So You're Afraid Of Winter
10 concepts informed by psychiatry and creativity to prepare for winter, create rituals, and use a season of interiority
In 2023, I started creating a series on my TikTok called Winter Mysticism, and it was a series preparing for and then journeying through winter in the northern hemisphere. We started in October—a month before the days shorten acutely and daylight saving time brings the sunset to an offensively early 4 pm. I’ve seen many people talk about being interested in better living in winter due to their own experience of depression or seasonal mood and energy changes in the darker, colder seasons—such as in Wintering, one of my favorite books by Katherine May . However, I started writing about winter because my experience has been the opposite.
I grew up in a small town in Illinois, without the luck of city lights to keep the winter interesting. I also am 30 year old, meaning the smartphones didn’t really exist until I went off to college, and the most interesting thing about the internet for a kid was Club Penguin and Webkinz (and, of course, AIM instant messenger as a teen). My childhood winters were filled with family dinners, being mediocre in multiple school sports (the gift of going to a small parochial school is everyone makes every team), the rise and fall of seasons in the Church, and lots of baking. When I went to college a few hours north in South Bend, Indiana (Go Irish), my freshman year of college was marked (some might say scarred) by the Polar Vortex winter, and my sharpest memory of that is walking 20 minutes against the wind, into the snow, to get to 8:30 am organic chemistry (which I struggled mightily in). Afternoons there were filled with visits to the dining hall, hot chocolate at the small cafe in the old liberal arts building, and movie nights in my all girl dorm.
In medical school in St. Louis, and in residency out here in Boston, similar rituals of winter repeated, but what changed was my awareness of how winter impacted my friends, my family, and eventually, my patients, differently. In hindsight, this was true in college as well, when I think about my friends from warm regions of the country or world and how truly horrendous the cold was for them. As a psychiatrist, I know there is a biology to this, and even a genetic component. Also as a psychiatrist, I know that most mood states and energy changes for people come from a diathesis-stress model—there’s something that can increase your risk for a condition, and environmental factors that make that risk into a reality of symptoms. (For more on Seasonal Affective Disorder from a clinical psychiatry perspective, you can check out this episode from last year of my podcast, How to Be Patient).
You’ll be hearing more from me here and on Tik Tok and Instagram for tips on making it into, through, and deepening into fall and winter. For now, here are 10 ideas of how to help yourself prepare for winter before November 2nd.
Below the Pay Wall: 10 concepts—5 from psychiatry, 5 from creativity—to help better our winters.