Ice baths and 5am Clubs: have people become so adrift from their bodies they will do mad things just to feel something?

There are two types of people in the world. Those who think making themselves physically uncomfortable makes them a better person and those who know that’s not true. Some people seem to rely on discomfort to give their lives meaning. Living like Puritans if the Puritans had Instagram. But instead of rising before the sun for quiet prayer, it’s now called the “5am Club”. Which sounds like a promising late-late bar, but instead is just people getting up really early and doing things they could otherwise get done later in the day at a more enjoyable time.
It’s a shame the Puritans aren’t knocking about as much any more; they would have probably got behind run clubs. They would have loved a standing desk. But they really would have rejoiced about ice baths.
My social media feed has been taken over with ice baths and people’s claims for what it can do for them. Who knew impersonating a beer at the bottom of an ice-filled bathtub at a house party could cure anxiety and depression while shining your shoes and giving your car a good vacuum? I’m all for doing whatever makes you feel good but it’s not exactly groundbreaking to suggest any activity that involves a change of temperature to get you out of your head and back into your body will help you regulate emotions. Some of you have clearly never been a stressed out seven-year-old who was told to hold an ice cube in the palm of your hand by a school councillor. There’s no need to waste hundreds of euro buying what is essentially a depressing adult version of a kiddie pool to deep-freeze yourself in.
Ice baths have really proved, at least to me, that people will do anything other than therapy. Given the choice between working through traumas, limiting personal beliefs and problematic behaviour, some among us have opted for sitting in a wheelie bin full of ice cubes instead. Even though there are other options to banish our demons that don’t involve emptying the local Centra’s ice bag fridge.
I’m not the only one who feels like this. In fact, I’m in good company. Roy Keane, forever the source of calm, thought-out reasoning, slated Gary Neville last week for having an ice bath at home.
“All of that is a waste of time, I’m telling you,” said our sage.
“I did my homework on it. Ice baths … it’s the new garlic bread … it’s the new thing!”
And who are we to argue with the thinking person’s hard man and national treasure? Even if his remarks were an insult to the culinary wonder that is garlic bread.
It’s not even the mixed science behind turning yourself into an ice lolly that makes me hate it. It’s just that people who do it, love to tell you about it. At the risk of sounding like your conservative relative during Pride, I don’t care what they do in their private lives, just don’t go rubbing it in our faces.
[ Hiberno-English just does so many things that standard English can’t and I am clinging to itOpens in new window ]
But I suspect that’s sort of the point of ice baths or any other unpleasant activity such as hiking Everest or raising children without screens. There’s always a bang of performative self-punishment off the whole thing. It’s like the worth of a person is tied to their ability to persevere through pain, even if it is self-inflicted. There’s an odd sort of morality tied to doing hard things, even if they are entirely unnecessary.
I have noticed a correlation between people whose day jobs usually involve ergonomic chairs and the warm embrace of office air conditioning, and pushing their bodies to their limits. Not once have I ever seen anyone in my blue-collar community talk about trekking to Everest Base Camp or consider base jumping or running a marathon. Most of the adult men I knew had physically strenuous jobs that involved some degree of danger because of the higher wages that kind of labour attracted. They might have played some sort of sport or gone to the gym in their free time but their downtime was spent relaxing and recovering. They didn’t need to push their bodies off the clock because they had nothing to prove to themselves or anyone else. My grandfather can point to the tiling on a roof and tell you which back injury it correlates to. The fruits of their physical labour (as terrible as it was for them in the long run) were tangible.
Maybe as we shifted into a service economy that favours jobs that revolve around emails, desks and our mind always being “on”, we have turned our bodies off, leading us to do all kinds of mad things just to feel something again.