Wim Hof is famous for climbing mountains in shorts and sitting in ice for record-breaking lengths of time. So his answer to Brian Rose’s first question in this clip comes as a surprise. People assume he loves the cold, he says. “I f*cking hate it, man.”
In this clip from his 2016 London Real interview, the man known as the Iceman explains why he uses the cold anyway, what he means by the “lizard brain”, and how his breathing method led to a scientific study at a Dutch university.
▶ Watch the full episode: Wim Hof – The Iceman
The cold as a teacher
Brian asks whether part of the cold’s power is that it is so immediate. You cannot check your phone or worry about what someone said about you; you have to deal with it right now. Hof agrees completely.
He would much rather be somewhere warm with palm trees, he says. But when he is in the cold, he uses that force to reach deeper parts of himself, and he respects it for that. He calls it “my teacher”: merciless, but righteous. At first you simply survive. Then you discover you can endure, and a sense of power grows. In his view, what he is really tapping into is the deepest part of the brain, and that, he says, has nothing to do with the cold itself.
Stop reading, start feeling
Brian points out that Hof had searched widely for answers: gurus, books, different traditions. Once he found the cold, Hof says, he stopped reading altogether. To him, much of religion and spiritual teaching stays on the surface, where people argue and quarrel. Brian sums it up as moving from the “monkey brain” to the “lizard brain”, and Hof, in typical style, mentions a song he has just written called Crazy Monkey.
Food, fight, freeze and flight
The lizard brain, as Hof describes it, is the old, reactive part of us. A lizard does not worry about taxes, tomorrow’s plans or paying for the house. It is concerned only with basic survival drives: food, sex, freezing, fighting and fleeing. That primitive layer, he says, is what is real.
He uses a bungee jump to show how it works. Someone on their first jump knows they are safe, yet they freeze at the edge. In Hof’s telling, the reptilian brain looks at the drop, sees death, and takes over the conscious mind. The result is a rush of adrenaline that the person cannot control.
Controlled adrenaline
His breathing method, he says, came out of his time in the cold. In a university study, people lying calmly in bed and doing the breathing produced more adrenaline than a person on their first bungee jump, but without any trigger and under their own control. He links this to the deepest structures of the brain, from the brain stem to the hypothalamus.
Hof then mentions the endotoxin research. Researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands first injected Hof himself with a bacterial toxin, and later tested volunteers he had trained. Results published in 2014 found the trained group had higher adrenaline levels and fewer flu-like symptoms than a control group. Hof’s own summary is more emphatic: “bacteria have no chance.”
He ends by saying the goal is to cut through the noise and make the method accessible to anyone, because in his words it is very, very effective.
This is Wim Hof describing his own method and views, not medical advice. Breathing exercises like this can cause light-headedness or fainting: never practise them in water, while driving or anywhere a blackout could be dangerous, and speak to your doctor if you have a health condition.
Who is Wim Hof?
Wim Hof is a Dutch extreme athlete known as “The Iceman”. He has set world records for cold exposure, including long ice baths, and climbed high on Kilimanjaro and Everest in shorts. His Wim Hof Method combines breathing exercises, cold exposure and commitment, and is practised around the world.
This clip comes from his first London Real interview, The Iceman, recorded in 2016. He returned in 2019 for Breathe Motherf*cker! How To Master Your Human Potential.
See everything Wim Hof has done with London Real on his guest page: Wim Hof on London Real.
More on London Real
Transcript
Transcript: Wim Hof – The Lizard Brain, The Cold And Controlling Adrenaline
0:00 Brian Rose: Is there something about the cold, because it’s so immediate, that you must deal with it right now? You can’t check your phone, you can’t think about what someone was saying about you. You deal with it right now, and then that leads to the breathing and leads to a real connection with your inside, with nature. Is that one of the reasons?
0:19 Wim Hof: Yes, absolutely. People think I like the cold too much. I f*cking hate it, man. I don’t like it at all. I like a warm, hot place. I like palm trees. But as long as I’m in a place like that, I use that force to tap into the deeper parts of myself, and thus I respect the cold very much. It’s my teacher. It is like you said in the introduction: merciless, but righteous.
0:57 Wim Hof: It brings you into this [unclear] of the mind. You just survive, and not only survive: you find out, you realise that you are able to endure, and this power within begins to grow, which is dealing with the impact of this force called the cold. And then afterwards you feel: wow, I’m filled up with power, and it feels good. And once you control that, you begin to find out that it is in the brain: we tap into the deepest part of our brain, which is pure feeling. And it’s great, and it hasn’t got anything to do with cold.
1:50 Brian Rose: And you had searched. You had looked for the gurus, you had read all the books, you were looking for the answer per se. It’s not like you hadn’t looked, but you stopped looking once you felt the cold.
2:00 Wim Hof: Yes. Once I encountered the cold, I stopped reading, stopped everything. It’s all very much on the surface: the old guru thing and the Buddha thing and the Catholics and all that. There’s a whole lot of war going on, a whole lot of controversy, because they quarrel on the surface.
2:25 Brian Rose: It engages the monkey brain.
2:27 Wim Hof: Yes.
2:28 Brian Rose: You’re going back to the lizard brain.
2:30 Wim Hof: Exactly. I just made a song, Crazy Monkey, and you were talking about the monkey brain, and it’s all about this, the crazy monkey. “Crazy like a monkey, let’s be funky.” I forgot the lyrics, but I’ve got it on the guitar, and everything is beautiful.
2:54 Wim Hof: Yeah, going back to this reactionary part of ours, which is a lizard. A lizard is not thinking about the taxes and what he’s going to do tomorrow and how to make his house and living secure, and all that mathematics or whatsoever. He’s just into food, f*ck, freeze, fight and flight. That’s it. Very primitive. That’s real.
3:22 Wim Hof: And we showed at the university people lying in bed doing this breathing, which was a result of being in the cold, becoming aware, later using it. I saw all kinds of [unclear], and I think a lizard is looking at that just like beauty. Like a chameleon, it goes like that. What does he see, and what do we see? We think we know it all, and we are human, superior, et cetera. We are not.
3:59 Wim Hof: When you get to a bridge, you’ve got to jump down, like a bungee jump. A person who has fear going into his first bungee jump, and he knows he’s secured, nothing happens, he is confronted with the lizard at that moment, because he’s paralysed. He is not able to control whatever is going on, because this reptilian is looking, using his eyes. He is looking at the abyss, at death, and taking it in, and he is taking over this conscious brain of ours, and he cannot do anything. He is paralysed. So this causes adrenaline inside, but non-controlled.
4:47 Wim Hof: Now we showed, lying in bed, and I learned it from being in the cold, the breathing, becoming aware: lying in bed, making people, in just two days or something, produce more adrenaline, but now controlled. No trigger whatsoever. Just in peace, and in peace tapping into the deepest part of the brain, producing more adrenaline than the person in fear going into his first bungee jump. That means tapping into the depth of the brain stem, hypothalamus, pituitary gland, pineal gland, all that. The primitive part. And thus bacteria have no chance. They injected these guys whom I instructed.
5:38 Brian Rose: They first injected you.
5:40 Wim Hof: Yes.
5:41 Brian Rose: So you went from the cold, mastered the breathing. With the breathing you felt you could master your adrenaline response, and then you decided: well, let’s take this a little further.
5:48 Wim Hof: Nice. Well said. A good résumé, man. Yeah, a lot of intelligent people, man, because we’ve got to cut through this and get to the bottom and make it accessible for anybody, because it’s very, very effective.
