People assigned to take cold showers didn’t feel any healthier, but they missed less work

There’s something impressive about taking cold showers. It summons up images of military discipline, and people claim that it makes you healthier. But how much of that is true?

In my quest to find out, I came across a 2016 paper published in PLoS One on how cold showers affected health and work. The researchers recruited about 3,000 participants who, like most of us, were not used to taking cold showers. These participants were assigned to four groups. Every day for 30 consecutive days, the first group had to end their normal, blessedly warm shower with a cold shower for 30 seconds. The second group had to do this for 60 seconds, the third for 90 seconds, and the fourth was the control group that did not suffer for science.

The...

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