Nature can teach us how to live our best lives in winter

Katherine May, The Independent

It has begun already. I wake in darkness, certain it is morning. I press the button on my alarm clock, and the orange glow tells me otherwise: 2am. The deep midpoint of the night. I turn on my side, try to settle myself again, but it’s no use. Peeling back the duvet, I put on my slippers and pad downstairs. I used to think that this was insomnia — a pathological disturbance of my sleep — but now I see it as a normal part of winter. Like so many of the changes that happen in the dark half of the year, I’ve come to treat it as a gift. When I wake in the night, my body is remembering an ancestral pattern of sleep. In 1996, the sleep scientist Thomas Wehr tried to replicate the sleep conditions of our ancestors by plunging people into darkness for 14 hours at a time. The same pattern soon emerged: a first sleep of about four hours, and then a period of wakefulness lasting two to three hours, followed by a second four-hour sleep.

Historian A Roger Ekirch found evidence of this midwinter break in sleep across history. It was seen as a valuable quiet time in the day, when people talked, prayed, and even socialised with neighbours. It was only after the arrival of artificial light that we lost this secret corner of our lives.

And yet, like so many parts of our winter experience, we have come to see this waking as a problem. We like to imagine that our lives can be exactly the same the whole year round, year upon year of uniform productivity stacked together to make a meaningful existence. All around us are signs that this is impossible. We get ill, we get exhausted, and we are drawn into caring responsibilities for the people we love. We are floored by bereavements and breakups. We survive traumas, only to find that they rise up in us years later. Somehow, we carry on telling ourselves that these are all anomalies and that we have uniquely failed to keep pace with everyone else. We watch as the world carries on without us, as if behind a sheet of ice.

If we listen to winter, it teaches us that the fallow periods of life are fundamental to our humanity, crucial to how we grow and change. From trees letting go of their leaves in autumn to mammals storing food, the natural world offers us an abundance of metaphors for our own survival in dark times.

Living with a creature that sleeps through winter has been instructive. My son’s bearded dragon has already gone into brumation (the reptile equivalent of hibernation), triggered by the shortening days. Guided only by instinct, he doesn’t try to resist the onset of winter; he simply adapts his behaviour to suit the conditions. We humans are unique in thinking we must put up a fight.

Traditional societies were forced to confront the cold months, and they saw them as a different phase rather than a meteorological error. Summer may encourage growth and energy, but that’s not sustainable for ever.

In winter, we process the effects of the high season, doing the crucial work of reflection, integration, and planning. In the Celtic tradition, winter is characterised as a gestational time: the new year is being nurtured into life. None of this can happen if we don’t first slow down.

That’s not to say that winter isn’t hard. Short days and low light levels have an undeniable impact on mood for thousands of people. Although there are some health benefits to being out in cold weather — wild swimmers like me benefit from the hits of dopamine and serotonin that are triggered by low temperatures — it’s my belief that they have been overstated in recent years.

Certainly, we were more used to living in colder temperatures in the recent past, but we have always sought to be warm and dry in winter. We must resist the idea that being cold is somehow morally superior. This argument becomes especially toxic at a time when so many elderly people cannot afford to heat their homes.

Yet some of the worst parts of our winter experience arise from the ways in which we’re forced to live through it. Our late-capitalist era demands that we are always productive, always growing, even when our bodies are crying out for rest.

It rations our access to heat and light according to what we can afford, rather than what we need. And it keeps us separate in our houses over winter, confined to our small family groups, or alone entirely. This isolation is not the fault of winter itself, but of the disintegration of our community spaces and the institutions that used to gather us together all through the year.

None of that changes the basic fact that winter exists. Try as we might, we cannot wish it away, and our attempts to avoid it often worsen our distress. By hunkering down in winter, and staying indoors bathed in artificial light, we are not giving our bodies the chance to change with the seasons.

By experiencing the changes that take place at this time of year — for example by noticing when the sun rises and sets, and getting outside to feel the changes in the weather — we can allow our circadian rhythms to adapt as they are meant to. As with so many things, the key lies in acceptance, rather than painfully fighting the inevitable.

There is, in fact, great comfort to be found in winter. It is full of stark natural beauty, a graphic contrast to the lushness of summer. Skeletal trees silhouetted against clear blue skies, red berries in the hedgerows, white frills of frost picking out the edges of fallen leaves: winter has its own glories. It invites us to wrap up warm, to slow down, to take care of ourselves after the fever of summer; it clears a pathway towards rest.