You come back from a vacation spent stuffing yourself with cookies and wondering what day of the month it is, and you ring in the new year with big plans: In 2024, you'll start working out. You will try to live a social life. You will never eat so many rich foods or wear the same stretchy pants for such an embarrassingly continuous period of time.
Then, a few more Weeks into January, reality sets in: You wake up at 5 a.m. to go for a run, it's dark outside, and the sidewalk is covered in ice. Sad-looking, droopy supermarket produce ruins your plan to eat more salads. You invite your friends over for drinks and find that no one, including you, is interested in leaving the house.
Welcome to the challenge of trying to reinvent your life in the dead of winter. It can be hard enough to launch ourselves toward new goals at work, in our personal lives, or in our finances at any time of the year — but few of us take on the added challenge of doing so as temperatures drop and sunlight becomes scarce.
This can hurt your self-esteem and your wallet. Many of us spend extra money in pursuit 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 ditched your New Year's resolutions, you might be on to something: There's a growing group of influencers, authors, and experts calling for a reframe of the way we think about the cold season. They say winter is just the right time to try to become a new person. Instead, it's the best time of year to relax and take it easy, especially on 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 meditation. Skip workouts at 5 a.m. for more sleep and a slower morning. Go ahead and accept that you won't be leaving the house much, and stock up on books, candles, and other cozy amenities accordingly.
“Plants and animals cannot withstand winter; They don't pretend it's not happening and try to continue living the same life they did in the summer,” author Katherine May wrote in her 2020 bestselling book, “Winter: The Power of Comfort and Retreat in Hard Times.” “They are coming. They adapt. They perform extraordinary transformational feats in order to get through.
“Winter is a time to withdraw from the world, maximize scarce resources, perform brutal acts of efficiency and disappear from view; But this is where the transformation happens. “Winter is not the death of the cycle of life, but its crucible.”
“Act like it's summer”
Avoiding the urge to reinvent yourself can help make the winter months a lot less miserable, said Allie Mazerolle, a yoga and breathing instructor.
Her video, suggesting people should take it easy this season, has gone viral on TikTok, with more than 1.2 million views.
In the video, she explained that one of her friends had just reached out to express that despite his busy schedule, he couldn't escape the winter blues.
“I asked him… Are you acting 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. Now is the time to dream, go inside, rest and take it slow.
Mazerolle told MarketWatch that she didn't expect the video to strike such a chord, but it makes sense given the pressure many of us feel to start the new year strong.
“People are exhausted,” she said. “We have arrived in January and expectations are very high to reset.”
And this wasn't the only popular post calling for a rethink of winter. Writer Heidi Priebe expressed a similar thought on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which received about 73,000 likes.
What does it mean to act as if winter has arrived? For Mazerolle, this means earlier bedtimes and quieter mornings. That means spending more nights reading or crafting vision boards, and skipping some high-intensity workouts in favor of gentle movement like yoga, she says — “moving my body in a way that feels nourishing rather than punishing.”
“This does not mean that you have to go into hibernation and not go to work,” she added. “I think we just need more rest.”
“We look at winter as something to get over, and we miss the essence of the season,” she said. “When we rest in the winter, we have more energy for the rest of the year.”
“There is wisdom in slowing down.”
Adjusting our habits during the winter is not a new concept.
For centuries, indigenous people in North America have reflected the cycle of the seasons, said Sarah Sunshine Manning, an indigenous writer and communications director for NDN, a Native-led advocacy group based in South Dakota.
Before colonization, many tribal nations held ceremonies to honor the winter solstice or practiced other ways of honoring the cold season, Manning said.
“There was always an intention to align your daily practices, align the celebrations with winter — the time when animals hibernate, when plant roots settle under the soil,” Manning said. “Our lives reflect that.”
She added that colonization and assimilation efforts isolated some communities from those traditions, although some of them still practice them today.
Manning, a citizen of the Shoshone Paiute tribes on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, continues her own version of this custom by recognizing the winter solstice every December. She honors the shortest day of the year by slowing down, spending time with her loved ones, and taking care of her home.
No two tribal nations are alike, Manning said, but many indigenous religions have long shared the belief that humans are not an exception to the rhythms of nature, but rather a part of them. She added that this may not be the number of people working today, but that does not mean the idea is outdated.
“It was not primitive to follow the classes. It was practical and spiritually sophisticated.”
“As humans, we need to rest,” Manning continued. “There is wisdom in slowing down.”
The psychological argument for slowdown
This approach may actually have a biological basis, said Michael Farnum, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University who has studied the effect of seasons on human behavior.
Perhaps one of the most well-known side effects of winter is seasonal affective disorder, a type of depression associated with changes in the season. But many people find that their moods and energy levels decline as the temperature drops, Farnum says, and not just those who meet clinical criteria for social anxiety disorder.
“A fair segment of the population will experience dips in mood: negative feelings, less energy,” Farnum said, adding that this is likely related to reduced exposure to sunlight.
He noted that the season shapes our behavior in other ways. Research shows that many people have a higher sex drive in the winter months, and they also tend to be more charitable, according to one study that showed people give more generous advice in cold weather.
The risk of infectious diseases also increases at this time of year, and some research shows that we are more avoidant of strangers and less willing to try new things.
It's difficult to determine which of these phenomena are biological or cultural, Farnum said, but it shows that the shift in seasons can have a greater impact on our behavior than we realize.
“Even with all these methods, we can isolate and isolate ourselves [from the weather]“We're still seeing that ebb and flow,” he said. “These fundamental aspects of our behavior and how we think seem to follow these seasonal patterns. Maybe we don't take them as seriously as we should.”
The state of abandoning your decisions
If you're still beating yourself up over letting your 2024 goals fall by the wayside, it might help to know that very few New Year's resolutions actually work.
That's because setting such high-risk, long-term goals often sets us up for a number of common mistakes, said Ayelet Fishbach, a professor at the University of Chicago and author of “Get it Done: Surprising Lessons from the University of Chicago.” The science of motivation.”
For example, we are often too ambitious, she said. We are not asking for help. We make a mistake once – by skipping a workout, or draining our budget – and we shame ourselves and forget about our ambitions completely.
We often don't take the time to seriously think about what it might take to change our habits — like waking up earlier, rearranging our schedules, or enlisting our loved ones to support us — and so we don't stop to think about it, says Fishbach. We set ourselves up for success when things get tough.
“When you have a long trip ahead of you, don't just get in the car,” Fischbach said. “You will be very tired; It will be difficult. You need to plan rest stops. …You have to be compassionate with your future self.
And if you've already abandoned your New Year's goal, rest assured: “It's probably the wrong goal,” Fischbach said. She said it's time to move to a new way of thinking about that goal, one that acknowledges that there will be days when you won't feel able to do your best.
“I think any [sustainable] “Change starts with loving yourself and wanting to be good to yourself,” she said.
From Mazerolle's point of view, it may be better to postpone the process again until the spring.
“It's effective for trees to conserve energy; For bears in hibernation. “Pushing yourself at the beginning of the year is not a smart thing to do,” she said. “It's actually more effective for rest.”
