by Richard Taylor : 2025-01-03
Another two months have passed since Part 2 and I have some better results this time. It's not a cure for brain fog, but I think the cold showers have definitely helped. I do have some quantitative evidence to back that up.
Following the lack of positive results from Plan A I switched to Plan B, which was taking a 30 second cold shower every day as described in this Dr Michael Mosely programme.
In some ways I didn't really want this to work. Since a cold shower is not something I look forward to doing every day. But it turns out that the first 10 seconds is the worst... after that it's just bad rather than being awful.
Anyway, I did notice a boost after the showers. I completed the 60 days that I planned as my "minimum effort" and have kept going.
As before, to assess my progress I recorded an average of 5 3x3x3 solves straight from cold (n1) and then up to 4 more averages (n2, n3, n4, n5) if I felt I had the capacity to do so.
You can see from these results that almost immediately I was able to do 3 averages a day, when previously even 2 was often a struggle. After a couple of weeks I was doing 5 averages a day quite regularly.
The times themselves are a bit harder to interpret as there are quite a few bad averages that were mostly due to stupid mistakes and/or over confidence after some good singles rather than brain fog.
There is definitely a downward trend in times though: the mean of all the averages for November is 29.77 and the mean for December is a second lower at 28.72 seconds.
By mid-December I was getting quite a lot of 26 and 25 averages, plus my first sub-25 average (24.97) for the whole year!
On the back of that I started practising a little for bigger cubes and competed in 5x5x5 at Stevenage December getting my second best official solve ever of 3 minutes and 16 seconds. Six months ago I couldn't solve a 5x5x5 in under 5 minutes.
This data shows that my concentration, as measured by Rubik's Cube solving times, has objectively improved a bit over the last 2 months. Of course that doesn't prove the cause was cold showers, but it shows there was at least a correlation.
Also, thinking about the original study highlighting the benefits of cold showers, I only had one cold during November and December which caused me to take time off work. In previous years since 2019 I have always had at least 2 colds and usually more during those months.
Plan B appears to be working. The results could be due to the placebo effect, or I might have just improved over time anyway, but there are definite improvements. I feel a lot better.
I am going to continue with the cold showers. If there are any big changes then I will write another article, but if I don't then assume that I continued to improve slowly.