Your Body Knows It Is Still Winter: 5 Practices for Honoring the Season Your Calendar Ignores
Why fighting January’s slower rhythm makes everything harder
If you find this post thoughtful,
please like it + leave a comment
about what it shifted in you.
Every holiday season, I get sick.
Not dramatically sick. Not hospitalized. Just sick enough that my body forces me to stop. A cold that lingers. Exhaustion that does not lift with sleep. The kind of illness that says, “You refused to rest, so I will make you rest.”
For years I treated this as bad luck. Poor timing. Maybe I touched something on the metro. Maybe the holiday travel exposed me to germs.
Then I started paying attention.
The pattern was not random. It was predictable. Every December, the culture screamed at me to do more. Buy more. Celebrate harder. Fill every evening with events. Every weekend with obligations. Every moment with activity.
I complied. My body collapsed.
This is not a medical essay. It is a confession and an invitation. I have spent years fighting my body’s winter wisdom. I am learning, slowly, to stop.
What Winter Actually Asks
The natural world does not celebrate the new year with resolutions and productivity goals.
In January, the Northern Hemisphere is still tilted away from the sun. Days are short. Nights are long. The Earth itself is in a season of rest. Trees stand dormant. Many animals sleep. The soil lies fallow, gathering strength for spring.
This is not death. It is necessary pause.
Your body is part of this. Not metaphorically. Actually. The same elements that make up soil and trees and winter air make up your bones and blood and breath. You are not separate from the Earth, observing its cycles. You are part of the Earth, cycling.
When winter asks the natural world to slow down, it is also asking you.
But the culture says otherwise. Holiday lights blaze against the darkness. Stores overflow with things to buy. The calendar fills with parties and obligations. Then January arrives with its demands for new beginnings, fresh starts, ambitious goals.
The season says rest. The culture says perform.
Your body gets caught in between.
The Lie of New Year Energy
Here is the lie we have been told: new year, new energy.
January 1 arrives and suddenly we are supposed to have momentum. Motivation. The drive to become our best selves. Gyms fill. Planners sell. Everyone posts their goals and intentions.
But January is not spring. The light has barely begun returning. We have months of darkness still ahead. The energy that new beginnings require does not naturally exist in this season.
So we manufacture it. Caffeine. Willpower. Pushing through. We force ourselves to perform at summer intensity when our bodies are asking for winter rest.
Then we wonder why we are exhausted by February. Why the resolutions fail. Why the motivation disappears.
It was never sustainable. We were fighting the season instead of following it.
Tiredness as Information
I want to say something that the productivity culture does not want you to hear.
Your tiredness in winter is not weakness. It is information.
When you feel exhausted in January, your body is telling you something true about what this season requires. The tiredness is not a problem to solve. It is a message to receive.
This does not mean you can abandon all responsibilities. Most of us cannot hibernate for three months. But there is a difference between meeting necessary obligations and adding unnecessary ones. There is a difference between doing what must be done and doing everything that could be done.
Winter asks for the minimum. Not the maximum.
When I finally started listening to my winter tiredness instead of overriding it, something shifted. I stopped getting sick every December. I stopped arriving at spring depleted. I stopped fighting a battle I was never going to win.
The body is wiser than the calendar. It knows what season it is even when the culture pretends otherwise.
5 Practices for Honoring Winter
Here is what I am practicing, and through them what I am learning to do. None of these is dramatic. All of them help.
1. Morning Slowness
No screens for the first 20 minutes after waking.
This is harder than it sounds. The phone calls. The emails wait. The news promises urgency. But winter mornings are slow by nature. The light comes late. The world is quiet.
Let yourself wake with the slow winter light. Do not immediately flood your nervous system with information and demands. Drink something warm. Look out a window. Tend some houseplants. Let the day begin gently.
This small buffer has the potential to change what follows.
2. One Canceled Thing Per Week
Create space by removing rather than adding.
Every week, cancel one thing you do not absolutely have to do. A meeting that could be an email. A social obligation you agreed to out of guilt. A task that feels urgent but is not actually important.
Winter is a season of less. Honor it by doing less. The space you create is not empty. It is where rest lives.
3. Warm Drinks Held With Both Hands
This sounds trivial. It is not.
The simple act of holding a warm cup with both hands is a micro ritual of receiving. You are letting warmth come to you. You are slowing down long enough to feel it.
Do not drink your coffee while typing. Do not gulp your tea while rushing out the door. Sit. Hold the cup. Let the warmth enter your hands before the caffeine enters your blood.
This is a practice of being instead of doing. Winter needs more of this.
4. Saying “Not This Season”
Language matters.
When you decline an invitation or postpone a project, try saying “not this season” instead of “I can’t” or “I don’t have time.”
This small shift does something important. It honors cyclical time rather than linear productivity. It acknowledges that there will be other seasons when the energy returns. It frames the no as seasonal wisdom rather than personal failure.
“Not this season” gives you permission to rest without apologizing for it. It is a cousin of the “No for now” approach to time management.
5. Honoring Tiredness as Information
When you feel tired, pause.
Instead of reaching for caffeine or pushing through, take one moment to ask, “What is my body telling me about this season?”
The answer might be: you need more sleep. The answer might be: you need less stimulation. The answer might be: you are doing too much and your body knows it even when your mind denies it.
Tiredness is not the enemy. Ignoring tiredness is the enemy. The practice is simply to listen before you override.
What Changes When You Stop Fighting
I cannot promise that honoring winter will solve everything.
What I can say is that when I stopped fighting the season, something in me relaxed. Not just physically, though that too. Something deeper. The constant war between what my body needed and what my calendar demanded finally ended.
Spring still comes. The energy returns. The longer days bring longer capacity. But now I arrive at spring rested instead of depleted. Ready instead of recovering.
The body knows what season it is.
Your work is not to force a different season. Your work is to honor the one you are in. To do what must be done while releasing what does not. To rest when rest is what the Earth is asking of everything that lives.
Including you.
This concludes what I started the week with, exploring what an ecospirituality lens reveals: walking as quiet witness, the severed relationship made visible, and the body as part of Earth’s seasonal cycle. Thank you for walking with me.
Walk with Me
If this resonates, I invite you to subscribe to Where Insight Meets Earth, my weekly reflections on contemplative walking, ecospirituality, and embodied practices for navigating what overwhelms us.
If you want to delve more deeply into this, I am launching the Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary in March 2026, a year-long journey exploring Earth kinship through contemplative practice. Learn more here.
In September 2026, I’m leading a contemplative walking retreat on France’s ancient Le Puy Camino, seven days of individual, contemplative walking, movement, and practices for metabolizing what sitting cannot, in the most beautiful landscape you can imagine, on a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage path. Details here.
Please ping me with any thoughts, ideas, or questions. ~ Jeffrey