I stayed in an Airbnb recently and encountered the usual dysphoria one feels when occupying strangers’ homes: How can it be so difficult to unlock a front door, where are the lights, should I have taken my shoes off before running to the restroom, and, for me, the most perplexing, why is it so cold in here, and how on earth do I manipulate this weird thermostat?
Regulating one’s temperature this time of year is, in much of the Northern Hemisphere, a fundamental challenge.
O, to truly understand the sneaky calculus that determines “real feel” — the weather app said 40s, but I didn’t count on the wind! Layers, you tell yourself before leaving the house, but how many can one reasonably layer under a down parka before locomotion becomes impossible?
I saw a headline from T Magazine and clicked eagerly, hoping it would solve things: “How to Stay Warm This Winter,” a list of luxurious accessories that promise to make things tolerable now that “we’ve reached the part of winter where it’s just you versus the elements.” I don’t know that I can justify cashmere earmuffs this year, but maybe over-the-knee socks?
One solution, I’m told, is to become a tea person (the Brits just call this “a person”). Tea people, like sauna people, understand that warming oneself is not a layering challenge, but a cellular one. You could armor yourself with sealskin mittens and a down coat indistinguishable from a mountaineer’s sleeping bag, or you could mainline hot liquids and alter your temperature from the inside out.
Tea people always have a mug going, a thermos at hand for refills. They carry out their all-day-long, all-day-strong warming ritual in the background, without the fanfare of coffee drinkers with their single-serving special orders. If they’re queried about their tea habits, they may, to the tea-ignorant, come off as a tad smug, like people with established yoga practices.
Remember the late-2010s craze for “hygge,” the Danish concept of coziness and comfortable well-being? The Scandinavians, the rest of the world realized, might know a thing or two about optimizing for winter. They know from long, dark seasons, but still rank as the happiest people on the planet. Kari Leibowitz, a psychologist who moved north of the Arctic Circle to study how people thrive there during winter, wrote in The Times in 2020 that the secret is a “positive wintertime mind-set.” It’s possible, she found, to cultivate this, even if you’ve always associated the season with dread.
A mind-set shift involves changing what you notice, what you remark upon, where you place your focus. Leibowitz advises concentrating on what you like about winter (cooking, cozy indoor reading, the quiet after snowfall) over what you don’t (don’t get me started). “Appoint yourself a wintertime ambassador this year,” she advised, “and encourage everyone around you to notice what they like about the winter as well.”
I imagine this self-designation might read as irritating to one’s shivering friends and family who would prefer to partake in the time-honored January tradition of complaining about the weather, but I’m already the unofficial publicist for summer, so maybe a new seasonal enthusiasm would read as refreshing.
Leibowitz also advises people to get outside, to figure out the layering situation such that experiencing the Norwegian concept of “friluftsliv,” or “open air life,” isn’t excruciating. The Swedish author of “There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather” (I think that sentence usually completes with “only bad clothes”) told Leibowitz, “There are some days when it’s harder to get outside than others, but I know that if I do, I’m never going to regret going outside.”
Ah! That penetrates, doesn’t it? You’re never going to regret going outside. This is the sort of mantra that works on me. Every fiber of my being may disagree with it, but if I allow my brain to override the resistance, if I believe intellectually that it’s true, I’ll go out in the cold and quite possibly discover the physical and mental benefits of “outdoorphins.” If I can take a break from my usual winter pastimes of turning up the thermostat when no one is looking and making others touch and offer sympathy for my corpse-cold extremities, there’s a different relationship with winter awaiting.
You’re never going to regret going outside. No regrets, only possibility. You don’t have to make snow angels or take up cold-water swimming — just get your good clothes on and get out there.
- Credit: The New York Times
- Author: Melissa Kirsch
