“How to Winter” — tips from health psychologist Kari Leibowitz

Q&A on thriving in the cold, dark season

It’s been snow, snow, snow all winter here — but what a useful photo backdrop. Feathers? I am perplexed. I hope there wasn’t a backyard tiff.

Hello, dear friends,

I was thrilled to talk with Kari Leibowitz, author of How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, and Difficult Days.

I love mindset books, because they get at a root cause. If you can shift your thinking, so much more is possible.

How to Winter is packed with practical tips and mind-bending ideas.

Here in the Hudson Valley of New York, we’ve still got three more months of winter to go. (Winter lasts from November to April. The leaves don’t return until May!) It has snowed a half-dozen times already, and it’s due to snow tonight and again Saturday. As I type this, it’s 15 degrees outside and dark.

But those are, as Kari helps us see, objective facts — if I interpret those basic facts as miserable, that’s my subjective view. There are other options.

Kari shares three core ideas on transforming our winter experience, and I’m excited to try them out.

She also writes a fun seasonal newsletter, Wintry Mix. It’s on a temporary hiatus thanks to the arrival of this little one, but you can read back posts like What’s better in the dark? and A piece of cake, about the Swedish ritual of fika, a sweet afternoon break and a standard part of their workday. (Let’s adopt this?)

Many thanks to Kari for speaking with me. (The Q&A below has been lightly edited and tightened.)

Hope you enjoy our conversation!

Brianne

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Brianne: I thought we could start with how you grew up thinking about winter, living at the Jersey Shore. Could you share what that was like?

Kari: I grew up in a beach town, and so summer was the fun season, especially when you're a kid. So much of American culture is about summer. Summer is the playtime, the fun time holiday break, and when you live in a beach town, that only gets compounded.

Winter was the season to get through, so you could get to the best season.

I just found the winter both boring and uncomfortable. I was cold. I didn't like getting up in the dark to go to school, even as like a little kid. I hated going outside at recess when it was cold out. I grew up entrenched in this culture that not only like revered summer, but strongly disliked the winter overall.

Brianne: 100%. That's very similar to how my time in Virginia Beach was. Winter was the off season, and you just waited it through until the summer came back.

Kari: You're like living for the summer.

Brianne: Yes. I was surprised to read in your book about the city of Tromsø in Norway, and how different it was, even with the polar night — months of darkness, when the sun doesn’t rise at all.

Kari: Yes, these narratives of seasonal affective disorder and winter depression are so prevalent in our culture that when I heard about somewhere with such a long, dark winter with the polar night, I was like, Oh, they must have high rates of winter depression.

And the research really shows that that's not the case.

In Tromsø, it’s not that there's no winter depression, but there are relatively low rates. There are rates comparable to Maryland, and there's not a lot of winter mental distress.

When I went there and was actually on the ground studying it and talking to people, the way that they were talking about the winter was really different.

There was a lot of enthusiasm for the winter and excitement for the winter, and people looking forward to the winter, and people being excited when it was really cold, and when the snow came, even though that's so much of the year.

It was still something that most people were celebrating.

visittromso

A post shared by @visittromso

visittromso

A post shared by @visittromso

Brianne: There's a part in the book where you describe what we miss out when we ignore winter, when we just slog through it. Could you talk a bit about that?

Kari: I think, at best, we're missing a whole season's worth of opportunities for joy and comfort and connection.

And we're missing this chance to embrace a different flavor of well-being.

I think winter wellness looks really different than summer wellness.

Really enjoying yourself in the winter has a different characteristic and a different quality than enjoying yourself in the summer.

And so we miss the opportunity to expand our definition of how we can feel good, and our range of what feeling good looks like for us.

But, at worst, we're missing half of our lives! Where you live, you’re saying winter lasts 6 months, and that's true for a lot of people in a lot of the world — in the northeastern United States, in mountain towns, in Ireland and Scotland. Even here, in the Netherlands and Amsterdam, it can be very wintry from November through March.

It can be half the year. If you're trudging through half the year, waiting for the other half, that's half of your life that you're just enduring rather than enjoying.

And that's really sad to me.

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Winter wellness

looks really different

than summer wellness.

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Brianne: You have 3 strategies from all your research for how to winter well.

Kari: There's three broad categories. And within that, there's lots of different specific practices and strategies you can use.

It's really not one size fits all, but I think these three broad ideas encompass the way that we can embrace winter.

The first is to appreciate winter.

Part of this is in your heart and mind, giving winter its due.

Some of that is really a practice of acceptance — of letting winter be what it is. It's not spring. It's its own thing.

You're going to feel more tired. Most likely you're going to have different motivation and energy and interests.

But that's okay. It can be a time to slow down, and a time where you feel different than the rest of the year — and really leaning into that appreciating.

Winter, I think, is also really about harnessing your attention and your words.

The truth is that winter is inherently neither good nor bad.

Objectively, it is cold, and it is dark, and it can be wet.

Subjectively, the cold can be uncomfortable and unbearable, or it can be crisp and refreshing.

The darkness can be gloomy or depressing, or it can be cozy and peaceful.

So winter has objective qualities, but those qualities are not in themselves inherently good or bad.

Similarly, you can use your language to point that out to yourself and others.

It's a little bit different than just looking on the bright side. It's making this intentional choice to try to train my attention and my words in one direction or the other.

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Let winter be what it is.

It's not spring.

It's its own thing.

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Brianne: One other thing you talk about in the book is the difference in how your mindset around something small, like how you think about baseball or spinach, shows up only occasionally in your life. But if you have a mindset about a season or place that you are living in day after day, it will change your whole experience and you might not even realize it.

Kari: Right. Research shows us that these mindsets about things that we’re in all the time are both uniquely likely to affect us, because they're really pervasive, they're really influencing us very broadly, and they're uniquely likely to go overlooked.

We're not stepping back and getting that awareness or perspective.

Winter really fits the category for both of those things.

Brianne: It almost becomes a fact in your mind. Of course, winter is this way.

Kari: Right. That was how I grew up. I didn't realize that it was sort of a mindset or even an opinion. I was like, Oh, yeah, objectively, winter is depressing. Winter is bad for mental health. Winter is gloomy — but that's a totally subjective interpretation of the qualities of the season.

So the next strategy is to make winter special.

If appreciating winter is about noticing the season differently, making winter special is about using your actions to lean into the opportunities of winter.

The people all over the world who really enjoy winter have things that they do that they only do in the winter, that they love.

If you live somewhere cold and snowy, and you can do winter sports like skiing or ice skating — that’s an obvious one,

Less obvious ones are, like, I knit all winter long, and then in the summer I'm too busy out in the garden. Or winter is my time to bake bread, because in the summer, my house is too hot to have the oven on all day.

Or winter is my time to read a bunch of books, and in the summer, I'm busy running around.

It doesn't really matter what the activity is.

But the idea that winter becomes a special time for activities that you enjoy and find pleasurable really turns the season into something that you look forward to, and I think makes a really big difference.

Brianne: I have a question from a Winter Camper about special times. She asked, “I'm curious if Kari has ideas around winter holidays that aren't Christmas, whether widely celebrated ones like Martin Luther King Jr. Day, or Lunar New Year, or more personal ones, people with winter birthdays, cultural traditions that aren't as popularly known.”

Kari: Totally. Many people who enjoy winter enjoy the season up until and around Christmas because they do all the things that make winter special, right?

They have the cozy vibey lighting.

They're making special foods.

They have all these special activities.

They have all these rituals.

Then, after Christmas, that sort of falls by the wayside.

And so what I like to tell people is that, if you do enjoy that [holiday] season, then you already know how to make winter fun and special.

You know how to do it, and it's just, how can you bring that forward?

One thing for me that's really fun to celebrate is the winter solstice, to mark and honor the darkest day of the year. To really acknowledge that I think is very meaningful.

Then Valentine’s Day comes in mid-February. There's this rise in Galentine's day, in celebrating your friends, which I think is really fun.

And it's been interesting to see this rise in people creating their own holidays into January and February, because I think that's a time of year when people need it.

I've heard of people doing something they call February feast, where they host a big dinner party in February to gather and give themselves something to look forward to.

I also think you can use the holidays to give you something to do at this time of year, right? So you can go in on concert tickets or theater tickets or museum passes, and make a day out of it in like late January early February, after you've caught your breath from the holidays, but then you still have something to look forward to.

Which I think is a really nice way to extend the holiday season and do something that feels special at this time of year.

Brianne: I love that February feast idea. That's so fun.

Kari: I know, I saw it online. It sounds awesome.

Brianne: It’s like Thanksgiving, but with none of the expectations.

Kari: Exactly. And you can just make it whatever you want it to be.

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Get outside.

Do it as

an experiment.

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Kari: The third strategy is get outside.

This one is in some ways I think the hardest, but in some ways also the most basic.

People all over the world who really enjoy winter find a way to get outside in all different kinds of weather,

It really comes down to: Make it fun, make it feel good, and dress appropriately, so that you're comfortable being outside.

I really encourage people to do it as an experiment.

Like, if you feel really resistant, bundle up and go outside for 5 or 10 min while you drink your coffee in the morning.

Or say you're going to walk for 15 min and then just see how you feel.

I have so many students and workshop participants who have the experience of being like, I really didn't want to do this, and then they do it dressed in the right way. And they're like, Actually, it was so nice, and I felt so good, and then I did it again a few days later.

We don't all grow up learning how to dress with the right layers for winter. And I didn't learn that in New Jersey — it wasn’t until I moved to Norway.

And now, wearing my multiple layers makes such a difference in being comfortable when I'm outside in the winter.

Brianne: I found the same thing. When I lived in Germany for a few years, I learned that wearing very thin layers, all the time, makes so much difference.

Kari: Undergarments. I mean, they're the best.

They're incredible. You put them under your jeans, and then you go outside comfortable.

And now I think they are a little bit more accessible in the U.S. Like Uniqlo has their HeatTech leggings. They’re really good and and pretty affordable.

Copenhagen is not that much colder in the winter than New York. But in Copenhagen, everyone you see on the street is secretly going to be wearing one of those woolen undergarments, and in New York, everyone is just like shivering in their jeans.

Brianne: Let’s talk about your Big Light Off concept.

Kari: Yes, I think in the U.S. there's a tendency to turn all the lights on to banish the darkness.

What you see throughout Scandinavia and in other places around the world that really embrace winter is smaller lights.

The idea is: Just use little lights like lamps, candles, twinkly lights, whatever is not the bright overhead lights in your house.

It is not as bright, but what it does is it works with the darkness, and so it makes sort of a cozy, calm, vibey atmosphere that is not possible unless it is dark out.

It transforms the darkness from something that is a burden to something that enables this kind of cozy, soft lighting.

Brianne: Do you have favorite candle companies or tips where to find small lights?

Kari: I buy the most basic unscented candles. Trader Joe's seasonally sells cheap white pillar candles, or sometimes I'll order them from Ikea because I'm burning them all day, every day.

Lamps are a really good thing to get secondhand. Thrift stores always have tons of lamps. And then they're more interesting.

If you have a room with a lot of lamps, you can get these outlets where it connects to a remote, and so you can plug all the lamps into a different outlet, and then have one remote that controls all of them.

You don't have to go around and turn all of them on and off manually every day — unless that's what you like to do, which can also be a nice ritual.

But when I'm getting in bed, it's nice to just click, click, click them all off.

Brianne: And I bet you instantly get a mood that's different.

Kari: Totally. It really transforms the space.

Brianne: Very cool. Thank you for sharing all of this, plus the many more tips and strategies in the book. I really feel like this book is going to help a lot of people.

Kari: Thank you so much. I hope so.

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One final lovely quote from “How to Winter”:

“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 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.” - Kari Leibowitz