That is the likelihood that you would have excessive amounts of cortisol later in the day , which not only can disrupt sleep but is correlated with a number of other um hormonal effects that are not good for us and therefore not good for fertility . So here what I'm describing are positive yet indirect effects of a cold on hormone levels , both in males and in females . So for men , we talked about increased testosterone , improved sperm quality .
So ease into it , be safe . But it does appear that both for men for reasons I talked about a few minutes ago and for women that deliberate cold exposure can be beneficial for fertility and for hormone production . But in particular for females , in terms of regulating cortisol and for hormone production .
Therefore , reducing temperature is good . Likewise , with females , deliberate cold exposure can be good for the overall fertility process . Not because cold is good for the ovary or being cold is good for the ovary or for luteinizing hormone or for follicle stimulating hormone or anything else like that .
I do that mainly for the psychological effects related to the long lasting increases in dopamine and epinephrine . But there are other data starting to come out showing that that that sort of approach or similar approaches can increase testosterone levels and maybe even sperm counts can reduce cortisol late in the evening if the cold exposure is done early in the day , so on and so forth . So a lot of interesting data coming out in really good journals that are peer reviewed and so on in humans .
Again , you can find that at Huberman lab dot com , we did a guest episode with an expert on the use of cold for health and performance with my colleague Craig Heller from Stanford Department of Biology . We also have a tool kit on how to apply deliberate cold exposure for health , for both females and for males , for sports , performance , cognitive performance , mood sleep , et cetera . You can find all that again .
