You return from a vacation spent gorging on biscuits and wondering what day of the month it is, toasting the new year with big plans: in 2024 you’ll start training. You will attempt a social life. You’ll never eat so many rich foods or wear the same pair of stretchy pants for such an awkward, uninterrupted period of time again.
Then, some In the weeks of January, reality kicks in: You wake up for a 5 a.m. run and it’s pitch black outside, the sidewalk is slick with ice. Saggy, sad-looking produce from the supermarket ruins your plan to eat more salads. You invite your friends over for drinks and find that no one, including you, is all that interested in leaving the house.
Welcome to the challenge of trying to reinvent your life in the dead of winter. It can be difficult enough to launch yourself into new goals at work, in your personal life, or in your finances any time of year, but few of us realize the added challenge of doing so when temperatures drop and sunlight is still scarce. .
This can hurt your self-esteem and your wallet. Many of us shell out extra cash in search of a new and improved version of ourselves: A 2018 survey by software maker Quicken found that more than half of decision makers spend money to stay on track, sometimes hundreds of dollars.
But if you’ve already abandoned your New Year’s resolutions, you may have discovered something: A growing chorus of influencers, authors and experts are calling for a restructuring of the way we think about the cold season. Winter is far from the time to try to become a new you, they say. Instead, it is the best time of year to rest and take it easy, especially with yourself.
They suggest a different way of thinking about winter, one that better reflects the natural world. Instead of goal setting and self-discipline, embrace rest and reflection. Skip those 5 a.m. workouts to get more sleep and have slower mornings. Go ahead and accept the fact that you won’t be leaving the house as often, and stock up on books, candles, and other cozy comforts.
“Plants and animals don’t fight winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and try to continue living the same lives they lived in the summer,” writes author Katherine May in her best-selling 2020 book, “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times” .” “They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get through.
“Winter is a time of retreating from the world, maximizing scarce resources, performing acts of brutal efficiency, and disappearing from sight; but that is precisely where the transformation takes place,” he continues. “Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
“Act like it’s summer”
Avoiding the urge to reinvent yourself could help make the winter months a lot less miserable, says yoga and breathing instructor Ally Mazerolle.
His video advising people to take it easy this season has had a huge buzz on TikTok, garnering over 1.2 million views.
In the video, she explains that one of her friends had just contacted her to tell her that despite a busy schedule, she couldn’t escape the winter blues.
“I asked him…do you act like it’s summer when it’s winter?” she says in the video, posted in early January. “I want to remind you that winter has just begun. Right now is the time to dream, to go within yourself, to rest and take it easy.”
Mazerolle told MarketWatch that he didn’t expect the video to hit so hard, but that it makes sense given the pressure many of us feel to start the new year strong.
“People are exhausted,” he said. “You get to January and the expectation is so high that it resets.”
That wasn’t the only popular post calling for a rethink of the winter season. Author Heidi Priebe expressed a similar idea on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, receiving about 73,000 likes.
What does it mean to act like it’s winter? For Mazerolle it means earlier bedtimes and quieter mornings. It means more nights spent reading or creating visual boards and skipping some high-intensity workouts for gentle movements like yoga, she said—”moving my body in a way that feels nourishing rather than punishing.”
“It doesn’t mean you have to hibernate and not go to work,” he added. “I think we just need a little more rest.”
“We look at winter as something to get through and we miss the essence of the season,” he said. “When we rest in the winter, we have much more energy for the rest of the year.”
“There is wisdom in slowing down”
Changing our habits during the winter is not a new concept.
For centuries, indigenous peoples in North America have mirrored the cycle of the seasons, said Sarah Sunshine Manning, an indigenous writer and communications director for the NDN Collective, an indigenous-led advocacy group based in South Dakota.
Before colonization, many tribal nations held ceremonies honoring the winter solstice or practiced other ways to honor the colder season, Manning said.
“There was always the intention to align the daily practice, aligning the ceremony with winter, a time when animals hibernate, when plant roots rest underground,” Manning said. “Our lifestyle reflected that.”
Colonization and assimilation efforts have separated some communities from those traditions, he added, although some continue to practice them today.
Manning, a citizen of the Shoshone-Paiute tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, continues her version of that custom by recognizing the winter solstice each December. She honors the shortest day of the year by slowing down, spending time with loved ones, and taking care of her home.
No two tribal nations are the same, but many indigenous religions have long shared the belief that humans are not an exception to nature’s rhythms, but a part of them, Manning said. That may not be the number of people operating today, but that doesn’t mean the idea is obsolete, she added.
“It wasn’t a primitive thing to follow the seasons. He was pragmatic and spiritually sophisticated,” she said.
“As human beings, we need rest,” Manning continued. “There is wisdom in slowing down.”
The psychological argument for slowing down
This approach may in fact have a biological basis, said Michael Varnum, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University who has studied the impact of the seasons on human behavior.
Perhaps one of the best-known side effects of winter is seasonal affective disorder, a type of depression related to seasonal changes. But many people find that their mood and energy levels decrease with temperature, Varnum said, not just those who meet the clinical criteria for SAD.
“A good portion of the population will experience a decline in mood: negative emotions, less energy,” Varnum said, adding that it’s likely linked to reduced exposure to sunlight.
The season shapes our behavior in other ways, he noted. Research shows that many people have a higher sex drive in the winter months, and they also tend to be more charitable, with a study showing that people tip more generously when it’s cold.
The risk of infectious diseases also increases at this time of year, and some research shows we are more avoidant around strangers and less willing to try new things.
It’s hard to say which of these phenomena are biological or cultural, Varnum said, but they make it clear that the changing seasons may have a greater impact on our behavior than we think.
“Even with all these ways we can buffer and isolate ourselves [from the weather], we still see these ebbs and flows,” he said. “These fundamental aspects of our behavior and the way we think seem to follow these seasonal patterns. Maybe we don’t take them as seriously as we should.”
The case of abandoning your resolutions
If you’re still beating yourself up about leaving your 2024 goals behind, it might help to know that very few New Year’s resolutions actually come true.
That’s because setting such lofty, long-term goals often leaves us facing a series of common missteps, said Ayelet Fishbach, a professor at the University of Chicago and author of “Get it Done: Surspiring Lessons from the Science of Motivation.”
For example, we are often too ambitious, he said. We don’t ask for help. We make a mistake once, skipping a workout or going over our budget, and we shame ourselves into oblivion, abandoning our ambitions altogether.
Most of the time, Fishbach said, we simply don’t take the time to think seriously about what it might take to change our habits (waking up early, rearranging our schedules, or recruiting loved ones to support us) and so we don’t set ourselves the goal. to success when the going gets tough.
“When you have a long trip ahead of you, you don’t get in the car,” Fishbach said. “You will be very tired; it will be difficult. You have to plan your stops. … You have to be empathetic to your future self.
And if you’ve already abandoned your New Year’s goal, rest assured: It was “probably the wrong one,” Fishbach said. It’s time to shift to a new way of thinking about that goal, he said, one that recognizes that there will be days when you don’t feel like you can perform at your best.
“I guess whatever [sustainable] change starts with loving yourself and wanting to be good to yourself,” he said.
From Mazerolle’s point of view, the trial could also be postponed until spring.
“It is efficient for trees to conserve their energy; for bears to hibernate. For you to push yourself at the beginning of the year is not smart,” she said. “It’s actually more efficient to rest.”