Getting into cold water without kidding yourself

One Tuesday in November, down at the Pointe Rouge, a woman arrived at my session with a brand new wetsuit still folded in her bag and asked me how many minutes she had to stay in for it to work. She had watched the ice bath videos. She had never unrolled a yoga mat in her life. I have had some version of that conversation every winter for three or four years now, huge expectations sitting in front of me and almost no bearings to go with them, and my answer tends to disappoint: I told her I do not count minutes. What I watch is how somebody goes in.

I practise in open water off Marseille, where the sea falls to around thirteen or fourteen degrees by February. Bathtubs full of ice cubes I happily leave to other people; that has never been my practice, and the performance aesthetic that comes with it wears me out. I am writing this because the distance between what cold promises on Instagram and what it does to actual people in an actual sea has become uncomfortable to watch.

Where I stop making promises

People come out of the water wide awake. Their eyes change, their voice carries further, their mood holds for a good part of the day, and I see it at every session, so I will say it without hedging. Researchers have looked at these effects on alertness and on how we get through stress, and I am glad that work exists. But I have read enough posts about cold water 'curing anxiety' to know where my own line runs. Cold is no treatment, and the habit of turning it into a test to be passed puts my back up. What I offer is a short, deliberate exposure to something uncomfortable, in a setting where you keep the upper hand from beginning to end. Nothing beyond that.

Breathing comes before the cold

It took me years to stop believing that cold could be tamed by willpower. Everything is settled in the first two minutes, when the water reaches your stomach: the breath bolts, short and high in the chest, and the brain concludes very quickly that you should be out of there. That reflex is normal. You can let it fill the whole space, or you can have spent enough hours working your out-breath on dry land, on a mat, to know what to do with it when it turns up. In my sessions breathing comes first, always, and I will not take anyone into the sea who has never done that work.

1. 01Five minutes of breathing at the water's edge, seated or standing, making the out-breath longer than the in-breath. The body should be calm before you go in.
2. 02Go in by stages: feet, calves, thighs, a few seconds at each level. Never a jump, never a dive.
3. 03As your stomach and chest go under, the breath will bolt. Go with it and blow out slowly through the mouth instead of holding on.
4. 04Keep it short. A first time is counted in tens of seconds, and you decide when you are getting out before you get in, never once you are in the water with your judgement drifting.
5. 05Warm up by moving, dressed again, out of the wind. No scalding shower straight afterwards, no sauna to follow.

Let the season do the work

In Marseille the sea cools slowly from October through to February. Anyone who swims every week from the autumn onwards follows that descent without forcing anything at all, the body adjusts at the pace of the season, and by January they are in fourteen degrees with no sense of having crossed a threshold. That is the route I offer. Whether it suits everybody I honestly could not say, and I may be wrong about it, but the people who hurt themselves, or who give up after three attempts, are almost always the ones who started in deep winter with something to prove. There is nothing to prove. A good session is one you come out of having kept your breath under control the whole way through, even if it lasted forty seconds.

• You are breathing calmly after a minute in the water: the body is settling, and you can stay slightly longer next time.
• You are still shivering twenty minutes after getting out, or your hands stay numb: it was too long, cut it back sharply.
• The thought of the session weighs on you for days beforehand, you start looking for reasons to cancel, you sleep badly the night before: take a break, the water will still be there in spring and nobody is keeping score.
• Numbness, confusion, unusual tiredness while you are in: you get out, right away, even if you had planned to stay longer.

Cold makes nobody stronger. It puts your own way of reacting to discomfort right in front of you, and that way of reacting can be worked on.

My favourite part, honestly, is what comes after. Climbing back onto a paddleboard out on the water, sitting down, doing nothing for ten minutes while the body warms itself up and the Mediterranean sorts your thoughts out for you. If the idea appeals, start in September, while the water is still mild and it feels like an ordinary swim. And bring beach shoes: the sand at the Pointe Rouge sticks to wet feet, and you will be glad of them.