Why Solāis Does Not Offer Cold Therapy

Cold therapy has been everywhere for the last few years.
Ice baths. Cold plunges. Cryo chambers.
Often framed as the gold standard for resilience, discipline, and “mental toughness”.

When I was shaping Solāis, I made a deliberate decision not to include it.

Not because it has no value.
But because, for most women, in the bodies and lives we are actually living, it is rarely what the nervous system is asking for.

That decision didn’t come from trends.
It came from physiology, neuroscience, and something much older: Eastern medicine.

Cold is contraction

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the body is understood as a dynamic system, constantly adjusting to its internal and external environment. Cold is described as a contracting force.

It tightens tissue.
Slows circulation.
Constricts vessels.
Reduces the movement of Qi and Blood.

This is not inherently bad.
But in classical practice, cold is used with precision, and only for very specific excess-heat conditions.

What shows up far more often in modern women is the opposite pattern: deficiency, stagnation, depletion, and chronic nervous system overload.

In that context, cold does not restore balance.
It deepens the contraction.

Classical texts are clear on this: repeated cold weakens the Kidney system, the energetic foundation of hormonal balance, fertility, emotional stability, and long-term vitality.

You do not build that system by shocking it.
You nourish it by warming it.

Heat is movement

From a Western neuroscience lens, the picture lines up almost perfectly. Most women today are living in a state of chronic sympathetic activation: always alert, always managing, always responding.

This state is associated with elevated cortisol, blood sugar instability, sleep disruption, gut dysfunction, and immune suppression.

Cold immersion triggers a powerful fight-or-flight response: spikes in norepinephrine, sharp rises in heart rate and blood pressure, and a surge of stress chemistry.

That response is not “wrong”.
But it is still stress.

For an already overloaded system, adding more stress does not create regulation.
It simply asks the body to adapt again, at a cost.

Heat, by contrast, speaks to the body through an entirely different pathway.

Infrared heat increases circulation and oxygen delivery, supports lymphatic flow, relaxes connective tissue and fascia, activates parasympathetic tone, and supports cellular repair.

In TCM language, heat moves Qi, nourishes Blood, softens stagnation, strengthens the Kidney and Spleen systems, and restores internal balance.

This is why heat has been used across cultures for thousands of years.
Not as punishment.
Not as a test of will.
But as medicine.

There is also something quieter here that modern wellness rarely names: the female body is profoundly temperature-sensitive.

In classical medicine, the uterus is described as requiring warmth and rich blood supply to function smoothly. Cold in the lower abdomen is associated with painful or clotting periods, irregular cycles, fertility challenges, and chronic pelvic tension.

Modern physiology echoes this. Uterine blood flow is sensitive to temperature and vascular tone.

Cold constricts.
Heat nourishes.

Once you see that, it becomes hard to ignore.

Then there is fascia: the connective tissue network that wraps everything in the body, now recognised as one of the most important regulators of pain, posture, movement, and nervous system tone.

Cold causes fascia to stiffen and contract.
Heat causes it to soften, hydrate, and glide.

Women carry a higher proportion of fascial tissue and are often more sensitive to fascial restriction because of how oestrogen interacts with collagen.

So when an already stressed system is exposed to intense cold, the body often tightens further.

Not releases.
Not settles.
Braces.

Infrared heat does something different. It penetrates into connective tissue, softens fascia, improves tissue hydration, and reduces the mechanical signals of threat the body is constantly reading.

Much of what people experience as “stress” is actually this background fascial bracing.
Heat speaks to it directly.

Safety is the point

From a nervous-system perspective, the body is not interested in motivation.
It is interested in safety.

Cold shock activates survival circuitry. Warmth sends a biological message of shelter, protection, and rest. From a polyvagal lens, warmth is one of the strongest non-verbal cues of safety the body recognises.

When the body feels warm, it interprets the environment as safe enough to repair.
When it feels cold and shocked, it prioritises survival.

Healing happens in the first state, not the second.

There is also a wider cultural contrast running through all of this.

Cold therapy is often framed through a performance model: discipline, grit, dominance over discomfort. Eastern medicine frames healing through regulation and harmony: how smoothly systems communicate, adapt, and return to balance.

Western wellness culture tends to confuse intensity with effectiveness.
Eastern medicine has always measured healing by how gently the body can come back into coherence.

This is why Solāis centres heat as its primary therapeutic input. Not because cold is wrong, but because warmth is what most women are missing.

Many women arrive not because they need more stimulation, but because their system is already overstimulated. What they are actually seeking, often without the words for it, is a place where the body can finally exhale.

Solāis was built around one simple idea:

The nervous system does not heal under pressure.
It heals when it feels safe.