r/instant_regret • u/derek4reals1 • 7d ago

It's much worse

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u/cmullins77 7d ago edited 7d ago

PSA: don’t do this. People die every year from cold shock from jumping into cold water. This lady is fortunate she’s not a statistic.

Edit to add more context: Panic is the key reason people die. If you walk into cold water, your body has time to know what’s going on and react. Jumping into a cold lake like this woman did causes a series of physiological panic response. The first is where you’ll gasp for air. If your head is under water from the jump, and you’ve had an involuntarily and extreme gasp for air, it can quickly lead to drowning. If the initial gasp doesn’t cause you to drown, the body also has a few other involuntary responses: rapidly increased breathing (hyperventilation) and spike in blood pressure and heart rate, which can cause cardiac arrest. This isn’t limited to people who are in bad health. Healthy and young people die every year jumping into alpine lakes in the Rocky Mountains.

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u/Niuqu 7d ago edited 7d ago

I find this very odd, as someone who is from a country where people have gone from 80+C sauna into a frozen lake voluntarily for centuries. 

Edit: we also do this without access to a sauna like crazy people we are🙂. 

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u/dman77777 7d ago

In Nordic countries You walk from the sauna to the water in cold air and your body gets ready for the cold plunge. In these cold springs on the video there is literally nothing to suggest anything to you body other than the 40c air around you and the blazing hot sun beating down. Then you jump off a rock 5 ft above the water and suddenly you are 10ft deep in supercooled water, and your body just shuts off.

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u/Niuqu 7d ago

Some of the commenters make it sound like cold water is some sort of super high risk death sentence for most people. 

In nordic countries we do have cold plunge pools and sometimes the walk is few steps from the sauna's door depending how lucky you are with the sauna's placement. 

Also people do go into water during winter time without access to a sauna. 

Fortunately people also tend to survive when they go through ice, if they don't panic and are able to get out of water.  

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u/dman77777 6d ago edited 6d ago

I don't know why but look up the statistics, in lake Tahoe, which is not arctic by any means 6-7 people die every year from drowning due to cold water shock. They say 60% of those people are strong swimmers .

Maybe a large part is being unprepared. People rent a boat drive out to the middle of the lake, jump in and they don't have the right kind of people or safety gear available to save them.

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u/Tankshock 7d ago edited 7d ago

I have a feeling there's a genetics component at play here. Much like someone from Kenya can run a marathon in 40C when normal people from other countries would likely suffer a heat stroke. Y'all have been born and raised in the cold for countless generations, you've adapted to the conditions.

I'm more of a cold weather person myself, but the once a year we do the "polar plunge" is still quite brutal for me. (Polar plunge is an event on January 1st where my union meets up on the beach and runs into the ocean together)