My upswing from before ended - I can go back and check but I think it started towards the end of December and ended around Monday of this week.

However, I do still have more libido than I do during previous downswings.

I took a 1 minute cold shower last night, and it wasn’t any worse than a 30 second cold shower. Actually, the 30 second shower was much worse. For the first half of this shower, I had the water on my face and chest and was having a hard time catching my breath. I had to lean over and let most of the water hit the side of my face. Then I chickened out by having the other thirty seconds of cold water spray on my back and head, which was easier. (I normally spend most of my showers facing away from the water. In movies, everyone who takes a shower is always facing the shower, but that’s always been uncomfortable to me, having the water spray on my face, so I’ve always taken backwards showers.) I’m not sure if what I did still counts as a cold shower, because I was only facing forward for half of it and I never directly aimed it at my balls. Also, the water was only 80% of the way towards cold, not 100%.

I’m staying in a hotel since I can easily and cheaply get top status with Hyatt for 2 years (including free upgrades to suites) if I do it, and this is sort of me banking on the fact that I’ll have someone special to enjoy that perk with. I will get lots of points and free nights back, so in the end it will only cost me a few hundred dollars. Also I needed a change of scenery. Anyway, the hotel’s showers are much nicer than mine - it’s got more of a rain type of thing, rather than a shower head that sprays a small area.

A lot of what makes cold showers so unpleasant is that I start hyperventilating, and have to fight the urge to turn off the water the whole time. I’m just looking at the countdown and trying to catch my breath, trying to tell myself “okay, what if you just knocked off all the bullshit and maybe held your breath for a bit? You could try not shivering. It’s really unnecessary, you’re going to dry off very soon anyhow.” But it only works to a small degree.

After my work day I will take a colder shower (max coldness) for 1 minute and try to face it the whole time. I'll try to catch my breath and tell myself “you can just stand here, it’s fine.” But when that rush of cold water hits me, I turn into Aaron Brrrr.

In middle school and high school, I was on a swim team at my local pool. Practice was at 7 AM, and the water was cold every morning. Even though this was in the summer, it was shortly after sunrise and big pools take a long time to warm up. I don’t remember how cold it was in relation to a cold shower, but I would usually slooooooowly lower my feet and legs into the pool, and get in, and it would be okay. Then eventually you have to go underwater, and that part still sucked but it was over in a few seconds. Once you started swimming, it was fine. Other times, I would just jump in and go underwater straight away to get it over with. No matter what, after a couple of laps you would completely move on from the coldness factor. It just wasn’t an issue anymore.

Cold showers are similar, but different. You can’t swim to warm yourself up / distract yourself, you don’t have the forced rhythm of breathing that swimming gives you, and you can’t really ease into it, either. It’s a continuous blast of cold water, but there’s a lot of air in between the water so your body doesn’t adjust to it the way it does when you submerge yourself. It would be so much easier to get in a pool of cold water and swim one or two laps. But it’s not QUITE as bad as I thought it would be. It’s a lot more tolerable if you can take a regular shower first, then have a body temp shower for a few minutes, and then set the timer and crank it down like a madman.

I’m not thinking about going past 1 minute cold showers until I have a less severe reaction to them. For now, 1 minute is plenty of time. Maybe in a week or two my body and mind will get more used to it, and I will have a less strong reaction to it.

Also trying to not fap at all - 2 days in so far. Launching the ads for my business this weekend as well.