fat. So the healthy brown fat, I call it healthy, and it is healthy. It's quite opposite to our white fat. And this special, little bit mystic organ that we have is actually the temperature regulated that we have in our body. And if we don't get exposed to different temperatures changing on our skin, then we are not using this organ in our body. We have found out that this organ is not only controlling our temperature from the inside,

it's actually also helping your metabolism. So it has a huge impact on our health. And we can see in studies that if people don't have the healthy brown fat, they have more obesity, they have higher BMI, but they also have type 2 diabetes. So there's definitely a correlation of less brown fat and being overweight and having type 2 diabetes and have cardiovascular diseases. And this is also increasing, of course, with age. But we also see that if you have brown fat, that your energy expenditure goes up

and that you will have lower blood pressure. You will have less obesity and not having type 2 diabetes, for example. So it's quite new that people are doing the eldest research in it. But we found out that if we can activate the brown fat, it will not only increase our temperature from the inside, but it will also use our glucose and it will use our fat from our bloodstream as fuel. And this is really good for us because then we are cleaning up some of the stuff that we have put in and sitting on our couch and eating all this very comforting food.

So we have too much of that. That is why we have all these lifestyle diseases. But the brown fat is not being used in our society because we are so comfortable all the time. So if we can get cold on our skin, we can activate the brown fat and it would do that immediately, actually. It is mystic, but it's also underrated what it's doing for us. But we can definitely see in my studies and also in humans that if you don't have that much brown fat, that you will have more obesity, more lifestyle diseases, higher cholesterol levels and higher blood pressure. I mean, it's so many people think that, oh, this mystic new brown fat, you need to get into a cold tub and you need to be there for 10 minutes or something like that. It's very extreme. I think it's very extreme that you go into a cold and sit there for a very long time. Some people do it for half an hour. It's not that I'm trying to promote at least. I'm just saying that try to get cold in some way if

if it's a cold shower then do that if you like cold plunging then do that but you can also turn down the heater in your in your living room so there's actually studies showing from yeah i think it was 2009 where they showed that people who sleep in a warm room for a month, they measured on this MRI imaging, they could see how much brown fat do these people have. And then they slept in the same room at 19 degrees, so colder at least, not very cold, but 19 degrees Celsius, right? That is okay cold. And they saw that they increased the amount of brown fat but also that

they get more insulin sensitive actually wow yeah so that is just one month sleeping and at 19 degrees they saw the increasing amount of brown fat so just getting cold from different reasons will keep your brown fat alive and what i mean alive is that the brown fat cells, they need to get activated to stay alive. It's like a muscle. You can compare the brown fat to a muscle. If you keep activating it, it will be more efficient. It will also know it's like any other thing in our body. If we use it, then it's useful. And then the body keeps it. And when you're going into the cold, you are telling your brown fat, I need you., then it's useful. And then the body keeps it. And when you're going into the cold, you are telling your brown fat, I need you. Yeah. It's so interesting. We mentioned

the potential benefits for obesity and type 2 diabetes. And brown fat is one of the key mechanisms there for us to think about. We mentioned resilience and how deliberately doing something uncomfortable is going to make it easy for you to cope with that stress, tolerate the cold, and that's going to transfer to other areas of your life. That's interesting. Let's go about the immune system. You talk about lots of different studies. I wonder if you could start off with the cold shower one because cold showers are probably one of the most achievable things for people across the world they can probably get into a cold shower

they don't have to go anywhere join a club somewhere all that kind of stuff but that was a pretty powerful study I thought Yeah, I think so too it's a randomised controlled trial which was done in Amsterdam. The study is about cold showers versus hot showers, you can say.

So all the participants in this study, they were divided into different groups. They wanted to see what happens if you end your hot shower on cold. What happens after 30 days if you do that? And if you do it for 30 seconds, 60 seconds, and 90 seconds, which is not very long, right? Okay, so people are having a hot shower. They have a hot shower. And they literally, at the end, they finish with cold, but it's either 30 seconds cold, 60 seconds cold, or 90 seconds cold.

Yeah. Okay, that's not long. That's not long, but it's long if you don't like the cold so but you can build this up but what they found i found very fascinating actually was that they saw that ending on the cold shower for 30 seconds 60 seconds or 90 seconds it doesn't really matter apparently so 30 seconds is enough but they saw that they have less sick days from work so less sick days from work could be an outcome of maybe boosting your immune system and that way you also feel better because of the chemicals in the brain so

it could also be that it's the whole package of like going into the cold and getting this increase in all the brain chemicals but also a boost in your immune system i think what you're saying here is really really important you don't need much there are incredible benefits for your physical health for your mental resilience for your weight for your metabolism. You just need a little bit. I really want to address the issue that many people have, which is, I just don't want to get cold. Like, it's not for me. Do you think it's possible for everyone to start to embrace the cold? Because the first time they go in, they're struggling. So they don't want to do it anymore. Is that a good reason for them not to do it at all? No, no, not in my opinion, because the more they reject it, the more they might even need it actually. And I would say I'm a cold sissy. And I think it's,

it's absolutely, I was a cold sissy. I was really, I went to the cold and I keep pushing it. So I didn't give up. Luckily, I didn't. Don't give up. Because if you go the first time, you will probably not get all the benefits from the first time. Because you cannot stay long enough to get the high release of everything good going on in your body. You will have to get through the first three four five rounds i mean so you need also to keep to it and believe in it just stick to it because it's like it's like

starting up exercise and in in your in your training center right it will hurt the first five kilometers you run will definitely hurt more than when you do it five times right and you are you don't start with a marathon right you never do? And you don't start with a marathon, right? You never do that. So you don't start with 30 seconds in the shower. You start by five seconds and then you build up to 10, 15. And maybe you can do 30 from the beginning, but that's because people are different.

So just believe in it and just keep pushing it because at some point you will get so adapted to it. It won't take long, but it will definitely take a few times. So that is why I'm saying don't give, try it first time and you're like, oh, that's not for me. That only hurt. Yeah, it hurts the first time. Running five kilometers after a long break also hurts.

You don't have to be good at it or good at anything, actually. This is just going in to the cold is something everybody can do if you don't suffer from um heart diseases or unregulated heart high blood pressure i think that this is definitely something that we can we can tell people to do in a controlled way get yourself the motivation to get in there and just see what happens. Do it day after day for let's say three, four days and just observe what happens. Do you know what I mean? It's that simple, but that effective as well. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long form conversational Wednesday

and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.