17/12/2025
It makes complete sense that your body would want to slow down at this time of year. So why are we so intent on gearing up??
REASONS TO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF
We humans, in our current form, have been around for roughly 200,000–300,000 years. To survive that long, we had to adapt not just to predators or scarce resources, but to the rhythm of the planet itself. One of the most important adaptations we developed was syncing our behaviour with the seasons.
We don’t fully hibernate, of course, but it would be biologically odd for us to behave in winter exactly as we do in summer. Winter has always been a time to hunker down. The natural world goes quiet. Growth pauses. Resources thin out. Even simple tasks take more effort. So, it makes perfect sense that our bodies slow too that we sleep more, move less, and crave our version of a warm, safe cave.
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Yet in modern life, we’re still walking around in those ancient bodies with those ancient propensities and the stretch between the summer solstice and the winter solstice can feel especially heavy. The days shrink, the cold creeps in, and everything becomes that bit more labour-intensive. Travel requires more layers and more logistics. The first school term whether you’re a parent, a teacher, or a student often feels like wading through mud.
I’ve noticed a common theme in the people I meet with, personally and professionally: a sense of limping toward the finish line of the year.
For hundreds of millennia, reaching the winter solstice was an achievement worth marking. It meant we had made it through the hardest half. Our stored food was holding up. Our bodies had carried us this far. Communities would gather, quite sensibly, to pause and celebrate survival and the turning of the light.
But our culture has drifted far from that natural ebb and flow. The Industrial Revolution and later, artificial lighting allowed us to override our biology. We can now behave the same way at 11pm as we do at 11am. We can push through winter as if it were July. We’ve built systems that expect us to function identically across all four seasons.
And somewhere along the way, we started pathologizing very normal human responses. Feeling slower in winter? Wanting to retreat a little? Mood dipping when the light disappears? Many people immediately assume something is wrong with them. As if consistency, not seasonality, were the mark of a healthy human.
When you zoom out, the absurdity becomes clear: we’ve spent 0.1% of our time on Earth living this way. It’s far too short a stretch to expect our biology to have caught up.
Yet stepping out of the constant push isn’t easy. Most of us can’t simply down tools for the whole of December. Modern life is built on momentum, and the wheels can feel like they’ll come off if we slow even slightly. So we keep going beyond tired, beyond reason, often beyond what our systems are gently signalling they can manage.
But maybe that ancient signal is worth listening to.
Perhaps we can’t stop entirely, but we can stop pretending we’re machines. We can notice the instinct to rest. We can take the pressure down a few notches. We can give ourselves permission just for a week or two to lean into what every ancestor we’ve ever had would have recognised as wisdom:
This is the season for slowing, for softening, for conserving energy.
This is the season to treat yourself a little more gently.
If you feel like you’re limping to the end of the year, it isn’t a failure. It’s a sign that you’re human wonderfully, primally, seasonally human and that your body is doing exactly what it learned to do across hundreds of thousands of winters
