When fear means go

During a recent MDRT Podcast episode, 14-year MDRT member Brendan Clune Walsh and stress physiologist Rebecca Heiss discussed how to challenge yourself and the benefits that can occur for your brain, your body and your life. For Walsh, the challenge was submerging himself in water as cold as 10 C, which forced him to overcome some serious apprehension. Why did Walsh post on LinkedIn about wanting to try something that scared him, and why was a cold-water plunge right for him? Listen to the full episode at mdrt.org/push-your-boundaries.

Walsh: It turns out it scared me both beforehand and after. It scared me before because the idea of sitting in really cold water for five minutes doesn’t sound fun. It sounds like a terrible experience, even though everything I’ve read and heard says this is going to be really healthy for you. You’re going to feel really great afterward. It’s going to be a great experience. It’s also mildly terrifying. So, everything you read growing up is like, don’t fall through the ice or you’re going to get hypothermia and die. All of this is bad for you.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but I have a hard time pushing myself outside my comfort zone. It is very easy for me to just hold onto the status quo, so when I can find opportunities to push myself outside my comfort zone, even in little ways, those little growths helped me get closer to where I want to be. Turns out it was scary afterward as well, because a lot of people were giving me guff about being in my bathing suit in a bathtub on social media, but that’s a different story.

Heiss: I’ve seen worse social media posts. Honestly, you’re not alone there at all in terms of not wanting to push yourself outside of the comfort zone. That’s very human. We’re really happy to be comfortable because our brain thinks that we’re going to die if we do anything that is remotely uncomfortable.

And what you just described is something that in the scientific community we call Type Two Fun. There’s Type One Fun, which is just fun fun. Like you go and have a couple of beers with your colleagues. Type Two Fun is, “This is going to be awful,” and at the end, we’re going to go, “You want to do it again?” Nobody signs up and runs a marathon and in mile 20, is going, “This is amazing.” It’s awful, and then you want to do it again. You kind of get this addictive dopamine hit.

Walsh: Good friends of ours that we stay with every year over the summer say, “The adventure is not an adventure until at some point you regret part of it, like, ‘Why are we doing this?’”

Brendan, why did you want to scare yourself? Was this trying to counteract your own impulse to stay in your comfort zone? And Rebecca, I saw on LinkedIn that you helped talk Brendan through the process of the plunge. How did you help him through it?

Walsh: The truth is, it was less about wanting to do something scary but wanting to do something that happened to be scary. I didn’t go in search of something that terrified me. It was something that I wanted to do that happened to scare me.

It’s not like I want to jump in the lion’s cage. It was, this is something that all the data said is really good for me, and I’m going to really enjoy after. It just happens to be scary. And then I just so happened to have a friend in Rebecca, who had done it before, who was able to talk me through like, here’s what you’re going to expect, and here’s what you need to get through. And having that support was awesome.

Heiss: Oh, that’s so sweet. You would have crushed it no matter what, because I think you had the right mindset going in. But when I saw he was about to do this, I was like, “OK, be prepared,” because as a stress physiologist, I have to admit, the first time I did a cold plunge, it caught me by surprise. And I really had to implement everything that I tell everybody else. I was like, It is time for you to take your own medicine here, Heiss, because that cold shock is so powerful. That discomfort, immediately, your brain goes, Oh, this is death. This is instant death, and you begin to hyperventilate really quickly. You have this gasp reflex, and it’s a challenge to control your breath.

And so the advice that I gave to Brendan was just, “Be aware of that. Your body’s response is going to be a really powerful thing that you want to be aware of. Begin to take back control and remind yourself that you are doing this to yourself, that you’re in a safe place. And take those slow deep breaths to make sure that you don’t end up in that panic state, because it’s pretty easy to do.”

Walsh: And building off that, I found there have been other things in my life that helped, where it’s focusing on breathing and focusing on meditation and how you talk to yourself. The brain is a very powerful muscle, and what you say to it matters, and initially, it was managing my breath in the beginning.

But then there are parts of it later on that didn’t feel great. It was a little stinging, and it was a little tingly, and my brain said, “Get out of here.” And so, I had to focus more on my breathing, and it helped that I had done some breathing exercises with meditation in the past. But like a lot of hard things, what I found now is that the more that I go back into the cold plunge, the easier it is. To the point now where it’s just not a big deal, and you just get in for 5 minutes, and I look at my timer, and then it’s done.

So, it’s interesting to see the evolution of, Oh, crap, I don’t want to do this. This sucks. I want to get out, to, Now, I can’t wait to do it because of the benefits that are going to come after, which far outweigh any discomfort of being in it.