If you've already been working with the Wim Hof Method, you'll know how beneficial it is.
For those unaware check out part one of my two-part take on the Wim Hof Method.
In short, Wim has developed a technique that utilizes deep breathing, cold exposure, and mental focus to gain conscious control over a number of bodily processes. Processes long thought uncontrollable.
Interestingly, we no longer need to ask "does the Wim Hof Method work?" We can just get excited about its potential applications.
The ramifications for the future of healthcare and our ability to conquer illnesses and dysfunction are astronomical. As a result, this man has the potential to be one of the most important people of our lifetime.
Here is a recent guided breathing session from the man himself:
Related: Learn how to do the Wim Hof Breathing Method (Part 1).
Wim Hof Breathing Benefits From My Experience
On a personal note, I have been experimenting with the Wim Hof breathing now for a number of years. I've been living with the theory behind its success - hyper-oxygenation, increased alkalinity, cold exposure, etc and exploring what else it can do. It's even tied in wonderfully with my work as a Physiotherapist. Overall, the results have been staggering.
So without further ado, here are eighteen everyday benefits I've found using the Wim Hof Method at home and as a Physiotherapist. These go beyond the big-ticket items of mental and physical disease and relate to daily situations. I have no research to back any of these up, they're just from my personal experience.
As always please keep an open mind and definitely test these out for yourself.
Disclaimer: It's important to note, do NOT practice the Wim Hof Method immersed in water or while driving. There have been instances where some people can briefly lose consciousness, so please do this at your own risk and in a comfortable, safe position.
Banish Early-Morning Tiredness
I love this one. As the father, I've had my fair share of sub-par sleep. As most parents will appreciate it doesn't matter what time you go to sleep at night, you're waking up when they do. It's almost like they know you need more sleep as they come bounding in as the sun comes up.
The point here is that the hyper-oxygenation associated with the Wim Hof Breathing Method can pull you out of that early morning funk. I can cycle through a few sneaky rounds and feel back to my best almost instantly. Clearly you want to make sure you understand why you've woken up tired and try to amend that, but this is a great backup plan nonetheless.
Related: Did you know sleep deprivation can have both emotional and social consequences?
The Real Hangover Cure
I'm not a huge drinker these days so when I have a few I tend to feel it a little more than I used to. But not anymore.
It can take some time and a few cycles to bring yourself back to square, but barraging your system with oxygen before going to bed, and then again next day (with a cold shower for good measure) can hastily improve a hangover.
Interestingly I've found the best time to do it is before bed that night. Get on the front foot and stop that hangover before it has a chance to set in overnight.
As an aside, you can imagine my childish glee when I heard Wim mention this very thing in a podcast he was on a year or so ago.
Heal Faster
I feel this genuinely needs more attention. Whether it's a small cut or a musculoskeletal injury, Wim Hof's breathing technique may promote faster healing.
The injured tissue needs oxygen to facilitate healing. So it makes sense that more oxygen may facilitate this better. Furthermore, hyper-oxygenation seems to improve my ability to influence specific areas of my body.
For example, if you've just cut your hand, take your initial 30 deep breaths and then do your max post-exhale hold. During this time, place your other hand over the injured area, close your eyes and focus on directing traffic to it. After a few seconds, you may start to feel it pulse. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam.
I can appreciate that these types of discussions can sound very dubious, but with some deep breathing and a little extra attention, we may actually be able to optimize our body's healing processes.
You can imagine how this has affected my work as a Physiotherapist with injury rehabilitation. Excitingly, the results are speaking for themselves. Give this a go next time you hurt yourself and see what it does for you. It might pleasantly surprise.
Remove Oxygen Deficit & Oxygen Debt
If you're an exerciser you may be familiar with the concepts of "oxygen deficit" and "oxygen debt".
Oxygen deficit refers to the time it takes from the start of exercise to the point where oxygen can be used as a sustainable energy source. It's those first few sluggish minutes of exercise before our body "kicks into gear".
Oxygen debt refers to the amount of time post-exercise your body still needs oxygen to return to all systems back to normal. This is represented by the need to take deeper, faster breaths for a while afterward.
In simple terms, there are periods of time at the beginning and after exercise where the body is hungry for oxygen. So clearly the Wim Hof breathing can work wonders here too. From my experience, Wim's deep breathing allows me to have my oxygen saturation primed to fuel me from the start, effectively eliminating the sluggish stage.
It's worth noting that it's probably not worth going through a maximum exhale hold at the end of every 30 breaths as you want to keep those oxygen stores relatively high. Consider a shorter hold before beginning the next set of thirty.
Furthermore, extra cycles at the end of activity can help equalize any remaining oxygen debt and allow you to get on with the rest of your day as soon as possible.
Related: Here are 12 other ways to optimize your post-workout recovery.
Warm Yourself Up
This is a handy one for when you're outside in the cold. Similar to speeding up the healing process, this also benefits from a little more focus.
Hyper-oxygenation alone can get you there but take the time during your exhale hold to "feel" yourself warming up. It may take a few cycles to notice a change but you should genuinely feel a difference relatively quickly. You may start to feel warmer or perhaps just less cold. For me, I can usually still register that it's cold but no longer feel cold myself.
Interestingly, the more time you spend exposed to the cold the more responsive your vascular system will become. This is where a daily cold shower can really improve your quality of life. Thanks to Wim, we now have the tools to better tolerate the cold and have better control over this tolerance.
Related: Here's some research supporting cold showers for better health and fewer sick days.
Cool Yourself Down
No surprises for guessing this one right? By the same token, hyper-oxygenation will grant you access to the processes that dissipate heat and cool you down. If you feel too hot, try the same process as above and "feel" yourself cooling down.
Again if you've been practicing cold showers your body will be better adapted to regulate itself up or down when needed.
One thing I've learned from the Wim Hof Method is how much we rely on indoor heating and cooling for comfort. It's similar to adding or removing layers of clothing to externally regulate our body temperature. There's certain freedom attached to understanding how tolerant the body is to natural temperature change. We just need to give it a chance to do the work itself.
Improve Athletic Performance
This is for those who enjoy simple workouts. If you love short, sharp exercise routines, the Wim Hof Breathing can take your performance to another level.
Simple tasks like push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, sprinting, etc, can quickly become a fight against lactic acid as the oxygen demands increase. Deep breathing beforehand allows your body to have a greater supply of oxygen to use from the outset. This helps delay the onset of performance-sapping lactic acid and results in greater initial energy stores, higher numbers and faster times.
For context, I really enjoy the challenge of a 3-minute push-up test. By cycling through 15-20 deep breaths before starting (and deep breathing throughout) I was able to improve my score by a staggering 50%. The same thing happened with a basic dead hang test from a chin-up bar - a 15% improvement straight away.
This one is fun to try. Choose something you value and see what Wim Hof's breathing method can do for you. Wim even incorporates as much into his training programs.
Manage Pain
This is another important "side-effect" of the Wim Hof Method. It can help you suppress and potentially overcome the pain response. So much so that I'm staggered this isn't one of our biggest focuses in modern medicine.
The idea here is simple. In order to experience pain, our chemistry must shift towards a more acidic state at some point. And if you've been playing along at home, you might recognize that hyper-oxygenation has an alkalizing effect on our chemistry. This suggests the more we can oxygenate our body when in pain, the closer we may get to "switching it off".
Now from a Physiotherapy perspective, it's important to remind everyone that pain does serve a very noble purpose. It's supposed to protect us from current or future harm. So whether or not we can switch it off should be considered moot. But having the capacity to regulate it is invaluable - particularly for those suffering from extreme, persistent or chronic pain.
Considering hyper-oxygenation may also have a positive effect on healing it makes sense to give this a go.
Related: Here's a unique take on Fibromyalgia and why the Wim Hof Method has a role to play.
Proactively Fight Off Basic Sickness
Conquering serious illness and disease has become the hallmark of Wim's technique. But we can't forget about the everyday ones.
If you start to notice any common symptoms associated with getting sick, use the Wim Hof Method to proactively eliminate them.
Prior to experimenting with the Wim Hof breathing method, I would normally feel the slightest sore throat prior to getting sick. I'd dread this as I knew the next day or two would be an annoying mix of a runny nose and red-raw nostrils. I'd get this maybe two or three times a year. Now, as soon as I feel those precursor symptoms I stop and do my deep breathing. Once supercharged I can focus on the area that feels crappy during the exhale hold. Thirty minutes later those symptoms are gone. Every time. It hasn't failed me once in about 4 or 5 years now (touch wood).
It's also worth noting that I think my immune system is now stronger from the cold showers as the sore throats are less common too.
Please note: With the ongoing threat of Coronavirus (COVID-19) worldwide, something like the Wim Hof Method may become even more important to help boost your immune system and improve your ability to fight it off.
I wouldn't go out of your way to test this out, but if you fall within one of the higher-risk groups for the Coronavirus, there can't be too many cheaper and more impactful things you can add to your arsenal.
Boost Your Energy Levels
Oxygen is such an important resource for the body to utilize particularly when discussing energy. Oxygen is an important reactant used by the body to produce energy from carbohydrates, proteins, and fats during aerobic metabolism.
Similarly, it's also utilized in the presence of lactic acid to help speed recovery from the more anaerobic metabolic processes.
In short, the more oxygen-rich the bloodstream is, the more oxygen is available to give you the energy boost you need to carry on with your day or achieve your goals.
Improve Focus & Mental Clarity
Do you ever have moments where you don't feel at your sharpest mentally? Well, you might be able to influence this too.
As with each of these everyday benefits, more oxygen often means better results. Similar to healing and pain management, this requires a little focus. For me, once hyper-oxygenated I can clear this fog just by closing my eyes and picturing the cloudiness disappearing. It takes a cycle or two for me to get there but I can eventually cue my body into doing it nonetheless.
This is highly useful considering my work and hobbies require mental sharpness and focus to achieve the best results. Again, test this out for yourself and let me know how you go in the comments.
Use Retention Times To Better Understand Your Body
Interestingly, you can use your exhale retention time to get a general sense of how your body is doing.
I find poor sleep, too much stress, feeling ill or a little flat, etc. can knock 30 seconds or so from my usual hold times. Similarly, it often takes a few more cycles than usual to get me to where I want to be. Being sick or hyper-stressed is obvious enough on its own, but it's fantastic to know how you're going in between.
If you realize your numbers are a little down, it's a fantastic opportunity to try to figure out why. Perhaps your bedtime has been getting later unnecessarily. Maybe you're a little more stressed than usual. Perhaps you already know all this but just need objective proof that it's taking a toll.
What gets measured, gets managed. And this creates a wonderful way to get ahead of the curve and be proactive.
Control Your Stress Response
This is just so bloody important.
Our nervous system governs the function of literally every process in the body in some way, shape or form. As I've mentioned in the first article we've long thought the majority of these processes were completely automatic. For example; we don't have to make our heartbeat, it happens on our behalf.
Now the Wim Hof Method won't interfere with the on and off switches for these systems (thankfully) but it does grant us access to up-regulate and down-regulate them when needed.
Of most relevance to this article is our fight and flight response. An "automated" set of physiological responses that enhance our capacity to face a threat head-on or get away safely.
However thanks to the modern world the "threats" we face are as plentiful as they are subtle. We have financial stress, time stress, social stress, relationship stress, work stress, religious stress, cultural stress, body image stress, among a hoard of others. And they don't go away easily.
As a result, our nervous system can become chronically 'up' - a basis for much of our chronic pain and illness. And with this comes greater acidity and inflammation.
The Wim Hof technique can give us conscious control over this "automated" system and deliberately down-regulate our body back to a more normal baseline.
Develop Greater Patience
Who feels they need more patience? In fairness we probably all could. Whether you have kids, are constantly stuck in traffic, waiting in line or on the phone trying to do something basic, one of the benefits of the Wim Hof Method relates to developing greater patience. It can also help pass the time.
The heightened neurological state discussed above feeds impatience. The more amped up you are the harder it is to wait around. If you're running late for something, how much harder is it to wait your turn? How much more frustrating is it to be stuck behind a slow car when you desperately need to be somewhere else?
Down-regulating your nervous system can help these moments become less challenging and monotonous.
Short-Circuit Anger, Rage, and Frustration
Following on again from the previous two points, the Wim Hof Method can help those quick to anger, rage, and frustration. You can leverage its down-regulatory effects to create a more tolerant physiological state.
These emotions often relate to an already heightened nervous system. It's why they can easily be triggered by relatively innocuous circumstances. This is why the term "hot head" is often thrown around.
Down-regulating your nervous system can do two wonderful things in this situation. Not only can it reduce the amount of anger, rage, and frustration someone can experience, but it can dramatically normalize your threshold for these emotions.
I'm not a very angry person, nor am I often highly frustrated or filled with all-conquering rage. But I do have a child. And they can certainly push your buttons. Sure it's thankfully not at the disastrous end of the scale but it's certainly all relative.
This is important as Wim has given us the power to replace poorer sleep, poor emotional states like rage, anger, anxiety, depression and frustration, poor thinking, poor pain tolerance, and any other heightened stress-related consequences, with their far more positive counterparts.
All because of a few deep breaths, a little cold exposure, and some focus.
Help Your Children Buffer the Effects of Technology
If you have young children, and like mine, they're very keen gamers or YouTube viewers, it can be hard seeing how much they enjoy it, but ultimately how negatively it can affect their mood and mental health.
I've now got him doing an abridged Wim Hof Method during and after technology. And the results are tangible. Interestingly, it takes him far less time to go from 100 to 0 than it does for most adults that I've witnessed. All it takes him is a set of 5 to 10 deep breaths and an exhale hold to bring him back down again. Better still, he does better when using his laptop, doing school work, or building his next great Minecraft civilization.
Break Unwanted Associations
Interestingly, I've been able to use the Wim Hof Breathing Method and mindfulness to help weaken negative associations I have with lollies/candy.
I don't feel I have an addiction in the true sense of the word, as I never go out of my way to eat them, but I definitely find it hard to say no if they're in front of me.
Pleasingly, I have been able to lessen this association dramatically. The hyper-oxygenated, post-exhale hold phase is again the perfect opportunity to work some magic.
Once set, I try to focus on how I feel when presented with the opportunity to eat treats. I then focus on turning down those feelings before visualizing a literal disconnection. Pardon the pun, but it's working a treat.
I'd be very interested to see if the positive effects of the Wim Hof method do extend to those struggling with addiction and dependence. Let me know below.
Recover From Jet Lag Quickly
Jet lag is a common phenomenon in today's modern world. However, despite how commonplace it has become, it feels like we're yet to evolve beyond second-hand information and guesswork when trying to recover from it.
Like any of the experiences mentioned above, the Wim Hof Method has the potential to be a powerful ally. If you're tired, adjusting to a new time zone, and feeling like your nervous system has become heightened, take a moment to breathe your way back to normality. Use those cold showers to help your nervous system recover and restore that sense of depleted energy.
Conclusion
It's truly wonderful to live in an age where deep breathing is being proven to have such a powerful effect on our physiology. It's also nice to know the Wim Hof Method can help with many modern-day situations and concerns. Not all are life-threatening but they can be life-limiting.
As always, I genuinely urge you to give Wim's technique a go. Don't take my word for any of this, just experience it for yourself. It's just so simple to do and as I've heard Wim say before "the worst thing that can happen is nothing." Having said that, I don't think you'll be disappointed!
Have you found any other day-to-day benefits of the Wim Hof Method?