How to Winterize Your Life

For those of you who live in places that get pretty cold, you will be familiar with the term “winterizing”. It’s the tasks required to reduce the energy costs of heating your home and any potential damage from severe cold and freezing temperatures. Things like weatherproofing your doors and windows, draining outdoor pipes, sprinklers and garden hoses so they don’t burst when they freeze, replacing your furnace filter, etc. All the parts of home ownership you hope a qualified adult told you at some point… only now you’re the adult.😅

With winter upon us, I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to winterize my life. I know it’s a tough season for me. I know it drags on and on… and on. And I know it’s an awful lot easier to plan for these tough times when I feel more energized, like I do now, versus when I am in the midst of it. 

Low motivation and energy are the biggest challenges I experience and hear from others leading into the winter since they are always the biggest challenges. So, what are some ways to winterize life, stay motivated and keep your energy up?

These are a few I came up with: 

Try daily treats to add small joys throughout the day (aka “joy snacks”)

I came across the idea of daily treats in the article Try this: The Daily List of Treats by Sarai Mitnik, who writes the delightful newsletter Making Time (she came across the idea in The Joy Diet by Martha Beck). Sarai’s post discusses “the weirdly transformative power of giving yourself gifts.” 

She describes daily treats as ways to “build up certain behaviours or habits, especially ones that are difficult for you” or to “use them to simply build a better relationship with yourself, training your own mind that you care for yourself and feel you deserve nice things…The treats need not cost money or be food-related, just some small pleasure to reward yourself each day.”

You might have seen memes along the lines of, “It’s been a hard day, I’m going to give myself a little treat,” buying Starbucks or going to Target every day, which pokes fun at the idea. I won’t deny that it initially seemed a little frivolous (Sarai mentions that this was also her first reaction). No matter what the Instagram reels say, a daily $8.79 “coffee” isn’t a treat, it’s an addiction 😂. Still, it resonated in the way she described it as “giving yourself the gift of enjoying your life, as many times throughout your day as you can manage.”

Richard Sima from the Washington Post proposed a similar idea in his article Want to feel happier? Try snacking on joy.  He describes “an antidote to an ever-stressful, busy and uncertain world…[is] finding and savoring little bites of joy in your day…"joy” snacks. By mindfully tuning into the pleasant, nice and sometimes routine experiences of every day, we can transform an otherwise mundane moment into something more meaningful and even joyful.”

The ideas of daily treats and joy snacks made me think about how easy it is to wait for the day to end or wish it was the weekend. Instead, small daily “treats” are an opportunity for joy and tiny things to look forward to over the course of the day.

For example, I look forward to coffee every morning. It’s a regular part of my routine, but it's still something I savour for a few moments each day. After reading the article, I thought about other things I might add to my list of small daily treats, and these are a few that came to mind:

• Take a 10-minute break to brush my cats and give them treats
• Make my favourite Earl Grey tea with cinnamon honey during the mid-afternoon slump
• Listen to my audiobook while I stretch for a few minutes
• Read a few pages of my book while I eat lunch
• Texting my friends a funny meme or reel to make them laugh

These small joys will help boost your energy during the long winter days or get you through a challenging task. They also give your mind or body a break to be creative, move, or recharge a little. 

Do a digital cleaning to quiet the noise

I always have significantly less energy available during the winter. It’s a symptom of the extra physical and mental effort even small things take. Bundling up in layers, additional planning for poor road conditions, the brief (though often sunny!) daylight hours, and even the physical experience of being cold all the time take a toll. 

This limited well of energy means I sometimes feel overwhelmed and overstimulated by the regular cacophony of other stimuli that I am exposed to on a daily basis. Much of the noise comes from social media, but it’s also in the news (uuugghhh), newsletters, and books I read and even the shows and movies I watch. While they all provide interesting information, data, entertainment, and learning, there is also A LOT of garbage. It’s a lot of competing voices telling me what to do, what I should want, and who I should aspire to be. It’s a lot to process and parse.

Most of you will be in the same boat. While you can’t control the winter, you can control the other stimuli you allow yourself to consume. When the dark and cold feel like they are pressing in and things start to feel exhausting, do a digital cleaning.

Do a quick review of your reading and viewing habits. 

• What are you reading every day?
• What are you watching?
• How often are you scrolling through social media streams?
• What content are you following?
• Whose voices are you listening to?

The most important question of all: How do they make you feel?

Unsubscribe, unfollow, mute, and narrow your consumption. 

Maybe it’s taking a break from reading the news because it upsets you. Maybe it’s unsubscribing from some of your newsletters because the backlog makes you anxious (hopefully not this one!). Perhaps it’s quitting Twitter (X🙄) because… I think that one is self-explanatory.

Give yourself a little more energy to work with by quieting some of the unnecessary, draining noise.

Plan fun things in the future to anticipate joy

In the dead of the Canadian winter, when there are only a few hours of daylight and the temperature drops to -20C (even -30C), it often feels like spring will never arrive. It’s easy to bunker down inside and get a little stir-crazy. It’s easy to postpone seeing friends and family because it’s too cold to leave the house. It’s easy to dread the effort it will take to go out. 

But we all need to go out, get some fresh air, feel the sun on our faces and connect with others. It’s vital for our mental and physical health. The trick is getting yourself to do it!

One way to break up the long wait for green and warmth and encourage yourself to get out is to plan for joy. It’s the same concept as the daily treats but for connections and events. It’s about creating things to look forward to. It’s about anticipating joy and fun instead of dreading the cold and snow.

I use a countdown app called Up Ahead that creates a visual timeline of events in the future (and ones that have passed). It’s a way to build anticipation for the things that are coming up that I am excited about. Concerts, holidays, travel, birthdays, anniversaries, movies, book and video game releases, and whatever dates of note you want, add them! 

You can always have something fun on the horizon, especially if you put some effort into planning them now. Use them to winterize your life with things that bring you joy and connection.

Embrace the season

Quite obviously, I am not a winter person😅. I will never like the cold and the darkness. However, there are parts worth celebrating, enjoying, and embracing. They are the things to remember in the coming months. 

Some winter things that I love:

• Edmonton is considered one of Canada’s sunniest cities, even during the winter when the sunshine is brief. My bedroom window is south-facing, and we often have a sunbeam splashed across our bed early afternoon (with a cat or two basking in it). When I need a mental break from my desk, there is nothing like lying in a sunbeam for a few minutes. I might be solar-powered!😂 
• No matter how old I get, whenever I see my Dad in the winter, he takes my predictably cold hands and warms them between his. They are somehow always toasty, no matter how bitter it is outside, and he will say, “Cold hands, warm heart.”
• A tradition we’ve done for many years is building gingerbread houses with my brother’s kids. We usually get a kit with several small houses so we can each do one and have a small village. The kids are 10 and 13, so we’ll see how long the tradition lasts. However, for now, I love how creative everyone gets!
• Even a winter curmudgeon like me has tried to embrace winter running. With the right gear (hat, gloves, thermal pants, thermal tops, neck warmer, wind-resistant jacket, thermal socks, and hand and feet warmers🥶), going out and running in my neighbourhood can be exceptionally peaceful. Unlike the summer, when many people are out and about, I sometimes have entire runs when I don’t come across another soul, and there’s nothing but the muted sounds of my feet on the snow.
• I do love curling up under our huge soft blanket next to my husband, with a cat on each lap, enjoying the coziness of the warm lights and a video game or movie.

There is also skiing, snowboarding, skating, tobogganing, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, and even just winter walks enjoying the sparkle of the snow. Or maybe just a bracing breath on the step before making a hot drink!

As we all know from Game of Thrones, Winter is Coming. It can be tough, but give these a try to help winterize the season as best you can. Above all else, no matter how long the winter lasts, spring is always on the way.

What will you do to winterize your life this year?

If you need some help to calm your chaos and figure out your own joy snacks, get in touch!