Why Wild Swimming in Scotland Is Necessary, Not Brave

Is it brave to get into a loch or the North Sea during autumn, or is it just the most sensible thing I do all week?

People use the word brave a lot when they hear I swim through the winter. It is meant kindly, and it misses the point. Bravery implies you are overriding good sense to do something frightening and admirable. What I am doing is far less heroic and far more practical. I am pressing a reset button I cannot press any other way, and it is not brave at all. It is necessary.

Let me describe the moment. You stand on the shingle, the wind doing its worst, and every rational part of your brain lodges a formal complaint. Then you walk in. The cold does not ease you in gently. It arrives all at once, an enormous, total, undeniable fact, and in that instant there is no room left in your head for anything else. Not the deadline. Not the invoice. Not the sentence you could not get right yesterday. The cold evicts all of it. There is only the water and your own startled breathing.

Why I swim wild

That is the point of it. I work with words for a living, and words are wonderful, but they are also a kind of endless indoor weather in the mind. The chatter does not stop. There is always another draft to worry at, another email half-composed behind your eyes. The great gift of very cold water is that it is louder than the chatter. It does not negotiate with your thoughts. It switches them off, and for a few blessed minutes you are returned to being an animal in a body in the sea, which turns out to be an enormously restful thing to be.

There is something to let go of, and the water insists you do it. On land I can hold a problem for days, turning it over, convinced that if I grip it hard enough the answer will come. The firth in January will not permit that clenching. The cold demands your whole attention, and to give it, you have to release your grip on everything else. You cannot brace and let go at the same time. So you let go. And the strange thing is that the problem I was gripping so tightly is often waiting on the shingle afterwards, looking much smaller and rather more solvable than it did an hour before.

I will not pretend it is always comfortable. The whole ritual is bracketed by faff, the cold hands that will not work the zip, the flask of tea that never quite gets drunk in time, the peculiar full-body glow that follows and lasts for hours. But the discomfort is not a bug to be endured on the way to the benefit. The discomfort is the mechanism. You cannot think your way into that kind of stillness. You have to shock yourself into it, and the sea is very obliging.

A ritual for the mind

Anyone who works with their mind, and especially anyone whose work never quite switches off, needs a ritual like this. Not necessarily the sea, though I recommend it. Something physical and slightly beyond your comfort, something louder than your thoughts that returns you to your body. A ritual with an edge to it, that makes the letting go non-negotiable rather than a nice idea you never get round to.

So no, I do not think I am brave. I have simply found the most reliable way I know to put down the thing I have been carrying, if only for ten minutes in a very cold sea. The bravery, if there is any, is in the small, unglamorous act of choosing to do it again next week when every sensible instinct says stay in bed.

Find your own escape

If your own head is too full and too loud, and words have started to feel like weather you cannot escape, find your version of the January firth. It does not have to be grand. It just has to be louder than your thoughts, and a little more than you would choose. Then walk in.