How Long to Cold Plunge (and how to work up to it)

You may be contemplating your first plunge, or maybe you’re a cold water veteran just looking for some more data on your protocol. Regardless of your experience level, we’ll walk through how long to cold plunge, as well as break down the reasons behind it and exactly what happens to your body throughout the plunge.

How long should you cold plunge?

Quick answer: 3 minutes is all you need to get maximum benefits. It’s generally okay to stay longer if you’re (relatively) comfortable and experienced, but at that point you’ve reached the peak and are in diminishing returns territory. Does 3 minutes sound crazy long to you? Totally fair, please don’t force yourself to jump in and do 3 minutes your first day. The best thing you can do for yourself is stay as long as you can each time, just a little more than you did last time, until you reach 3 minutes. You’re getting lots of benefits the whole way through that time frame, which we’ll go over in detail next.

The Science: What Does Cold Plunge Do?

Let’s take it step by step. Your body is rapidly going through big physiological changes and responses the whole way through the 3 minutes:

• Cold shock: 0-30 seconds
  • Physical response: Your body is, in fact, shocked by the cold. Especially if you haven’t done a lot of cold water exposure, your reflex will be to gasp and hyperventilate. Additionally, vasoconstriction happens, which just means that your blood vessels narrow so blood flow slows down and helps conserve body heat. This is a key opportunity to train your body to stay calm under stress and improve resilience.
  • Practice recommendations:
    • Breath: Your body will want to gasp and hyperventilate, so consciously counteract that by taking a deep breath before you enter the cold water, and lower into the water with a slow, controlled exhale. When you’re submerged, continue a slow, controlled breathing pattern. You can simply count as you breathe in and out, or try box breath, or whatever works best for you.
    • Mental chatter: Your mind will be naturally in freak out, kick and scream mode. Recognize that that’s totally fair, it’s SO cold, AND that you also can put another thought track on top of that. Try mentally telling yourself whatever you want to feel in the moment. I’m safe, this is good for me, it’s warm in here…whatever works for you.
• Happy chemical time: 30-90 seconds:
  • Physical response: This is when the flood of chemicals comes into play, and where your nervous system is learning to regulate itself naturally and safely so that later, when a real stressful thing happens, your body can manage it better. Let’s run through what they are and what they do.
    • Norepinephrine: This is your body jumping into fight or flight, which results in razor-sharp focus, increased energy, better mood, generally feeling awesome and ready to run through a wall.
    • Dopamine: The really good stuff; it starts increasing during this time. Naturally increased mood (which can last for hours after the plunge), higher motivation and drive, better focus and concentration. The key here (as you may have heard that cheap dopamine is bad, which it is) is that you’re doing a hard thing in exchange for the dopamine, so it’s a very healthy, safe way to get it.
    • Cortisol: You may be thinking ummm I don’t want that. Fair! But the idea here is a little like exercise; purposeful, controlled stress that we then learn to manage in the moment is beneficial. You’re building resilience, and it gives you an energy bump also.
  • Practice recommendations:
    • Breath: Continue the purposeful breath from the first :30. You may also try humming or buzzing (yes, like a bee, go wild) which physically stimulates your vagus nerve as it runs through your mouth, which tells your body that it’s safe. It’s basically a manual calm down switch.
    • Mental chatter: You can go two directions here. One, if you want to train your brain to focus and relax in the moment, you can go inside yourself and do that. Tell yourself what you want to believe as I said before, or do a meditation, whatever works for you. OR, if you’re just trying to get through the damn thing, the most effective solve I’ve seen is distraction. Ask someone a question. Anyone. About anything. Start telling someone your life story. Sing a song. You would be shocked how fast things go once you start a conversation with someone.
• Peak benefit: 2-3 minutes
  • Physical response: The happy chemical cascade of fun continues, and metabolic rate increases, too (also fun!).
    • Norepinephrine: Peaks during this time, up to 2.5x typical levels.
    • Dopamine: You hit sustained increase during this time; you’re feeling awesome.
    • Metabolic rate increase: Two really important things happen here. One is in the moment; at this point, your body is working HARD to warm up, of course, and burning a bunch of calories to do that. This spikes during and shortly after as well. The other one is longer term; as you do cold plunge repeatedly over time, your body begins to build brown fat, which is a special kind of fat that actually burns calories all the time, not just when you’re cold. Research by Dr. Susanna Soberg, a Danish scientist and expert on cold and heat exposure, recommends approximately 11 accumulated minutes per week of cold exposure to gain this benefit. Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford who is well known for sharing scientific information in a practical and understandable way, talks about this as well on several of his podcasts, including this one.
  • Practice recommendations:
    • Breath: Settle into what worked for you to start, or try something different. I personally find that by this point, my body has calmed down and I can let my breathing be more regular, focusing just on the slow in and out breath.
    • Mental chatter: Again, at this point you may have settled in a bit / gone numb, so let your body guide you here. If that has happened for me, I like to close my eyes and use the time to focus on something positive, or let my mind go without any digital or human distraction to see where it leads. This unstructured time, not unlike shower thoughts, can be great for ideas, problem solving, and creativity.
• Beyond 3 minutes: Diminishing returns
  • You can absolutely stay in longer if it feels safe and okay to you. I am not here to tell you not to. But if you’re looking for the benefits, you’ve largely gotten them by the 3 minute mark. In my personal practice, I like to cycle through sauna and cold plunge 2-3 times, depending on my schedule that day, which ends up looking like 15 minutes of sauna, followed by 2-3 minutes of cold, 2-3 times.

Starting Out: Your First Few Sessions (150 words)

Your first few weeks will likely be a process of building up to 2-3 minutes, and that is completely okay and beneficial. Start small; that might look like staying in 30-60 seconds each time, and / or only submerging partway, leaving hands / feet out, selecting a tub with a warmer (relatively) temperature. Don’t force yourself into 2-3 minutes all the way in at first. This is about building the skill, not torturing yourself because “benefits.” You will get there.

If you can only remember one thing, let it be this: do what you can reasonably do, and every time you go back, do a little bit more. In whatever way you want. Maybe it’s a few seconds longer next time, or you sneak a hand in that you didn’t submerge before, or you try a slightly colder tub. Whatever it is, add just a bit more each time. That’s it, that’s the whole practice.

Building to 2-3 Minutes (100 words)

As you progress past the first few weeks, add time slowly until you’ve reached 2-3 minutes per plunge. Many people stop here and that’s perfect; as we said, this is really where the benefits max out. You may think, based on the point about it getting easier over time, that this will then eventually feel “too easy.” I have not found that to be the case. Even if you are very cold-adapted and have done this for years, different days will feel different. It might feel unusually challenging because you didn’t sleep well, or drink enough water, or were very stressed today, or who knows what. The important thing is to continue the practice and take what comes. If you’re entering the cold regularly and staying through the 2-3 maximum benefit time frame much of the time, that’s all you need.

Why You Don’t Need to Go Longer (100 words)

The neurochemical benefits max out around 2-3 minutes. If you recall the intensive process your body goes through in those first 2-3 minutes, that’s the bulk of what will happen. Going longer doesn’t make you notably healthier, just colder. You may want that for mental resilience training and if so, have at it, just be safe and don’t push past what you can manage.

How Cold Should It Be? (50 words)

Contrary to popular opinion, colder isn’t necessarily better. The cascade of benefits that we discussed happens roughly anywhere below 60*; the only difference is in the speed of the response. If your water is 59*, the neurochemical responses will all likely happen, they’ll just take a bit longer than if the water was, say, 42*. Because of this, it’s less important to be in excessively cold water and more important to choose a temperature that you can reasonably stay in for the 2-3 minute time frame. 50-59* is often a good choice, because it’s reasonably tolerable while also providing the cold immersion benefits.

Wrap + Link (50 words)

TLDR: get in cold water for 2-3 minutes, a few times a week. When you’re starting out, do what you can reasonably do, even if it’s only 15 or 30 seconds, and each time after that, do a little more until you’ve reached 2-3 minutes. There isn’t much benefit to going further than that physiologically, but if you want to, it’s fine as long as you’re safe and aware of your body. Why do we do this at all? In addition to it feeling awesome and energizing thanks to all the happy chemicals it releases, we are training our nervous system here. When we enter cold water, we purposefully put ourselves into fight-or-flight mode, and then calmly manage through it. This gives our bodies practice at entering that mode and coming back out of it in a calm, measured way, rather than staying stuck there and spiraling. It doesn’t happen overnight, but after cold plunging regularly for awhile, you’re likely to notice a different response when a stressful situation is presented to you.

Cold exposure is part of a broader toolkit that allows you to regulate your nervous system. Read more about that and other tools available to do this here.