It’s Cold. It’s Shocking. Northern Europeans Love It. Now I Do, Too.

Books

The Sublime Euphoria of Cold-Water Swimming

Plunging into the chilly ocean delivers a high like no other.

By

Laura Miller

Enter your email to receive alerts for this author.

Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences.

Unsubscribe from email alerts

Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Laura Miller ?

June 13, 2026 10:00 AM

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

There’s a jewel box of a cove in the coastal Maine town where I live, and every day a small group of hardy souls heads over there to dip in the waters of our bay. When I say every day, I mean every day—with the occasional exception of those rare January mornings when the air temperature drops below zero. Sometimes I join them. In fact, one of the main reasons I moved here was the opportunity to swim in the sea more often.

A road runs over the causeway near the cove, and every so often drivers will slow down to stare at the plungers during the winter (or fall, or spring) months. Still more of them these days will honk their approval or admiration. Although Northern Europeans have extolled the benefits of cold-water swimming from time immemorial, in the U.S., they have only recently become widely known—certainly more than they were several years ago, when I first forced myself into the water at a beach on a nearby island. This beach is closer to the open ocean than our town cove is, and the water far colder than I was accustomed to as the strictly summer swimmer I was back then. But I really wanted to swim to an islet I could see from the shore, one of those countless tiny piles of rocks pushing out of the water just off the coast, crowned with pine trees that seem capable of growing in no soil at all.

It was August, and the air temperature was in the high 80s, but the water, I’m guessing, was 60 degrees at best, maybe colder. When you  first sink into the chill, your body can’t believe you’re doing this and urges you to reconsider, but if you keep moving, the water simply feels cold, not intolerably frigid. I made it to the islet and out onto a miniature beach made entirely of pink shell fragments (swim shoes are essential here for all but the toughest feet), and clambered up over the smooth, tan, sun-warmed stones to gaze off toward the Atlantic. I felt instantly euphoric, both from a sense of adventure—now I could explore the islet that I’d only been able to admire from afar before—but also, clearly, from some sort of physiological effect that I now know is well documented. I talked a friend into joining me soon afterward, and he got hooked, too. We make a pilgrimage to that beach several times every summer.

Laura Miller

As Chris Ballard, a former senior writer for Sports Illustrated ,  explains in his new book,  The Plunge : Maverick Swimmers, an Unlikely Quest, and the Transformative Power of Cold Water,  scientists studying cold-water exposure documented “a whopping 530 percent surge in plasma noradrenaline, a hormone and neurotransmitter that drives your body’s fight-or-flight response.” Well, of course it does, but unlike other stress hormones, plasma noradrenaline is associated with mental clarity and the elation I experienced on that islet. Furthermore, the researchers observed a concurrent 250 percent increase in dopamine—the feel-good hormone—and both neurotransmitters “stayed elevated for the full two-hour testing window, even after volunteers exited the water and rested under blankets on beds.” I can testify that a cold-water plunge or swim, followed by a hot shower (not considered best practice, but I seldom have time to let my body warm up on its own), is one of the best drugs I’ve ever taken. True, it leaves me feeling more mellow and gelatinous than alert, but sometimes gelatinous is just what you need.

The Plunge  is primarily an account of the more extreme sport of ice swimming—in which athletes clock significant distances (1 mile is the signature feat) in 41-degree (or colder) water, wearing only a standard swimsuit, swim cap, and goggles. Ballard offers an account of how the International Ice Swimming Association was formed, some profiles of the major figures in the sport, descriptions of various matches and championships that Ballard attended and even competed in, and the story of the group’s attempts (so far unsuccessful) to get ice swimming included in the Winter Olympics. As someone deeply uninterested in sports, I confess that passages like “Keaton kept blasting. He’d expended an enormous amount of energy just to make up this much ground. Swimming in the ice punished the early push,” stupefy me. I can almost feel brain functions shutting down when finals and championships and world records become a factor, and much of  The Plunge  flowed through my mind like thread through the eye of a needle, leaving nothing behind. (Your mileage may vary.)

Still, Ballard does assemble much interesting information in  The Plunge  on how to acclimate oneself to cold water (graduall…