Kari Leibowitz is an unlikely ambassador for winter. The health psychologist grew up on the Jersey Shore steeped in a belief that summer was the supreme season—a time of going to the beach, eating ice cream, and attending outdoor concerts. Winter was the cold, dark opposite, an epoch of endurance, retreat, and limitation. It was no coincidence that she escaped to college in sunny Atlanta.
But in 2014, as a Fulbright scholar, Leibowitz, MA ’18, PhD ’21, headed somewhere that made New Jersey winters look balmy: Tromsø, Norway, 200 miles beyond the Arctic Circle and home to the world’s northernmost university. Leibowitz went there intending to study how the city’s residents gritted through Tromsø’s two-month, sunless polar night. But she soon realized her assumptions were wrong. People in Tromsø didn’t endure winter so much as enjoy it. Previous research in Tromsø showed no evidence of a wintertime increase in depression, even though many Americans struggle with the season. How?
The answer appeared to be largely in a “positive winter mindset” and the habits it fed. The inhabitants of Tromsø saw winter for its possibilities more than its privations, its rewards more than its punishments. The sun didn’t come out for months, but the candles could, converting cafés, restaurants, and university breakrooms into soft-lit dens of coziness. The cold was undeniable, but people embraced outdoor life, even in frigid twilight, as a boon to health, not an invitation to illness. After a year in Norway, Leibowitz headed to Stanford as a grad student in psychology, where her adviser was associate professor Alia Crum, whose research is at the intersection of mindset and health, and she found an additional mentor in professor and mindset pioneer Carol Dweck. Even in Palo Alto’s mild climes, Leibowitz’s Arctic experience stayed with her, ultimately leading her on an international voyage to learn how other cold-weather cultures, from Iceland to Japan, embrace winter. Those wisdoms are at the heart of her new book, How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days. Some advice from a reformed winter hater:
Anticipate the season.
The precise beginning of winter is open to debate. For the literal, it’s the winter solstice; for the poetic, it may be the first frost. Leibowitz places winter’s beginning at the end of daylight saving time, when darkness falls with a thump. Whenever you assign it, Leibowitz sees value in acknowledging it rather than pretending it isn’t happening. Stock up on hot cocoa, move your wool socks to the top drawer, set up tealights, put on the flannel sheets. Mark the transition with a celebration like a candlelit dinner. Leibowitz suggests making a list of winter activities you’re anticipating. And recognize that winter is real. It’s natural for the body to slow. “Allow yourself this time to ease into a new rhythm,” she writes.
Photo: Robert Yaffe
Light the way.
For many in the Northern Hemisphere, early winter comes with a cozy crutch. From Diwali to Hanukkah to Christmas to New Year’s Eve, November and December are filled with sufficient cheer. But winter stretches on even when the eggnog and latkes are long gone. So why not be like the Scots, who keep the good times going with Burns Night in late January? Leibowitz recommends spreading rituals from the festive season—say, the mulled wine, the gift-giving, or the family movie nights—into the cold new year. Love Christmas baking? Go nuts for Valentine’s Day cookies. “Convert your ‘holiday spirit’ into a ‘winter spirit,’” she writes. And as you do, don’t forget the importance of lighting. While light imbues the holidays—from menorahs to twinkling trees—we snuff out the glow while it’s still vitally needed. For Leibowitz, soft, low lighting—which she calls “Little Lights”—is at the heart of the difference between futilely fighting winter’s darkness and embracing the season’s magic. Take it from those hygge masters, the Danes, who each burn an average of 3.5 kilograms of candles per year: A Little Light sets a big mood. “If you banished all overhead lighting—all Big Lights—from your home this winter and used only Little Lights, you’d be 90 percent cozier, guaranteed,” Leibowitz writes.
Opt outside.
Don’t get too snug. Not everyone is going to be enticed by Leibowitz’s tale of swimming in a frozen Finnish river or the Nordic habit of letting well-bundled babies nap outside in subzero weather, but Leibowitz says we’d do well to cast aside the beliefs that we can’t go out in certain conditions or that cold weather gives us colds. Norwegians esteem the philosophy of friluftsliv—or open-air life—which emphasizes time in nature, no matter the season, with a little preparation. As the Scandinavians say, there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. (In Tromsø, good clothing included headlamps, reflective vests, and spiked shoes.) A warm hat, coat, and gloves can give you back the outside world, and your sanity. “When we’ve fortified ourselves appropriately, armed with the right clothing and mindset, we can go outside in any weather, and, in doing so, find that perhaps winter isn’t as limiting as we thought,” Leibowitz writes.
And, of course, nothing makes a cozy, candlelit den full of Valentine’s Day cookies quite as enticing as braving the elements, then coming back indoors.
How do you winter? |
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. Email him at sscott3@stanford.edu.
