FOREWORD BY
WIM HOF

WE HAVE BECOME VERY GOOD at being comfortable. Too good. We heat our houses, we soften our beds, we fill our cupboards with food that was designed in a laboratory by clever people whose job it is to make sure you cannot stop eating it — and then we stand in the kitchen at nine o'clock in the evening with an empty packet in our hands and we say to ourselves, what is wrong with me?

Nothing is wrong with you. Your body is not broken. Your body is bored. It's waiting for a signal that never comes, because we have removed every hard thing from our lives and called it progress.

I go into the ice to bring that signal back. Matt White went into a biscuit cupboard. Different door, same room.

I want to tell you how I met this man, because it explains why I am writing these words.

It was January 2022. The world was still shut in its houses and I was teaching online, which is not my favourite way to reach people, because I like to see the eyes. Afterwards an email arrived from a stranger in England. He was not asking for a photograph or a podcast. He had a condition called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, which began when he was thirteen years old after an injury to his hand, and which had been burning in him every day since. Decades. The doctors have a name for this condition that I do not like to repeat, because it tells a person how their story ends before they have finished writing it.

I was in a hotel room filming for television. I called him.

People sometimes ask me why I do this. There is no why. A man was in pain and the phone was in my hand.

We talked for a long time. Afterwards he sent me a message to say thank you, and something in that message made me want to keep going, so I called him a second time. I remember thinking: this one is not asking to be rescued. He's asking questions. That is a completely different phone call. A man who wants rescuing wants something from you. A man who is curious wants something from himself.

Over the months that followed he breathed. He went into the cold. He kept his doctors, which is right, and he did the work alongside them, which is also right. I promised him nothing, because I never promise anything. The body makes the promises. I only introduce people to it.

The pain did not leave him. I want to be honest about that, and he is honest about it too. But something else changed, and it's the thing I have been shouting about for forty years: we cannot always choose the pain, but we can absolutely choose our relationship with it. That is not a poem. That is physiology. Your mind is not a passenger in your body. It's in the driving seat, and most people have never even looked at the wheel.

Years later he wrote to me again. This time it was his leg. The nerve had gone and his foot would not lift. A climber with a foot that will not lift. You would forgive a man for stopping.

He did not stop. He learned to climb differently, and then he climbed for Great Britain.

That is the whole man, in one story. Every time life took something away from him, he asked what was still there.

So when he told me he had written a book about biscuits, I laughed.

But this is not a book about biscuits.

I know this animal. I have met it in the ice water, at ninety seconds, when it begins its negotiation: this is enough, you have proved it, get out now, be sensible. It's the same voice. The same brain. Deep in the brain stem sit freeze, fight, flight and fuck — the four oldest instructions we have — and every one of them is older than your good intentions. That machinery kept us alive when we lived in the trees. Now it embarrasses us in the kitchen.

Matt has a name for the moment it wins. He calls it the Fuck It Button, and I laughed out loud when I read it, because I have watched a thousand people press it on the edge of a frozen lake. One small failure, and then the whole day is thrown away in a temper. Nobody has ever explained to these people that the second decision is the one that mattered, not the first.

When you can see the impulse arriving instead of waking up afterwards with an empty packet, you are free. Not perfect. Free. Awareness comes first. It always comes first. Everything I teach is only this.

The other thing I like about Matt is that he is funny. I am not always funny. But I know that a mind that is laughing is a mind that is open, and an open mind will let an idea walk straight in and sit down. He is a serious man who refuses to be a solemn one, and the science is all in here, but it never once stands over you wagging its finger.

You will not find shame in these pages. That matters more than people realise. Shame does not make anybody stronger. Shame makes you hide, and the whole point is to stop hiding — from the packet, from the cold, from yourself.

So read this book. Then put it down and go and watch yourself. Watch the moment your hand moves before you decided it should. Do not fight it, do not hate yourself for it, just see it.

You are not weak. You are not broken. You are human and human is far more powerful than you have been told. Go and find out for yourself. Get uncomfortable on purpose. Take the cold shower, close the cupboard, feel the urge arrive and let it pass through you like weather.

In other words, there is nothing else for me to say here other than what I always say.

Breathe, motherfucker.