It is the darkest week of the year. For the lucky folks in Miami, the day still lasts a little over 10 hours; in Anchorage, it lasts less than six. In Utqiagvik, Alaska — the economic center of the North Slope’s oil operations — there is no day at all; the sun last set on Nov. 16 and won’t rise again until mid-January.
When there is no snow, that night feels even more endless. As temperatures warm around the globe, snowfall is noticeably declining, which actually makes winters in northern climates darker since snow reflects so much light. With some parts of the U.S. set to lose 10% to 20% of their snowpack per decade due to climate change, darker and rainier winters are likely in store for millions of us.
If that news fills you with horror and despair (as it does me) then I’ve got the book for you: Kari Leibowitz’s How to Winter, a guide to “harnessing your mindset to thrive on cold, dark, or difficult days.” Leibowitz is a Stanford-trained health researcher and psychologist specializing in “the winter blues.” She and I first spoke in January when she thoroughly debunked the claim that warmer winters will make people happier.
Leibowitz certainly doesn’t think the loss of snow is good news. (In addition to her mindset research, she is on the Science Alliance team at Protect Our Winters, a nonprofit that mobilizes outdoor recreators to take action on environmental issues.) But if warmer winters are a part of our reality going forward, then she also believes we should learn to adapt to them rather than merely endure them.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
When we spoke in January, I was working on a piece about the common misconception that global warming and warmer winters will make people happier. Though few Americans actually look forward to darker and colder days, what do we lose when we lose winter?
We lose a lot. If you live somewhere that gets below freezing or that gets snow in the winter, that opens up a huge world of winter recreation possibilities — skiing, snowshoeing, ice skating — and also a world of beauty and fascination. Even people who don’t love winter tend to think of a White Christmas and snowy cabins when they picture a winter that they would love. Ice and frost can be really beautiful.
In my personal experience, and in the experiences of many people I’ve spoken to throughout Scandinavia, a few degrees or more below freezing is much better than a few degrees above freezing because then you get that humidity, and that cold soaks into your bones. There are a lot of places in the U.S. that are really on the border, where a few degrees makes a really big difference between a colder, snowier winter and a warmer, rainier winter. Snow also reflects light; it makes it brighter during the darkest days of the year.
I’m glad you brought that up! One of the things I learned last time we spoke was that climate change is making the world darker in the sense that snow is what reflects light in the wintertime, so warmer and drizzlier winters are potentially more difficult for us to tolerate than very cold ones. What would you recommend people who live in these transitional or rapidly changing climates do to combat the winter blues?
Working with the darkness is key wherever you live, whether it’s somewhere snowier or less snowy. In Scandinavia, you will not see big, bright overhead lights on in people’s houses during the night or the evening in the winter. It’s almost counterintuitive because you think, “Oh, it’s dark outside, let me make it as bright as possible in here.” But that creates a really strong contrast that is tiring for our eyes and our bodies.
Lower lights — using candlelight — turn the darkness into an asset. You can only eat dinner by candlelight when the sun sets early; it makes the darkness part of the vibe and it also reduces the big contrast with the outdoors. That might make it easier to get outside and do things, too, because it doesn’t look as dark out compared to inside. On a gray, rainy morning, I will light candles for 15 minutes when I eat my breakfast. In the U.S., this sort of lighting is usually reserved for special occasions, but I think making it part of the everyday is really valuable.
You also write in the book about rebranding Christmas lights as “winter lights” and leaving them up all season long.
This is something they did in Edmonton, Canada, when they were working on their winter city strategy. It kind of kills me when the Christmas lights come down in the second week of January! We have so much winter darkness left to go and we need that light. Even at home, using twinkly lights in our living rooms makes such a difference in the vibe.
You can only enjoy Christmas lights or winter lights when it’s dark out, and acknowledging that darkness brings something special also helps reframe our feelings about winter.
You wrote this book because many people struggle with the winter. But as I was reading it, I was thinking about how much I dread summer and the inescapable heat of August. Do you think the mindset strategies you suggest for winter could apply to “summering” as well?
They are really different challenges. My theory about winter is that the cold is not as big a problem as the darkness. There is research that backs this up: Evidence shows that light makes us feel awake and that it makes us feel good, and darkness makes us feel tired and can have a mild depressant effect. But the larger message of the book, and the larger approach to the winter mindset, is to find the opportunity in the challenge that you’re facing. And that can help us with anything — including really hot summers.
So, what’s the opportunity? Maybe the opportunity is that you can do more things at night when the temperature is really nice; there is something really lovely about being outside at night when it’s warm! Or maybe you can spend time resting during the hottest parts of the day, like they do in places like Spain. I’ve been to other places in the Mediterranean where they have metal blackout shades that are great for sleeping and keeping it cool. We should think, “What are the opportunities here to work with the climate, to build houses differently that have better cross breezes or have atriums?” We need to work with this reality.We need to adapt.
When did you start thinking about climate change in your winter mindset work?
It really came from my experiences in the Arctic. I’d talk to people there and they would be like, “It’s raining in January. That’s very unusual.” When I was living in Norway [between 2014 and 2015], I went to Svalbard, and there was a bunch of stuff that I couldn’t do because it had been too warm. It had rained, and then the rain freezes on the mountain tops, and it snows on top of that, and then there’s avalanche risk. We were going to go to some ice caves and it wasn’t safe at that time. I was talking to people in Svalbard who were like, “Normally, this fjord freezes over, and we can snowmobile from place to place in the winter, but this year, we can’t.”
Being [in Tromsø, Norway], living there, talking to those people, and really caring about that community, and staying plugged in from afar — it’s really personal. A lot of the things that I was learning about in my research that people in Tromsø look forward to, and that make winter great, are not things that they can always count on. And I think that’s true everywhere you go.
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