Cold exposure interferes with sleep (at least it does for me)

 Yeah, I took a break from cold exposure for about three days.  Here's the deal with cold exposure.  This is just a hypothesis.  This is what I think happened.  

Cold exposure has extremely powerful ant-inflammatory effects.  Through this mechanism, as well as through dopamine, it has a host of positive effects on the mind: boosted mood, greater resilience and endurance, better cognition.  A huge part as well is that the effects of a night of lack of sleep are almost unnoticed.  It's through this that it had a huge positive effect on my progress with vision therapy.  It really knocked the cobwebs off my brain.

However, there are drawbacks.  Your body needs inflammation for recovery.  So my body was getting sore from daily workouts over time.  But I think the reason my body was getting sore is that it wasn't recovering correctly due to lack of sleep.  Andrew Huberman has said cold exposure (cold plunges) should be avoided when you're about to go to sleep.  Fine.  I always do plunges in the morning anyway.  However, I think the reason the plunges interfered with sleep is through the anti-inflammatory mechanism.  I think your brain perhaps uses inflammation as a signal to sleep.  I noticed that when I took a three-day break from cold plunges that I had no trouble falling asleep.  Then I did another plunge yesterday during the day, and that night I had trouble sleeping again.  

Problem is that when doing cold plunges, you're less affected by lack of sleep, but the body does need to sleep in order to properly repair itself.  I think that may be where the soreness came in, because the red light exposure really enabled me to work out much harder and beat up my muscles more.  Then when I went to bed (read: not sleep), it wasn't fully repairing itself.  

So this requires some tweaking.  There are two things that come to mind.  Man, it's weird how powerful cold exposure is.  Even though I slept like shit, my mind seems to work really well at the moment, and I can type extremely fast.  What I'm going to try first is alternating days with cold exposure.  I'm going to take a break one day, and do cold exposure the next day in alteration.  And when I do cold exposure I'm only going to do two minutes at a time (not 3-5 minutes, which I think may have been way overkill).  I think maybe doing cold exposure every day every morning may have been overkill, and too much on the body.  

The other thing I might try is doing cold exposure earlier in the morning (like 8am), and see if that allows me to sleep better.