Nick Cave explains one activity that transformed his mental health
Nick Cave
Musician Nick Cave has explained the one activity that fills him with dopamine and 'shivering joy', transforming his mental health. Writing for his newsletter the Red Hand Files the Bad Seeds frontman explained the moment that opened him up to the power of cold-water swimming.
The singer-songwriter said he was overcome by the urge to jump into the sea during the winter shortly after the death of his son Arthur, and the transformation he felt means he has done it ever since.
He wrote: "I have heard it said, now and then, that some individuals wake up happy in the morning. Unfortunately, I can't count myself among them. So, forgive me if I come across as some Wim Hof-style wellness guru, but I have found something I can do to significantly improve this sorry state of affairs - wild swimming, or more accurately, cold-water swimming.
"Some years ago, the winter after Arthur died, I was walking along an empty beach in Brighton and had the sudden impulse to jump into the sea. I was shocked to find that, upon entering the freezing water, I experienced a sudden, violent, radical rearrangement of my relationship with almost everything. I discovered that it was simply impossible to grieve in icy water. This revelation began my love affair with cold-water swimming."
Cave said he now swims in lakes, rivers and seas whenever he can, calling it a 'catastrophic outrage to the nervous system and an excruciatingly intimate engagement with one’s mortality'.
"This encounter obliterates all anger and worldly woes." He said: "We are made happy!", and added: "Borne on the wings of God’s laughing angels, in the grip of some massive dopamine surge, we understand we are better now. This sense of delight, this shivering joy, will remain with us as we go about our day."
Earlier this year, Cave said “there can’t help but be feelings of culpability” over the deaths of his sons as it is “against nature” to bury a child. The Bad Seeds musician, 66, known for hits such as Into My Arms and One More Time With Feeling, lost two children in the space of seven years.
In 2015, his son Arthur, 15, died after taking LSD for the first time and falling from a cliff near his home in Brighton. In 2022 his son Jethro, 31, who had schizophrenia, died in Melbourne.
Asked if he feels culpable for the death of his sons, he told the Guardian: “I think it’s something that people who lose children feel regardless of the situation, simply because the one thing you’re supposed to do is not let your children die. Forget that. The one thing you’re supposed to do is protect your children.”
Addressing if he feels culpable because drugs were involved in Arthur’s death, he said: “There could be some element of that, yep. Look, these things are in our DNA, they’re inherited. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Arthur, who was just a young boy. It’s not like he was into drugs.
“On a fundamental level, it’s against nature to be burying your children. And there can’t help but be feelings of culpability.”
Cave and his family, including fashion designer wife Susie and Arthur’s twin brother, moved to Los Angeles soon after Arthur died because they were “triggered too much” by living just down the road from where it happened. The tragedy was widely reported and Cave said this resulted in him being “forced to grieve publicly”.
He added: “That was helpful, weirdly enough. It stopped me completely shutting the windows and bolting the doors and just living in this dark world.” Asked if his experience of bereavement helped after Jethro died, he said: “Yes. It really helped, because I knew I could get through. I’d been through it.”
He said does not “feel cursed” but added it would be wrong to talk publicly about Jethro because he did not meet him until he was seven and it would be disrespectful to his mother, who brought him up.