Taking Cold Showers for 100 Days: How an Impulsive Person Creates Her Own Center

I tend to live life quite spontaneously. My thoughts and interests often bounce from one thing to another, but over time I’ve been learning how to return to myself and maintain a sense of balance.

One way I do this is by repeating a single task for one hundred days.

For one hundred days, whether I feel like it or not, whether it rains or snows, I commit to doing that one thing. It sounds rather strict, but as a perfectionist who is never fully satisfied, I also set myself a rule to keep the challenge sustainable:

"If I complete this one task today, then I've already done enough."

As I like to say:

"Life is a perfect score if you get 70 out of 100." — Yewon

Over the years, I’ve tried many different one-hundred-day projects. Some were successful, while others ended halfway through.

I once committed to studying every night from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. and successfully completed it—even while traveling abroad, nodding off from exhaustion in hotel rooms. I also completed a one-hundred-day writing challenge.

On the other hand, I tried attending Taekwondo for one hundred days but quit after two months. The same thing happened with my goal of meditating for twenty minutes every day.

The hardest point always seems to arrive a little after the two-month mark.

Before Taekwondo classes, I sometimes came down with a fever. There were days when I accidentally fell asleep before meditating. Somehow, temptations always appeared in one form or another, making me want to quit.

Yet learning to simply do it anyway in those moments helped me develop endurance—the ability to manage myself, persevere, and ultimately reach my goals.

Most recently, I completed one hundred days of cold showers.

Unfortunately, I happened to start in the middle of winter.

Every morning, I would stand beneath the shower spraying icy water, stomping my feet, squeezing my eyes shut, and enduring the cold. At first, I intended to do it strictly every morning. But as time went on, I realized that on my days off, I sometimes wanted to enjoy a slower morning. So I relaxed the rules and allowed myself to do it at any time of day. On days when I felt a cold coming on, I adjusted the temperature from freezing cold to simply cool.

Somehow, I made it through all one hundred days.

(If you ask why I started in the first place, it's because I once happened to take a cold shower and noticed a dramatic improvement in my energy and mood. I felt more alert, more alive, and carried that momentum throughout the day.)

Perhaps it was a simple accomplishment, but I wanted to celebrate it wholeheartedly.

I bought myself flowers. I treated myself to delicious food. I wanted to acknowledge that I had done well.

Completing something consistently for one hundred days means that by the hundredth day, you've begun to genuinely want to do it.

I still write. I still study. And now, in early summer, taking a cold shower every day feels much easier than before.

These days, I approach it with more flexibility. Sometimes I skip a day. Sometimes I bend the rules. But overall, it has become more enjoyable.

After one hundred days of repetition, some habits disappear, while others remain and become part of who we are.

For me, the habits that survived have become personal preferences that enrich my life.

These one-hundred-day challenges help bring me back to reality whenever my thoughts scatter in a hundred different directions. They give me something solid to stand on.

Having experienced the benefits firsthand, I find these periods of training much easier than I once did.

For now, after completing my cold shower challenge, I’m taking some time to rest before choosing my next one-hundred-day project.

Though if I’m being honest, I think I already have a faint idea of what it might be. 😊