For years I’ve heard about Wim Hof. He was this legendary superhero, child of the cold who was obsessed with deep breathing, laughing and connecting to the central nervous system. I watched this crazy vice documentary and was so curious about his method. He claims that everyone is able to connect to their central nervous system through a specialize breathing technique which can essentially release unneeded crap from your mind while simultaneously boosting your immune system.

I read articles by Tim Ferriss and Aubrey Marcus about the benefits of taking cold showers in the morning. Wim Hof also uses cold exposure with his technique and I’ve started factoring in at like 30 seconds to 3 minutes of cold water exposure in my daily showers. I’m not 100% what benefits I’ve gotten from it yet but I do know my breathing patterns change and it’s interesting to see how my resilience to cold water has improved. I’ve always liked swimming in cold rivers or lakes, the shower technique is a bit different though because you don’t experience the cold all around your body – more like a freezing rotisserie chicken – but I’m still doing it.

At my work, some guys do Wim Hof breathing at least once a day thanks to a video they found on Youtube from an interview Wim did with Joe Rogan. Besides my experience with Vipassana, I’m not used to doing any type of practice in a group setting but with this, I definitely enjoy having company. For the first few times, I found my mind really feeling panicked or angry. The thought going through my head echoed “I don’t like this!” but my body really did. I feel like I can connect deeply to my nervous system and that I’m somehow discharging unnecessary static from my limbs. Every so often I also find that my hands get a form of paralysis and want to close in on themselves, a common side-effect I’ve heard from other people who do similar breathing techniques. Overall I wouldn’t necessarily call Wim Hof breathing a meditation but it definitely has a self-reflective property to it.

Because I wanted to extend my sessions beyond 3 rounds, I ended up building my own Wim Hof Round Generator. For the tech folks out there, I converted the original video into an MP3, created a simple site using Laravel and utilized Amazon’s Lambda & S3 to create and store the generated MP3s after stitching them together based upon the number of rounds the user wanted to create.

If you’re interested in learning more about Wim Hof breathing, check it out at https://wimhof.snakeclubco.local. Hope you enjoy! Feel’s good huh? Right on!