How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days

Those who appreciate winter generally orient toward the season's wonders: coziness and gathering around a fire, crisp air and starry skies, slowed-down rituals and chance for rest. For people with this mindset, winter is not a limiting time of year to dread but a time full of opportunity to anticipate. In Norway, I learned that we are not condemned to waste the winter months, throwing away the season, wishing for spring. We can change our mindsets and, as a result, change our experience of winter--and of our lives.

Our mindsets shape our attention: by influencing what we believe winter fundamentally is--dreadful or delightful, boring or fascination--and what we expect winter to be like, our mindsets subconsciously orient us to one version of reality or another.

One study found that viewing leisure as "wasteful" and "unproductive" undermines enjoyment of relaxing or fun activities, even as leisure itself has been shown to lower blood pressure, reduce risk of depression, and strengthen social relationships. Worse still, viewing this downtime as wasteful is associated with lower happiness, greater depression, and more stress and anxiety. This effect was strongest for leisure activities that are not in service of other goals (like exercising or meditation), but whose sole purpose is enjoyment (like relaxing, watching TV, or pursuing hobbies).

Winter sunset can be a particularly good time for a small daily ritual: making a sunset tea tray, with a hot drink and a little treat, pairs something often seen as negative (the early darkness) with something delightful to reclaim sunset as a time for pleasure.

In locations rainy and windy, snowy and icy, I noticed three general strategies for embracing the season. The first is to Appreciate Winter: look at winter for what it is, and let it be a time for slowing down. Adapt to the season, using your words and attention to lift up winters pleasures. The second is to Make It Special: lean into the activities and feelings that are unique to this time of year. Revel in coziness, enjoy delights made possible by winter's darkness, and create and savor rituals that imbue the season with meaning. The third is to Get Outside: layer up and enjoy the outdoors in all weather, experiment with winter bathing, and take advantage of the ways your town or city celebrates the season. Together, these three broad approaches help us find opportunities in winter, transforming it from a season of limitation to one full of possibility for meaning, connection, and fun.

If a mindset doesn't help you, reduce your suffering, of bring you closer to who you'd like to be, it's not worth adopting. When we look beyond winter for what other mindsets we might improve, it's perfectly reasonable to focus on the most appealing mindsets.

Getting outside in winter is essential. The belief that we can't enjoy ourselves outdoors is largely responsible for the idea that winter is limiting; this perspective makes the world feel out of reach. But this view is erroneous and self-fulfilling. If we remain cooped up, we will feel winter's limitations, and our mood will drop, no matter how hygge we make it inside.

Research shows that awe helps us feel more life satisfaction, more connected to humanity and the world, and less bogged down and annoyed by day-to-day concerns. Awe is associated with reduced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (in both military veterans and young people from underserved communities), feeling happier on a moment-by-moment basis, and reduced daily distress. Experiencing awe might even make you nicer: the emotion is associated with greater generosity and prosociality (in lab experiments, this included helping people more, cooperating more, sharing more, and sacrificing more for others), less narcissism, and decreased aggression.

How we attend to things shapes our existence. Our attention is a powerful tool, and it plays a tremendous role in our everyday experience. What we attend to becomes what we see, and what we see becomes what we engage with, and what we engage with becomes our life.

It is easy to mistake the fallowness of winter for wasted time and space. But this view obscures the necessity of winter for sustaining the whole cycle, dismissing how crucial dormant times are for the growth and beauty that comes later. It ignores the critical work being done under the surface. It pretends that we can all go nonstop, all the time, working and living and loving at full capacity, unceasingly. But we can't, and there is much to be gained by not trying, and by gifting ourselves a season to restore.

We suffer from living in a culture that is out of sync with yearly rhythms of light and dark. We turn our ire toward winter, blaming the season for making us feel this way, rather than pointing fingers at a civilization organized with no regard for the changing light, a jobs without flexibility, at norms that mean we’re raising children without the support needed to make it less relentless.

Resigning ourselves to trudging through the season costs us. At best, we're missing the joys and delights of a special time, one unique in its opportunities for contemplation, connection, and delight. At worst, though, we're sleepwalking through a third of the year or more--meaning we're opting out of fully embracing months of our lives. Whether we're aware of them or not, our mindsets impact our experience of winter.

But when we expect winter wonder, our attention and behavior reorient accordingly. The cold becomes a reminder that it’s time to make soup, our commutes become chances to observe the rain fall, and gray mornings become aesthetic backdrops for coffee drinking. When

The first is to Appreciate Winter: look at winter for what it is, and let it be a time for slowing down. Adapt to the season, using your words and attention to lift up winter’s pleasures. The second is to Make It Special: lean into the activities and feelings that are unique to this time of year. Revel in coziness, enjoy delights made possible by winter’s darkness, and create and savor rituals that imbue the season with meaning. The third is to Get Outside: layer up and enjoy the outdoors in all weather, experiment with winter bathing, and take advantage of the ways your town or city celebrates the season.

In addition to easing stress, and promoting relaxation, sauna bathing can improve sleep, skin conditions, and circulation; lower blood pressure, which can prevent or even treat hypertension; improve lung function and reduce pulmonary diseases; reduce pain and increase mobility for patients with rheumatic disease; provide relief for headaches and arthritis; and boost the immune system, making people less susceptible to colds and viruses.

Hot baths before bed improve sleep for insomnia sufferers and can reduce depression symptoms. One study found that people who took baths more frequently were less likely to be depressed three years later, an effect that was especially strong for bathing in winter.

Friluftsliv is about communing with nature and with yourself, and about unburdening oneself from anything but being present. It's about disconnecting from the day-to-day in order to connect with something older, wilder, and larger.

Just as our helpful mindsets can create our reality, our unhelpful mindsets become self-fulfilling. Sometimes, negative stories around winter are so pervasive that they trick us into thinking that winter is colder and gloomier than it actually is, discouraging us from looking at the world with fresh eyes and taking in: How cold is it really? We create false narratives about winter, and these narratives become a greater barrier to winter enjoyment than actual winter conditions.

We can use our language to continuously and consciously shape our experience, which influences not only our mindsets, but the mindsets of the people around us. In speaking lovingly about winter, we can shape how the season feels.

walked alongside my thoughts through snow and rain on slick streets and let myself get lost in reverie in the library

considered the time of year when the sun doesn’t rise. Taija told me that they start talking about giđđadálvi

She described this familiar feeling: bundled in her car in the morning in the freezing cold

toes. Yet we can take a page out of Passmore’s book and notice nature by really attending to winter weather with all of our senses. Trees rustle in the whistling wind; rain splats and patters; ice crunches and crackles; snow muffles sound while shushing under our feet. Rain turns the streets into mirrors

Yet we can take a page out of Passmore’s book and notice nature by really attending to winter weather with all of our senses. Trees rustle in the whistling wind; rain splats and patters; ice crunches and crackles; snow muffles sound while shushing under our feet. Rain turns the streets into mirrors

Passmore is one of the first people to specifically investigate a nature and well-being intervention in winter. And yet even in Edmonton

Across multiple randomized controlled studies in the US and China

By classifying a wide range of seasonal behavior change as winter depression