Ever heard the expression "take a cold shower..". I thought about it, and can appreciate why it would work. Did anyone ever try a cold shower? It's probably very uncomfortable, i want to find out if it works before I put myself through that.

For some people it makes it worse.... :-[

Gevura ShebYesod wrote on 28 Nov 2011 04:51:

Even cold?!
In the Memoirs of the Lubavitcher Rebbe he relates that the father of Baal HaTanya (I believe) rolled himself in snow as a teenager in the middle of the night to control the urge.

obormottel wrote on 28 Nov 2011 05:25:


Yeah, but taking a cold shower and then drying off with a nice fluffy towel and then putting on cozy pajamas and getting into your down blanket (and don't forget the Ben n Jerries ) is not exactly what the Baal Hatanya's father was doing...

forget the fluffy towels....With me the cold water has the opposite effect of what "cold shower' seems to mean for most people  :-[ . But then again, i'm not "most people"  :o :

kidushashem wrote on 28 Nov 2011 14:47:

well, of course, Ben and Jerries is not cholov yisroel, but otherwise...

obormottel wrote on 28 Nov 2011 17:33:


that's why you need to make Aliyah, we've got it Chalav Yisrael in Israel!

BTW, getting back to the question at hand, I think that taking a cold shower can be helpful if you find lustful thoughts creeping in and you want to get rid of them. Boy, that cold water does it faster than anything. But if you're not thinking anything bad, why torture yourself?

It seems to me that a cold shower is an act of desperation, too little, too late.

Better to intercept the taiva at the earliest alarm.  As soon as a lustful thought starts hovering and looking for a landing strip in my brain, I start davening, asking Hashem to take my lust.

And committed shmiras eynayim also goes a long way to preventing the heat.

Though much experience I can tell you that a cold shower works 100% !!!

But........you must make sure never to come out!

going back off the subject, it was'nt the baal hatanya's father, but another bochur who's story is described in detail in the rebbe's memoires, and ended up helping the besht with the spreading of chassidus. the reason for the mistake probably was that they both had the same name, boruch. or maybe it was just both of them. (which would strengthen the notion that it is a good idea, as it was tried and proven already 275 years ago.)

In my opinion a cold shower does work but if i had an urge the last place i would go is the shower

a HOT Mesilas Yesharim session works MUCH better for me. five minutes. try it- you'll love it!

A cold shower works as well for addicts as swallowing a garlic clove works for keeping away vampires.
Both are figments of the imagination.

Moshe"ME" wrote on 07 Dec 2011 19:05:


That was beautiful, Mo!

I stayed sober while I was in Yeshivah in EY. I have come to see that it was not "leaving yeshivah" that screwed me up so badly afterward...(though my guilt told me that a hundred times - which just led me to masturbate myself even more!)...

Rather, it was having to date real girls; get married to an actual human being; having to actually get a real job and deal with real people; having to face the fact that I was not going to be one of the people that klal yisroel will call one of "the gedolim" but just be another guy on the bus; and just having to GROW UP. Those things made me uncomfortable. Because I am an addict, they apparently made it necessary for me to rediscover my imagination and my penis and all the nifty things I can do with them.

The Dubner Maggid was 100% right when he 'gave it' to the GR"A, zy"a. It's easy to stay kosher in the head when you are in a cloistered bubble where everybody behaves perfectly and you do not have real life (marriage, family, job, shul politics, neighbors, mowing the lawn, and peoples' wills to deal with. Real people have real wills of their own. That's always trouble - especially for an addict. It's not an aveiro - it is a desperate and necessary escape. And it is so tragic because it does not work. Instead, it makes everything worse and worse. And thank G-d for that. For, the only reason I ever had to stop was because it did not work and made everything worse! Heaven knows I tried to stop in order to be a good Jew...even to be a tzaddik ...for the sforim I saw said I could be greater than others (you know, the encouraging sforim that say that those with this sexual netiyah have a closer chance to become tzaddikim davka, so the YH fights them stronger?)! Well, all that did to me was poison me. It made me more grandiose - and all the more guilty when I failed to live up to my great ma'amod.

"Tov v'yoshor Hashem, al kein yoreh ("slam down" as in yaroh y'yareh) chato'im baderech" - He forces us to eventually get better, by the sheer misery that naturally occurs as a result of our best efforts to 'make it'! Tatty is sooo Good!