Kanal by Henry Silvey

As part of EWF X Hate Mail (2026)

Rock bottom, self-help and really, really cold water

There are no adjectives to accurately describe the sensation of submerging your body in cold water. 

When I first jumped into the freezing canals of Copenhagen’s Islands Brygge Harbour Bath in 2023, the response was instantaneous, extreme and unlike anything I’d ever felt prior. I immediately entered a state of total shock. My heartrate, blood pressure and adrenaline spiked. I began to hyperventilate. My skin went red raw. My limbs began to shake uncontrollably. My bones froze to the marrow. I felt like I was about to die. Which makes sense, because the symptoms I’ve described above are also symptoms of dying. But wading in that icy canal is not the closest I’ve felt to death.

*

Seven years ago, at the age of 18, I found myself in the midst of an immense and devastating depression, one that had been building slowly but steadily since the eve of my 16th birthday when I thought about killing myself for the first time while listening to Frank Ocean’s Blonde (it’s fine okay it was 2016).

In 2019 in my first year out of high school, I didn’t want to be alive, and had no intention of living to the age I currently am. I rarely left my room. I didn’t see any of my friends. I couldn’t work or study. I ate like shit, if at all. I was on meds that made me sleep 14 hours a day and gave me terrifyingly vivid nightmares. 

I couldn’t confidently say I engaged in a single consistently healthy behaviour over the span of many years. I fantasized about my own suicide almost constantly. I resented myself. I resented my life. I resented doing all the simple things that are essential to living. I saw my future as nothing but unrelenting suffering. You might say I was a bit of a downer.

And then the pandemic hit.

*

On the second night of my six-month exchange in Copenhagen, I met my now-friend Pantju at a student party after overhearing his Australian accent and heroically inserting myself into his conversation with two other students – Rory and Caitlin – from Ireland and Canada respectively. We figured out we were all living at the same student accommodation: Signalhuset, in Copenhagen’s south. They invited me to join them the next morning at the Islands Brygge Harbour Bath, one of Copenhagen’s most popular canal swimming spots.
In Danish summer, the days are long, sunny and periodically warm. The canal water, however, remains freezing – probably colder than the coldest setting on your average Australian shower. That’s the best you’re gonna get in Copenhagen in terms of swimmable open water.
Except my exchange began in the middle of winter. On Sunday, the 5th of February 2023, Copenhagen experienced a high of 2 degrees Celsius and a low of -1. This was the day we decided to do our first cold plunge together. It seemed like a pretty good way to break the ice.
*
Despite its newfound popularity in online wellness circles, cold-water plunging has a long and occasionally dubious history. 
Millennia before the Wim Hof Method became cemented in the annals of online self-help, Nordic cultures had been using icy lakes and rivers to train the body and cleanse the soul since the Viking Age. 
In 18th century England, cold water baths were commonly used to treat fevers, aches and pains. In the 19th and 20th centuries, cold water showers and baths were used in insane asylums to subdue people with psychiatric disorders. 
In the 21st century, cold water immersion has gained popularity online as an alternative therapy – one that purports to enhance immunity, stimulate muscle growth, reduce inflammation and boost dopamine levels. Everyone from Joe Rogan to Gwyneth Paltrow raves about it. Which should probably make you less inclined to try it. Regardless, who would want to simulate dying rapidly of hypothermia for a quick dopamine boost? A lot of people, apparently. There must be more to it.
*
“Some years ago, the winter after [my son] Arthur died, I was walking along an empty beach in Brighton and had the sudden impulse to jump into the sea. I was shocked to find that, upon entering the freezing water, I experienced a sudden, violent, radical rearrangement of my relationship with almost everything. I discovered that it was simply impossible to grieve in icy water.
“I wake up early, walk through the woods with some other wild swimmers, and jump into the lake. During winter, with water temperatures dropping to freezing, this is nothing less than a catastrophic outrage to the nervous system and an excruciatingly intimate engagement with one’s mortality.”
-	Musician Nick Cave, in response to a fan named Freya, who asked: What makes you happy?
*
I remember the turning point. At one of my routine weekly appointments with my psychiatrist, he spoke to me candidly after years and years of little to no progress: if I wasn’t interested in getting better, it might be time to take a prolonged trip to the hospital. He suggested we try Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, a treatment for major depressive disorder in which small electric currents are sent through your brain to stimulate minor seizures.
*
Out the front of Signalhuset was a stagnant, murky canal; algae and reeds and miscellaneous scum brooding unappetisingly on and under the surface. A body of water not intended for swimming by any stretch of the imagination. A small, fenceless bridge stretched across the water leading to the entrance of our building. 
Sometimes, at the beginning of exchange, my friends and I would come home from a night on the town, stand at the edge of the canal and consider whether jumping in was funny enough to justify the cold, wet aftermath. It only took our third boozy night out for my American friend Aidan to be the first to take the leap.
He takes off his shirt. Leaves his shorts and Teva sandals on (mind you it was still winter; this guy is just insane). I whip my phone out to capture the moment. He takes one apprehensive step in to test the depth towards the edge of the water. Submerges his second foot when he knows it’s safe to stand. And then jumps into the deep end head-first. Not a second later, he springs up from the dark pool as if jolting awake from a nightmare and clambers out of the water and onto the pavement, giggling his head off.
From then on, if we were coming home from a night out, there was no question. Someone was jumping in the canal. It was probably going to be Aidan, but we all took turns throwing ourselves into the water. All through winter, spring and summer, we jumped in the canal at least once a week, often in the early hours of the morning. Our sleeping neighbours hated us. We were very fucking annoying. The water never got warm. I’m pretty sure it gave me an ear infection that sent me to the hospital with blood in my ears. Yeah. That was probably the worst physical pain I’ve ever felt.

*

In 2023, the New Yorker released a documentary short called Swimming Through, which followed Jennefer, Helen and Deirdre: a trio of Chicago women who met through their early morning icy water plunges in Lake Michigan during the height of the pandemic. 

Helen, a cancer survivor, claims that once she hits the water, “…everything that is wrong or stressful disappears.”

“The shore is hell. Getting dressed is hell. The after-drop is brutal,” Helen continues. “However… you feel superhuman. It’s a feeling that lasts the entire day. The feeling of being fully, utterly alive and joyous.”

But there’s more to it. 

“There is strength in being able to do something by yourself,” Jennefer says. “But I think for me, it’s created in my life a tendency to feel like I have to do things alone.” 

She begins to tear up. “What this experience has done is showed me the importance of community and support.”

“Swimming through the winter helped us get through.”

*
The mere thought of being electrocuted was enough to jolt me out of my fugue state for a brief, but intense moment. Just as lockdown restrictions began to lift, so too did the veil of despair that had hung over my eyes for so long. It lifted just enough to let me see something very important: that I was still alive. Perhaps it was also the fact that everyone else was stuck inside their room – where I certainly would have been anyway, pandemic or no – that made me feel as if we could all start from square one together. The next morning I decided to take a cold shower.
*

The evidence to support meaningful benefit in cold water immersion for treatment of depression or anxiety is mostly speculative and primarily anecdotal. A few studies link cold immersion to quicker muscle recovery and reduced stress levels over a 12-hour period, but there’s not enough literature to substantiate a definitive link between cold plunges and overall physiological wellbeing.

I’ve no doubt most anecdotes are true – even if we purely ignored the science, engaging in extreme cold exposure forces you to be in your body. At its core, it proves you can do hard things and come out the other side feeling renewed. It never gets easier. Every time feels like the first time. The only thing that changes is your resolve. The more you do it, the more proof you have that you can endure.

*
Like the women in Swimming Through, Danes tend to share their cold plunge experiences with friends, family or even colleagues before work. The Islands Brygge Harbour Baths stay open year-round. In winter, these sub-zero dips are fittingly referred to as ‘Winter Bathing.’ There are 184 winter bathing clubs in Denmark, with over 70,000 members. The social flavour of this approach falls under the banner of hygge, a Danish concept that refers to a psychological state characterized by coziness, togetherness, conviviality and spontaneous social flow. Terms usually not associated with almost freezing to death.
*
I needed a shock to break me out of the mould of desolation I had constructed my sense of self within. But it was not the shock that kept me from slipping back to the bottom.
After that meeting with my psychiatrist, I developed a passing interest in becoming healthy. It started for me the same as I’m sure it starts for most depressed people in the modern age: I searched up something along the lines of ‘how to not be depressed.’ 
Over the next six months, I absorbed as much self-help information as I could find. I listened to podcasts about minimalism, watched video essays about mindfulness. I eventually started running and going to the gym, having cold showers every morning and journalling regularly. I did all of this alone. Two years later, in 2022, I was the healthiest I’d ever been. And I still hated myself.
I took this catch-all online advice as gospel. Just look at all these dudes – ripped, healthy, seemingly happy testaments to their methods. But when they didn’t work long-term, I concluded that I was simply beyond saving.
*
A month later, I jumped into the Winter Baths at Islands Brygge with Pantju, Rory and Caitlin, no less than 24 hours after we met. Afterwards, on the walk to the sauna near the baths, my freshly numbed legs gave way beneath me. I collapsed onto the boardwalk in front of about 20 or so people. Pantju helped me to back my feet. I was so numb that I didn’t notice I was bleeding until 10 minutes later in the sauna, when I lifted my blood-stained hands from my knees.
*
Cold water won’t save you from drowning. It won’t grant you an unshakable resolve that makes the rest of your life trivially easy. It won’t make you feel less lonely. 
It’s a flirtation with death, a baptism that serves to remind you something you may have forgotten in the everyday despair, something that the world has beaten out of you.
You are alive.
*
I knew the first time we jumped into that bitter canal together that, despite not living in the same hemisphere anymore, we would always be friends. The mutual trust we formed through that simple, impulsive leap was proof we were all willing to do hard things even if they were stupid, uncomfortable or death-simulating, that they would only ever ask me to jump off a bridge if they were jumping with me. In that water we forged a connection that brought me back into my body. Back into the world.
For me, the antidote is not found online. Nor below the surface of an icy canal. It’s found in the grinning faces you see when you remember to come up for air.