Cold Temperature

Big feelings are inevitable—crashing out doesn’t have to be.

Photo by Mika Ruusunen on Unsplash

The Opponent: When Emotions Take the Wheel

Your kid is completely losing it—crying, yelling, saying things they don’t mean—and every instinct you have to reason with them is making it worse.

Welcome to what kids are now calling “crashing out.”

If you interact with kids regularly, chances are you’ve recently heard the expression “crashed out.” Like all viral phrases amongst tweens and teens, crashed out seems to have entered the youth lexicon with the speed of a meteor— suddenly embedded in the shared language of everyone between about 8 and 26.

As resident dinosaurs in this ecosystem, we were slow on the uptake. Crashed out? Were you cycling? Did you get hurt??

A tween finally deigned to explain that “crashed out” means having an emotional meltdown—getting so upset that behavior gets impulsive, messy, and—in hindsight—not super helpful. And after many conversations with students and patients in recent weeks finally started making sense (ooooh, it’s not that they were literally injured by a friend, they just felt really upset), we felt some admiration. Because what the youth did here is something clinical language has never quite managed: they renamed emotional dysregulation in a way that sounds like an actual human might say it (emotional dysregulation does not exactly roll off the tongue after all.)

No matter what we call it though, kids and adults alike know that moments of crashing out are no fun. We all have our own flavors of meltdown town—tears, screaming, shutting down, snapping at someone we love, name calling, hyperventilating, and posting things on Snapchat that later feel… less inspired—but in almost all cases, big emotions are the driver behind these ineffective behaviors.

And yet here is the important part we don’t want to lose—big, uncomfortable messy feelings are not inherently “bad.” The experience of strong emotions—even when they are painful to feel—is a crucial part of being human and a requirement for living a rich, full life (also: would you want to delete joy, delight, or hilarity? Big emotions run both ends of the spectrum.)

So, the issue is not emotion itself. The issue is when emotions grab the steering wheel, when they hook us. In other words, when our feelings start pushing, pulling, and steering our behavior in ways that don’t match our goals or the person we want to be.

Put more simply: emotion + body activation + impulse + no pause button = saying or doing things we regret and that make a hard moment worse.

TLDR: Big emotions are not the enemy. The problem is when emotions “hook” us and pull behavior off the rails.

The X’s and O’s: What’s Happening in the Body

When we “crash out,” our nervous systems are often in a sympathetic threat response (fight/flight/freeze). This looks like:

• heart rate spikes

• breathing gets shallow

• muscles tense

• attention narrows

• thinking brain (prefrontal cortex) goes partially offline

We’ve all been there, and we can all vouch: logic, consequences, and problem solving don’t land when emotions are a 10 out of 10. Here’s where things get interesting though—we don’t actually need kids to “think better” in the heat of emotional dysregulation (ahem, crashing out). We need something much more simple first: for their bodies to settle down a few notches. And one of the fastest known ways to do that is not deep insight, reasoning, reflection, or a well intended adult yammering at them.

It’s cold.

Cold temperature is one of the most reliably rapid down-regulators of the nervous system. When the face—especially around the eyes and cheeks—or other sensitive areas (wrists, inner elbows, back of the neck) are exposed to cold, the body activates something called the Mammalian Dive Reflex: heart rate slows, blood flow shifts toward core organs, and physiological arousal decreases.

This is an ancient survival mechanism—basically: “If I am underwater and cold, I should conserve energy and stabilize.” But what does this have to do with crashing out, you may ask? It just so happens that cold exposure comes with a very useful emotional side effect. By rapidly downshifting the nervous system, our emotional intensity is typically reduced as well, allowing the brain to come back online. So when the goal is to help kids (and honestly, adults too) build a gap between feeling and reacting, cold temperature is one of the quickest tools in our toolkit.

TLDR: When kids are really upset, their body shifts into threat mode. Thinking brain goes offline. Body drives behavior. But exposure to cold can help slow things down.

The Play: Cold Temperature

To run this play, we intentionally use controlled cold exposure to bring a revved up body down from a 9/10 to something more workable, closer to a 6 or 7. So how do we do it? The two essential ingredients are:

1. Something very cold

2. Applied to a sensitive part of the body, for example:

• Face

• Inside of the wrists, elbows, or knees

• Back of the neck

• Or—in the case of one particularly hardy teenage boy we knew—the bottoms of one’s bare feet. Try it, we dare you.

After that, there are unlimited ways to run this play depending on personal preference.

The “classic” method (often called ice diving in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy-informed work) involves dunking your face in cold water for ~10–30 seconds. It works incredibly fast and looks great on TikTok¹, but is not always logistically convenient. Fortunately, there are plenty of more portable options:

• Stand outside in the cold for 1–2 minutes
  (a favorite in one of your authors’ homes for parents and kids alike)

• Wet a washcloth, freeze it, and press it to face/cheeks

• Freeze oranges or clementines and roll them over face and cheekbones
  → a sensory three-fer: cold + pressure + scent

• Keep a poppable ice pack in the glove compartment of the car or a kid’s backpack and apply to body

• Freeze a water bottle and place it against your wrists (we often pitch this as a great stealth coping skill for class or a meeting—there’s nothing unusual about having a cold water bottle near you!)

• Hold ice cubes in your hands or wrapped in cloth and watch them melt

• Wet a washcloth, tie it into a knot, freeze it, and then attempt to untie it

Play around and figure out what you like. One key principle though: do not try this for the first time when you are a 10/10 upset. That would be like trying to perform a complicated piano piece for the first time at the recital with no practice. You don’t want “learning the skill” and “being in crisis” happening at the same time. Practice it when calm so your body recognizes it later.

When teaching this skill to the kids in your life, make sure to emphasize:

1. The goal is not “feel nothing”

We are not trying to erase emotion. We are trying to move from “emotion is driving the car” to “emotion is in the passenger seat.”

6 or 7 out of 10 emotional intensity can still feel uncomfortable, but it’s a range where we have far more choice. That’s when other skills—breathing, perspective-taking, problem solving—become accessible again.

2. Frozen washcloths do not fix fights

Important and surprising news: frozen objects do not magically resolve interpersonal conflict. This is not a delete button for emotions. It is a pause button to slow your behavior down so you don’t make a bad situation worse. You still have to come back and deal with whatever set things off in the first place, just from a more regulated place.

In other words, cold temperature is not the final move. It’s the reset before the next move. But as your Playbook authors often reflect around 5 pm—sometimes all you need to take the edge off is a cold one.

TLDR: Cold exposure can help rapidly downshift the nervous system so kids regain access to thinking and problem solving.

¹ A cultural note (because reality is funny):

A few years ago, tweens would look scandalized to hear a therapist suggest putting ice on their face. Today, 3 in 4 will say: “Oh yeah I saw that on TikTok—it’s good for your pores.”

We cannot comment on skincare claims. But we can confirm that young people are now significantly more open to cold-based nervous system regulation.

Thanks influencers?