Your Chinese Medicine Winter Wellness Guide (and Why We Say No to Ice Baths!)
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
There’s a particular kind of tiredness that arrives with winter — not the kind that a good night’s sleep fixes, but something deeper. A quiet pull inward. According to the principles of Chinese medicine, that feeling isn’t a problem to solve. It’s an invitation.
Winter is a season of storage. Of root. Of going beneath the surface.
And when we work with that rather than against it, something shifts — not just in how we feel physically, but in how resourced we feel come Spring.
Hi I'm Dr Karina Smith (TCM). If we have not met already, I'm a Melbourne based Acupuncturist and I am passionate about helping people take care of their health and wellness, by connecting to the call of each season, and making the adjustments needed for optimal health.
Here are some of Chinese Medicine's most important ways to care for yourself this Winter.
Eat Warm, Nourishing Foods
This sounds simple, and it is — but it’s also one of the most consistently underrated things you can do for your health in Winter.
From a Chinese medicine perspective, the body expends significant energy maintaining its internal warmth when temperatures drop. Cold and raw foods require your digestive system to work harder to generate the heat needed to process them, drawing on reserves that are already being called upon just to keep you warm and functioning.
This is especially important for people with weak digestive systems that experience regulate bloating, loose stools, sleepiness after eating, sluggish digestion and reflux. (It's important to note that eating cold foods and drinks will eventually weaken the digestive tract).
Soups, stews, slow-cooked grains, roasted vegetables, warming spices like ginger, cinnamon and cardamom — these aren’t just comforting, they’re genuinely supportive. They meet your body where it is rather than asking it to work against the season.
I'm really passionate about helping people make positive changes in their diet and lifestyle, in ways that don't feel overwhelming or too hard to implement.
One of the easiest ways to have ready made warm meals in the home, is to make a big pot of soup on the weekends. You’ve then got something ready to heat up and eat all through the week, making is super easy and quick to feel nourished at the end of your day, without having to cook a meal from scratch.
I'm also a huge fan of the slow cooker. Put all the yummy things you want in your stew into the slow cooker in the morning, set it, and come home to a house filled with delicious smells, with dinner ready to serve up.
If you don’t already have one, a slow cooker is genuinely one of the best investments you can make for your winter wellness. You put all your ingredients in before you leave in the morning, and by the end of the day you come home to a hot, rich, nourishing meal that’s been cooking itself. This one is a great option and easy to order online.
Think of it less as a diet choice and more as a form of respect for what winter is actually asking of you.
Limit Your Cold Exposure in Winter
When it comes to Cold plunging, and especially ice bath submersion practices, Chinese Medicine is a Hard No. This is extreme cold!
We talk at length about cold foods and drinks being consumed and the impact on the body, (which I will get into shortly). Submerging the whole body into icy water is on a whole other level!
Cold plunging and cold water therapy have had a significant cultural moment, and the way they’re talked about makes them sound like a straightforward health upgrade. But there’s important nuance that rarely makes it into the conversation.
Here’s what’s actually happening in the body when you drink cold water or eat cold foods.
Your body has an internal thermostat; a core warmth that everything depends on to function well. When cold enters the body, your inner furnace has to fire up to compensate. In Chinese medicine we call this inner furnace your kidney yang energy; the deep warming force that keeps your digestive system running, your organs processing, and this is needed for every single transformative function in your body.
When people have kidney yang depletion, they start to experience symptoms such as: feeling cold to the bone, extreme fatigue, lowered libido, poor digestive strength, lack of inspiration and mojo, just to name a few.
Every time the body is exposed to cold, whether externally or internally, kidney yang has to work harder just to maintain baseline. That expenditure has a cost!
Cold also cools the intestines, which can compromise your body’s ability to extract nutrients and enzymes from food. If your digestion is already sensitive, or if you’re running on low reserves, cold foods and drinks are quietly making that harder.
You might notice that if you are a person who has a smoothie for breakfast, loaded up with frozen berries, ice, cold milk, banana, raw greens and fruit, your next bowel movement might be very loose! That is the impact of cold in the digestive tract.
This isn’t about being rigid. A bowl of gelato with friends after dinner is one of life’s genuine pleasures, enjoy it. It’s the habitual, daily relationship with cold that’s worth examining.
Why Ice Bathing is a NO
Cold plunging operates on the same principle, just more dramatically. When you get into an ice bath, your body doesn’t know you’ve chosen this and it responds dramatically because you could die of hypothermia!
In response to this, the body under extreme duress, responds as if your life is at risk. It digs deep, mobilises enormous amounts of energy, floods your system with adrenaline, and works hard to push the cold away and keep you alive.
That’s why people emerge from a cold plunge with bright red skin feeling intensely alert. That’s adrenaline. That’s your system in emergency mode.
The immune markers that show up elevated in research after cold exposure are often cited as evidence that cold plunging boosts immunity. But elevated cytokines and immune factors aren’t a sign that the immune system is getting stronger — they’re a sign that it’s fighting hard to protect you from something it perceives as dangerous!
As my Acupuncture teacher Ann Cecil Sterman often says "If ice bathing is so fantastic at strengthening the immune system, would you put a newborn baby or an elderly person in an ice bath?" No, because they might die!
Karina was recently featured on an episode of the Imperfects Podcast, as the practitioner who was treating comedian Troy Kinne, and together they noticed his health go into absolute decline after a period of ice bathing. Karina was able to feel this in his pulses, and in his returning symptoms, and he was told that he could not ice bath again if he wanted to keep his good health.
What’s worth noting is that the invigorated feeling people love from cold plunging, (or even from regularly drinking ice cold water) is an adrenaline rush. And adrenaline rushes can become addictive. People who swim in cold water every day often describe it as something they crave. That craving is worth paying attention to, because what feels energising in the moment is drawing on deep stored reserves.
Some people are more robust than others, and some bodies will tolerate this better than most. There is emerging research suggesting cold exposure may affect women’s bodies differently to men’s.
From a Chinese medicine perspective, my view is that regularly submerging in cold water or ice baths isn’t particularly supportive for anyone — but it’s especially worth considering if you’re already fatigued, hormonally sensitive, or navigating a season like Winter where the body is already asking for conservation.
As a regular practice, you are repeatedly drawing on a reservoir of deep stored energy — energy that in Chinese medicine is understood to be finite, meant to be measured out slowly over a lifetime, held in reserve for genuine emergencies. Making daily withdrawals from that account has long-term consequences that won’t always be immediately visible. Winter, above all seasons, is the time to protect that resource rather than deplete it.
Your Chinese Medicine Winter Wellness Guide
We live in a culture that treats rest as something you earn, or squeeze in at the edges. We also live in a culture that expects us to produce the same amount of work, and mantain the same level of effort all year round, as if the seasons mean nothing. The prioritisation of work and commerce, over our relationship with the natural world and her cycles, is very evident, and it makes it very difficult to appreciate the need to slow down in Winter, and do less.
Winter invites a different relationship; where slowing down is not laziness, but wisdom.
In Chinese medicine, Winter is the time to fill the restock the pantry. The practices that matter most right now aren’t the ones that push, expand or perform. They’re the ones that restore.
Earlier nights. Restorative movement. Quiet. Stillness. Time spent inward rather than outward.
This doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means choosing activities that give back rather than draw down. Yin yoga, gentle walks, long baths, nourishing meals shared slowly. These are winter medicine in the truest sense.
What you build in winter becomes the resource you draw on in Spring. The season is worth taking seriously.
Winter's Deeper Invitation For You
If there's one thing to take from this, let it be this: Winter isn't asking you to do more. It's asking you to do less, but with more care. Warm food instead of cold. Rest instead of push. Presence instead of performance.
So this season, let yourself slow down without guilt.
Make the soup.
Skip the ice bath.
Go to bed a little earlier than you think you should.
Your body is listening, and it remembers how to restore itself — if you give it the chance.
Wishing you a warm, nourishing winter.
Stay warm,
Sending Big love,
Karina X
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Karina regularly sees patients at her Altona and Newport clinic spaces in Melbourne.
She also shares her Chinese Medicine knowledge regulalry across her various social platforms:
Instagram: @drkarinasmith
Website: www.drkarinasmith.com
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