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Polyamory + prayer (Issue #387)
Last year, some friends and I visited a spa in Brooklyn with different relaxation areas themed around global spa traditions: one room was a Russian Banya; one featured Himalayan Salt. And there was the requisite cold plunge, set against a wall lit to look like a snowy mountain — in Japan, I think. People jumped in and out of it all afternoon, terrified at first and laughing afterward. The cold plunge trend, we decided, was here to stay.
Martina H, who describes herself as an “Arctic Wanderer,” recently wrote about the popularity of the cold plunge: On Instagram, fitness fanatics and biohackers alike post endlessly about the benefits of immersing your body in very cold water. It’s incredibly popular with morning routine obsessives. But in Swedish Lapland, where Martina grew up, people share “a belief, passed down like a wool sweater, that exposure to cold makes children stronger, more resilient, more alive, even when the sun disappears for twenty-one hours a day.” She goes on: “we didn’t discover cold plunges and we don’t call it ‘cold therapy.’ We inherited them, and we call it Tuesday.”
Well before cold plunge evangelist Wim Hof took his first breath, communities across the world have been engaging in cold therapy rituals, from Scandinavia to ancient Egypt. These often came with a deep understanding of the cold: “The Sámi reindeer herders of the north learned to read the cold like a second language,” Martina writes, “knowing when it healed and when it killed.” Today, most cold plunge fanatics are a little fuzzier on the facts.
And yes, a cold plunge feels amazing, thanks to the noradrenaline and dopamine released by the brain — it’s a natural high. But while many people claim that cold plunges help muscles recover after a workout, this isn’t as true as TikTok would have you think. Cold exposure has been shown to benefit professional athletes after a training session, but for the rest of us, a plunge can actually reduce muscle growth by up to 20 percent (but effects vary due to hydration levels or specific temperatures).
As Martina writes, this doesn’t mean that nobody should plunge. It only means that you should do it “if it feels like clarity rather than punishment.”
— Marian Bull
Recommended reading:
- When rangers realized the history of Muir Woods was incomplete — erasing Indigenous stewardship and early conservation movements — they expanded the park’s timeline and invited visitors to reflect on a more accurate, and more complicated, story. Then came a Trump executive order claiming this sort of historical accuracy was “disparaging to Americans.” As a result, the exhibit — and others like it across the country — shut down. And as Ranger Elizabeth Villano sees it, that’s the real threat to Americans: not confronting our unflattering history, but living under an administration that “tak[es] away our ability to think critically for ourselves.”
- All relationships are mirrors, writes Morgana Clementine, but polyamory makes you face multiple reflections at once — making it that much harder to blame your exes or hide from your own patterns.
- Spirituality writer Dan Foster argues that prayer reshapes us from the inside out. Even without belief, studies show it calms the nervous system, lowers stress, and builds emotional resilience. Unlike meditation, prayer offers something more relational: it connects people to a higher power, to their community, or to the long line of others who have prayed before them.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom on being a villager
Want the support of a village? Then be a villager: host playdates, organize carpools, feed your neighbors when they’re sick. Most importantly? Don’t keep score.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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Cold therapy isn’t new. For people in Sweden, it’s called “Tuesday.” was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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