July 2025
Friends and Clients,
Healthy Wealthy Wise provides applicable and to-the-point info to expand your knowledge on health and finances and inspire your heart and mind. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for following along!
Jon
Healthy
Cold Showers: 1,000 Days of just doing it and why you should consider it too.
Ever since I can remember, I hated getting in cool or cold water almost as much as I hate early morning wake-ups. As a kid, I complained so much that my mom actually took me out of my morning swim lessons.
So what I am about to say is quite strange for me…
July marks an anniversary: three years (over 1,000 days) of taking a cold shower or cold water dip EVERY. MORNING. This is one of the first things I do each day, and I haven’t missed a day yet.
To be clear: this is not a brag, it’s a moment to reflect on the changes that have occurred in me.
I’ve kept this habit through warm seasons like this sweltering July, through freezing temps where the water is so cold it stings your skin and takes your breath away. Even on vacations or through bouts of sickness, I’ve kept it going.
Does this make me tough? No.
Has it changed who I am? Not really.
But it has helped me wake up faster, feel more alert, and boosted my mood and focus in a noticeable way throughout the morning. It’s something that I could skip, but I don’t because I don’t want to break my string… and why would I? It's a ritual now. I don't even have to really think about or motivate myself to do it, it's just what I do. Like brushing my teeth or combing my hair.
Of course, some mornings are harder than others, but like exercise, it’s one of the few things in my life that, after I do it, I ALWAYS feel better. And I don't regret it.
A few tips that helped me get started:
I use getting coffee as my reward. 🙂
Start in the hot months and keep going through the cold ones. The barrier to entry is low right now; the water in the pipes isn't very cold for very long. As the weather gets colder, your tolerance and toughness should increase as the temperature decreases.
It's not a cold plunge where the temperature is extremely cold and you have to build significant tolerance or should be more measured in your exposure. Cold plunges can be so taxing on the body you shouldn't do it all the time. I’ve done those, but that’s not something you'd want to do every day or when you're sick.
What cold showers are great for…
1. Taking Fewer Sick Days
A Dutch randomized controlled trial found that people who ended their showers with 30–90 seconds of cold water called in sick to work 29% less often than those who took warm showers only—despite no difference in how they felt during illness. And 54% less if they engage in regular exercise
Source
2. Boosts Mood and Mental Focus
Deliberate cold exposure causes a significant release of epinephrine (a.k.a adrenaline) and norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline) in the brain and body. These neurochemicals make us feel alert and can make us feel agitated and as if we need to move or vocalize during the cold exposure. Cold causes their levels to stay elevated for some time, and their ongoing effect after the exposure is to increase your level of energy and focus, which can be applied to other mental and/or physical activities. (This is why a cold shower is great before going into work or taking an exam.) Source
3. Builds Stress Resilience
Repeated brief cold exposure trains your nervous system to stay calm under stress by activating your sympathetic response without panic. One study showed cold showers reduced perceived stress over time and increased self-reported quality of life. Cold exposure may even have the potential for relief of depressive symptoms and most definitely an increase in positive emotions.
Participants felt more active, alert, attentive, proud, and inspired, and less distressed and nervous after having a cold-water bath. The changes in positive emotions were associated with the coupling between brain areas involved in attention control, emotion, and self-regulation. Source 1 Source 2
Wealthy
Selling a business, property, or large stock position?
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If you’re planning to sell a business, unwind a big stock position, or trigger a meaningful capital gain sometime in the next few years, there’s a strategy worth knowing about that can potentially decrease your tax liability dramatically.
Most people think tax planning starts AFTER a major event, when it comes time for tax filings.
But in reality, the best outcomes happen when you begin preparing well in advance. There’s a way to manage your investments where you don’t just ride the market, you actively look for losses to store up while staying fully invested. You can realize those losses intentionally and store them up for future use, while still targeting growth in the overall portfolio. This term is “Tax Loss Harvesting.”
Over time, this builds a “bank” of capital losses that can be used to offset gains, now or in the future. If you’ve got a big liquidity event coming, like selling your company, vested equity, or a real estate exit, this kind of preparation can make a real difference when the tax bill comes due.
This isn’t something you’d want to DIY. There are rules around how and when it’s done, and it works best in taxable investment accounts. But it can often be implemented quietly in the background while you go about life and business as usual.
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Wise
Although I didn’t begin reading Carl Jung’s work in depth until my late 30s, I realized his ideas had been showing up in my life much earlier.
Mostly through the lyrics, music, and art that shaped me. One of the biggest influences was Maynard James Keenan of TOOL, whose work often echoed Jungian themes, even if I didn’t fully recognize them at the time.
But it wasn’t until the prolonged pressure and existential weight of midlife truly set in that I began to engage with Jung’s writing on a deeper level. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung’s own life story revealed parallels that felt strikingly similar to my own experience. What I found was a mirror to my own musings.
Mostly, the friction between who we are and what we are doing outwardly, or who we are forced to become in light of life’s callings and responsibilities. To speak to this idea in terms of his own concepts, my persona, “the mask,” and the self, “who we truly are,” find themselves at odds with one another at some point along the way. This is a natural process that occurs in most people. Many cultures throughout time have different rituals, myths or ceremonies to initiate and explain these changes. However, modern life doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of dealing with these changes on a deeper level.
Many call this a” midlife crisis” and paint it in a negative light. I believe this to be a chance for something positive if it’s paid attention to and addressed with care and reflection.
Carl Jung saw it as a necessary shift. Not a crisis but more of a psychic reckoning. In the first half of life, we build careers, families, and reputations. We follow scripts handed to us by culture, parents, school, and survival. But eventually, if we’re paying attention, something breaks through. A feeling, a dream (or the loss of a dream), or maybe just the weight of it all bearing down. And the message is this: there’s more going on beneath the surface. Source
If that signal gets ignored, it can show up as frustration, boredom, burnout, or just that nagging sense that the life you’ve built no longer fits. People often push the responsibility of dealing with these feelings onto others, jeopardizing relationships or unconsciously creating problems with careers or family.
But if you lean in, Jung believed this could be the moment you stop living out of the unconscious and start to take hold of your own life and become who you are truly meant to be. A process Jung called INDIVIDUATION. The work of becoming whole.
And it often starts not with clarity, but with disorientation. As he said, we have to step off the well-worn path and begin designing the second half of our lives from the inside out, not from the expectations we’ve been carrying all along but from our soul.
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What I’m Vibing On
Bob Dylan talking about how he feels like his songs from the 60s were divinely inspired and that he could never create like that again. I agree with the first part and totally disagree with the second. He always WAS and IS a conduit for something otherworldly.
Bob Dylan on magical songwriting.
