Lizzo says a cold plunge helps her with anxiety

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Lizzo is having a good year: her Amazon series Lizzo’s Watch Out fo the Big Grrrls won an Emmy last week, several weeks after her VMA win. But the singer, dancer and flute-player extraordinaire says her good mood is also attributable to the work she’s doing to maintain her mental health — including taking ice plunges, where she lays in freezing water for a few minutes.

A few days before the Emmys, Lizzo posted a TikTok of her taking an ice bath. In the video, she slowly submerges herself into an outdoor tub filled with what appears to be extra-cold water. Her face and body language certainly indicate that what’s happening is pretty different from a relaxing bath — she goes in slowly, sometimes looking pained. She stays in for three minutes, she indicates, and by the end her body is numb from the cold. But she also says she feels better, and that cold plunges help her with inflammation in her lower back and knees. In another TikTok, she adds that it also helps her with anxiety.

As Shape points out, Lizzo is the latest of many celebrities to talk about the benefits of cold plunges: Zac Efron, Madonna and Lady Gaga have all shouted out the procedure, as has Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and ‘Thor’ actor Chris Hemsworth.

Some of the additional benefits these celebrities extoll include loosening muscles, building the immune system, and waking the body up.

How true are claims about the benefits of ice baths?

The short answer is that although there isn’t a ton of academic research on the topic, some studies have shown benefits to subjecting your body to icy temps.

When Healthing’s multimedia editor Emma Jones joined a polar plunge this spring, University of Ottawa doctoral candidate of human kinetics Kelli King told her that the few small studies that have been done have found positive impacts on its impact on inflammation, among a few other areas.

And Stephen Cheung, a professor of kinesiology at Brock University who researched the body’s response to extreme temperatures, added that it releases a ton of adrenaline, which both wakes us up and potentially benefits the immune system.

“You can think of it as the gas pedal … when your skin temperature drops very quickly like that, you are essentially slamming on the gas pedal,” he said.

There are some mental health benefits, according to very small studies, Healthline reports. One case study, for instance, of a 24-year-old woman with depression and anxiety was able to decrease the symptoms of those disorders through regular cold water swimming. And Thea Gallagher, a clinical assistant professor at NYU Langone Health, told Shape that “anecdotally, it’s rejuvenating,” and that people who do it often say they “feel really good afterward.”

There are also some risks, though — Cheung explained that vasoconstriction can sometimes cause an increase in blood pressure, which can cause stress to the heart. And while the risk of hypothermia is minor, the muscles can potentially constrict, making swimming difficult. This isn’t a major risk for someone like Lizzo, who cold- plunges in a bath — but it can be a risk for someone jumping into a freezing lake, where safety requires swimming to shore.