From cold plunges to cliff dives: How obsessed are we with adrenaline? | Canada Voices

Picture this: It’s an early winter morning. Snowflakes circle overhead as you stand on the edge of a frozen lake in Ontario’s Kawartha region, just north of Toronto. You’re outfitted in nothing but a swimsuit, a toque and a pair of mittens. With a deep breath in through your nose, you take a step forward and plunge yourself into the icy water.

Welcome to Cold Camp. A self-described “ultimate cold-plunge experience” located on the shores of Ontario’s Maple Lake, Cold Camp offers visitors weekend-long, wellness-focused retreats that culminate in a sauna and cold plunge activity designed to “awaken the body, enhance circulation and support natural energy.”

It’s a little more intense than your typical yoga retreat – and part of a growing trend. Increasingly, people are opting for adrenaline-spiking travel, trading relaxing spa days and beach retreats for bungee jumping and frigid cold-plunge experiences.

Adventure travel is one of the fastest-growing segments in travel, according to 2025 research from Backroads, which also projects the sector will surpass $2-trillion by 2032. And Canadians are leading the charge. Adventure company Adventure Canada, which hosts high-octane experiences across the world, reported a surge in domestic bookings in 2025.

For Dr. Zindel Segal, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough who specializes in meditation and sensory procedures that help with depression, the urge to seek out thrills makes sense. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, people have been looking to push back against isolation and the restraints of quarantine, sometimes in dramatic ways. What’s more, many of these activities connect with emerging wellness trends.

“There are clear physiological benefits to things like cold plunges, saunas and going back and forth [between hot and cold]. In societies that have been doing this, there are lower rates of inflammation and a good impact on heart rate variability,” Segal notes.

Now, “people see the health benefits of doing certain activities which would have seemed extreme five or six years ago, so they’re combining travel with an opportunity to do these things in more authentic environments,” he says.

Of course, not every adventure is a search for ultimate health and wellness. For many bungee jumpers and cave divers, the draw is the specific sensory experiences they elicit.

“[These activities] take you deep inside your body,” Segal says. “Because what you’re doing is generating bodily sensations that you’ve probably never experienced before, you’re becoming fused with your body for 50 or 30 seconds in a way that’s very unusual. Your attention is narrowly focused on the experience. That’s an unusual experience for people who work a desk job or people who are feeling like they’re in a routine.”

For those who want to spike their adrenaline without hopping into a frozen lake, a variety of thrilling adventures are available right in our own backyards. Travellers who want to feel the rush of the wind whipping through their hair as they speed along secluded trails can do so in Whitehorse thanks to Muktuk Adventures, which run dog sledding tours in the winter, summer and fall.

In Revelstoke, B.C., which is considered the heli-skiing capital of the world, visitors to Eleven Revelstoke Lodge can take a helicopter to remote mountain peaks for a chance to ski on truly untouched powder. For warm weather adrenaline junkies, Great Canadian Bungee offers traditional thrills in our nation’s capital, with bungee jumping and zip line experiences just outside Ottawa, Ont.

A wild vacation doesn’t have to mean extreme sports. For travellers hoping to tap into their love for the spooky, Hamilton, Ont.’s Ghost Walks introduce visitors to the city’s darker and more supernatural history. Scenic Caves Nature Adventures’ Caves & Caverns Trail, located in Collingwood, Ont., lets the view be the thrill.

There may be another reason why this type of travel is taking off. While Segal can’t say for certain how the current political and social climate directly impacts people’s draw to adrenaline-pumping activities, it’s not hard to imagine that people would seek experiences that ground them and take their minds off the current news cycle, if only for an hour or two.

This type of travel allows “people [to] get back to something very concrete, very real, very sensory-oriented. For that period of time, they know exactly where they are — they’re either hurtling through space, or they’re clenching their teeth trying to sit for another 30 seconds in an ice bath,” Segal says.

“Those things can feel very real and you don’t have to deal with, at that moment, who’s right, who’s wrong and which direction are you being pulled in.”