Winter Resilience: Supporting Your Mind, Body, and Energy in the Dark Months
- Justine Ferland
- Nov 19
- 6 min read
As the days shorten and the air grows colder, many of us notice a shift in our energy, mood, and overall vitality. Winter is a natural season of rest and restoration, but the busy holiday and end of year can also challenge our resilience and capacity. Understanding these changes and aligning your routines with the rhythms of winter can help you maintain vitality, focus, and well-being, even during the darkest months.
Understanding Seasonal Shifts and Their Impact
Winter is not just a change in weather; it’s a change in light, temperature, and the natural rhythms nature and our bodies are tuned to. Recognizing how these seasonal shifts affect your mind, body, and energy is the first step toward cultivating resilience and flow during the darker months.
Circadian Rhythms: The Body’s Internal Clock
Your body is a magical machine running a finely tuned 24-hour cycle called the circadian rhythm. This helps regulate sleep, alertness, hormone release, and energy levels. During winter, shorter daylight hours can shift your internal clock, affecting the timing of melatonin and cortisol:
Melatonin: the hormone that promotes sleep, is released in response to darkness. With longer nights, melatonin production can start earlier and last longer, leading to increased sleepiness in the morning or during the day.
Cortisol: the stress and alertness hormone, also follows a circadian pattern. Less daylight can dampen morning cortisol peaks, leaving you feeling sluggish or low on energy.
(Matthews et al., 2016; Wehr et al., 1995).
SEELEDU Practice Tip:
Morning light exposure: Step outside for 10–15 minutes first thing in the morning, even on overcast days. This helps signal to your body that it’s daytime, reinforcing these natural circadian cues.
Simple movement: Gentle morning stretches or mobility exercises enhance circulation and reinforce wakefulness. Bonus bring it outdoors in nature!
Mood Fluctuations Shorter days and lower light exposure can influence neurotransmitters like serotonin, which regulate mood and motivation (NIMH, n.d.; Lewy et al., 1998). Many people notice:
Lower motivation or irritability
Heightened emotional sensitivity
Mild seasonal depressive patterns
SEELEDU Practice Tip:
Micro mindfulness breaks: Pause 2–3 times daily for 1–2 minutes of deep breathing
Gratitude journaling: Note three positive moments at the end of the day to nurture your emotional resilience.
Energy Shifts
Winter signals in nature and the body a shift to conserve energy.
Strategies to align your energy with winter:
Schedule short, intentional breaks to stretch, breathe, or walk integrating experience and day together
Align work with natural energy peaks: tackle demanding tasks mid-morning; reserve afternoon or lower capacity times for gentler activities
By respecting your body’s natural seasonal rhythms, you can maintain energy without overexertion, creating sustainable life vitality.
Nutrition for Winter Resilience
When we look across cultures, winter energy is typically supported by warming, nutrient-dense foods. Tapping into this ancestral knowledge and cultural practices, we bring focus to nourishing ourselves with:
Seasonal vegetables: Root vegetables, squashes, and hearty greens
Warming spices: Cinnamon, ginger, turmeric
Protein & healthy fats: Nuts, seeds, eggs, fish
Hydration: Cold weather reduces thirst signals, so drink regularly
Vitamin D support: fatty fish like trout and eggs can provide D3
Eating in harmony with seasonal offerings nourishes the body, supports energy, and stabilizes mood.
Rituals to support nutrition:
Morning beverage: Herbal tea with fresh ginger and lemon
Seasonal lunch: Roasted root vegetable salad with protein and vitamin rich additions
Somatic Practices for Winter Resilience & Energy
Movement is medicine! Movement and awareness help counteract winter lethargy and always support both mental and physical well-being.
SEELEDU Practice Tip:
Daily movement: What movement calls to you? Dance? A walk in the woods? Yoga? Find your enjoyed movement and you will be more likely to integrate it as a daily practice
Breathwork:
Box breathing: Inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4, repeat 5 cycles
Nature connection: Even brief daylight exposure stabilizes mood and circadian rhythms
Simple somatic practices help your body feel awake, calm, and resilient, even in shorter, darker days. If you’re refining your winter rhythms or building more sustainable performance habits, this is the type of work I support clients with and I'm happy to be a source of support for you!
Mental and Emotional Support
Seasonal and life resilience is as much mental as physical. Winter offers a unique opportunity to focus and refine both! With fewer daylight hours and quieter rhythms in nature, your system naturally turns inward. This isn’t a sign of weakness or slowing down. It’s a seasonal invitation to focus your energy, sharpen your presence, and strengthen the emotional wellness habits that carry you through the entire year.
When you tend to your emotional and mental landscape intentionally, you create more stability, more clarity, and more consistent energy. This inner steadiness is what prevents obstacles from pulling you off-course. You let winter become a training ground for discipline, reflection, and high-quality recovery-the very things that support long-term performance.
Winter becomes a time to level up, not by doing more, but by practicing more deliberately. Smaller, well-placed resets and repetition throughout the day build a strong, responsive nervous system and habits SEELEDU Practice Tip: Intentional routines: Daily rituals anchor your day and stabilize mood
Takeaways for Winter Resilience
Connect with your circadian rhythm: Morning light + gentle movement sets the tone.
Align energy with the season: Breaks, nutrition, and structured activity prevent burnout and support mind, brain, and energy
Use somatic practices: Breath, movement, and nature connection restore vitality.
Winter as a Season of Strength
Winter naturally asks something different of us. It slows the tempo of the natural world, shifts the light, and presents an invitation to our bodies to enter into a quieter, more intentional rhythm. When we work with these seasonal cues rather than against them, winter becomes far less about endurance and far more about refinement.
Resilience in the darker months isn’t built through force, it’s built through presence. It built through small daily practices that help your mind, body, and energy stay aligned. Morning light, nourishing meals, steady movement, mindful pauses, and simple somatic rituals all work together to create stability from the inside out and are living medicine. This season can be a powerful training ground. A time to strengthen emotional clarity, sharpen your focus, conserve energy wisely, and practice habits that elevate long-term life performance, endurance and well-being.
If you appreciate seasonal guidance like this, join my free community newsletter for seasonal based practices and ways to stay grounded throughout the year. Join Root & Rise now
Author & Photographer: Justine Ferland
Justine Ferland is a psychologist, educator, and integrative health and wellbeing coach with over two decades of experience supporting people in cultivating resilience, performance, and grounded daily practices. Through SEELEDU, she blends lifestyle medicine, somatic awareness, and nature-based wisdom to help individuals strengthen presence, energy, and everyday wellbeing. All photographs in this article were taken during her own outdoor practices and seasonal fieldwork in the Black Forest.
References
Zhang, Y., Folarin, A., Sun, S., Cummins, N., Ranjan, Y., Rashid, Z., … Narayan, V. A. (2023). Longitudinal assessment of seasonal impacts and depression associations on circadian rhythm using multimodal wearable sensing. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02953 (arXiv)
Matthews, S. K., Kim, H. M., & Reynolds, C. F. (2016). Annual variation in daily light exposure and circadian change of melatonin and cortisol concentrations at a northern latitude with large seasonal differences in photoperiod length. Journal of Physiological Anthropology, 35, Article 33. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40101-016-0103-9 (BioMed Central)
Wehr, T. A., Aeschbach, D., Duncan, W. C., Walden, W., Schwartz, P. J., Turner, E. H., … Goodwin, F. K. (1995). Seasonal rhythm in bipolar I disorder. Bipolar Disorders, 8(5, Part 2), 467–472. (Note: related to seasonality, but not directly cited above — include only if relevant. If not, skip.)
Lewy, A. J., Sack, R. L., Singer, C. M., & White, D. M. (1984). Diurnal and seasonal variations of melatonin and serotonin in women with seasonal affective disorder. Biological Psychiatry, 20(5), 485–497. (This corresponds to older foundational work; but our citation was from 1994 — adjust if necessary.) — Actually, in our data: Diurnal and seasonal variations… (PubMed)
Wirz-Justice, A., Graw, P., Krauchi, K., Sarraf, H., & Jones, R. T. (2006). Seasonal variation in cognition, sleep, and mood in healthy people living at high latitude. BMC Physiology, 6, 18. (Not in your list—but could be useful; optional.)
Rosenthal, N. E., Sack, D. A., Gillin, J. C., Lewy, A. J., Goodwin, F. K., Davenport, Y., … Wehr, T. A. (1984). Seasonal affective disorder: A description of the syndrome and preliminary findings with light therapy. Archives of General Psychiatry, 41(1), 72–80. (Classic SAD work.)
Hoffman, M. J., & Watson, N. F. (2015). Sex and seasonal variations in melatonin suppression and alerting response to light. Journal of the Endocrine Society, 1(1), 123–134. https://doi.org/10.1210/jendso/bvaf155 (OUP Academic)
NIMH. (n.d.). Seasonal Affective Disorder. National Institute of Mental Health. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/seasonal-affective-disorder (National Institute of Mental Health)
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