10 Weeks of Winter

Inclement interruptions…

Snow falls in silence transforming the world in the dark of night. The morning arrives to reveal a new landscape. Side streets lay under a heavy white blanket, while main roads obscured with muddy slush track new traffic patterns in the tire prints and intermittent disclosure of where the lines used to be. Vehicles sit in heaps at the sides of the road like landscaping borders. The snows mutes and muffles the definition of things.

Moving through the snow-covered world requires adaptability. Paths may form by the first explorers of the new frozen land only to be buried again by more ice-bound precipitation. Shoveling, salting, and sheer abundance of use opens ways for travel only for ice to form sidewalks into something more like a slide than a promenade. Plowing similarly clears the road for ice to settle while at the same time further encasing vehicles in an icy prison. From one hour to the next the demands of traversing the outside winter world change, and the journeys succeed through responsive negotiation with the conditions and environment. Alterations to movement patterns, routes, attire, mode of transportation, or additional gear are all interventions applied to habitual customs for getting out and going somewhere

Colloquially (or according to common use) the word intervention conjures the activity of a group addressing harmful or destructive behaviors of an individual, but in my professional practice the word has a more neutral and functional meaning for understanding process. Interventions describe an interrupting activity or action that helps facilitate changes or new directions for the subject or process being intervened. I like this concept. I find it useful in understanding how to alter systems and behaviors through addition. Interventions, in my frame of reference, add something to invoke change. (More on removing or stopping and maintaining processes and activities later.)

Adding…

I like to start with adding. It’s friendly. In a way, snowfall is an additive intervention. It intervenes in the world and in our lives by adding layer upon layer of frozen water to all the unsheltered surface parts of the environment. Because this intervention occurs we’re forced to change and adapt (or we can try behaving as usual and wreck our cars or fall on faces). Snow adds new dynamics, new obstacles, and new opportunities to our experience. When changing a process, activity, behavior, etc. to achieve different outcomes we can use interventions in a similar way. If we want to prolong our vision as we age we might take eye health supplements. If we want to get in the habit of taking a homemade lunch to work we might place Post-It notes in key locations to remember to pack and bring the lunch. If we want to make sure we wake up on time for a flight or a trip (or work or school) we might set an alarm. All of these additions are interventions to what we would otherwise do or see or hear, etc.

For my 10 Weeks of Winter, most of the changes I’m making, and the most foundational changes I’m making, come in the form of interventions. They are rudimentary additions that ground and support significant broader change. In many cases they are also themselves adaptable. I have already expressed these interventions in my list of protocols, but here I will elaborate on their role as daily interventions:

• Red Light Therapy: is an added activity that intervenes on behalf of circadian rhythms. It has (or may have) other health benefits, but the main purpose for including it as a protocol is to offset impacts of too much screentime and long hours of darkness. If effective, it should contribute to easier waking up in the morning and feeling tired when it is time to sleep. In recent past winters I have found myself losing track of the time of day (or rather night) while spending my life in the dark lit up by screens. I would stay up until 2 in the morning without realizing it because I didn’t feel tired, wasn’t paying attention to the time, and didn’t have an outside light source to help alert my sense of the time. By using the red light panel first thing in the morning and in the evening before bed I’m hoping to create improved physiological signals for wakefulness and tiredness.
• Morning Light Viewing: similarly to red light therapy is an added practice that may help set circadian rhythms. My understanding is that those who want to wake up earlier can use morning light viewing to help them naturally wake up at earlier times. The complication for anyone living sufficiently north of California is that it may be dark for half the year at the time when you want to wake up. Nevertheless, and again according to my understanding, viewing morning light as close to sunrise as possible can still help you wake up earlier, and, very importantly, get tired when you need to sleep to support your early rise. My hope is that using the red light panel in the morning when it’s still dark will augment morning light viewing, and aiming to view morning light near dawn or at the latest by 8 AM (approximately the latest sunrise time of the year in my region) will help my body adapt to earlier times of alertness faster. With this intervention I’m hoping to offset sluggish tired mornings when I either hit the snooze too many times or accomplish little because I’m so tired and unmotivated in the remaining dark of the morning.
• Vitamin D Supplementation: adds hormonal support during low light seasons that boosts mood and feelings of robustness and resilience. This one is pretty straightforward. If you’ve never gone the vitamin D rabbit hole I invite you to give it search!
• Movement: is not really an intervention for me at this time. I already have a “movement practice” and it belongs more in the category of maintenance. If anything, the inclusion of movement as an intervention is with a focus on daily consistency. For the 10 Weeks of Winter it must be a daily practice. I know I need movement as a lifestyle intervention to boost my mood and generally feel good in my mind and body. Further to that, I am more likely to fall out of consistency in the winter because I prefer to be outside for movement and exercise and it can be pretty yucky out there. The intervention component may need to be something more like “dress for movement”. If I feel warm and can stay dry (apart from sweating) the follow through should flow more naturally.
• Breathing Practices: are a subtle intervention, and effective subtle work is often the most impactful kind of work. This intervention is almost entirely a foundation for everything else. If you’re not buying into this one, I get it. I have to talk myself into it every time I’ve applied breathing practices. They seem almost silly. I mean, I breath all the time. Focusing on my breathing, yeah, I notice things, like shallow breathing high in my chest instead of deep breathing, but what does it really do to pay attention to breathing and do funky breath holds and exhales and belly breaths? When I begin a regular breathing practice it feels as though I just do the practice and forget about it. If I don’t pay attention I hardly notice that it’s done anything at all. So why include it? Because if I do pay attention I notice it’s done so much for me that I won’t be able to summarize it here. Depending on the practice there are a couple immediate effects that dovetail into other activities, such as: warming up my body, energizing my body, calming my mind, and relaxing my body. Breathing practices can sustain me and heat me up before working out or going into the cold, and they can wind me down into a restful state that’s just prefect for going to bed. There’s so much to say that I will leave this topic for exploration in at least one full blog post.
• Going Outside: is something I’m nearly compelled to do when the weather is nice, and also when the weather is snowy, but always when it’s light out rather than when it’s dark. Adding a going outside daily intervention in the winter will help ensure that I do indeed go out when it’s grey and rainy and cold and all the environmental signals flag staying inside. The reason why this intervention matters for the 10 Weeks of Winter is that where I live there’s a high probably that most of the 70 days will have heavy dark clouds, high humidity, and off and on rain. If I don’t add in going out I probably won’t do it, and I’ll miss the winter days entirely. It matters to my mental wellbeing to be outside in the natural light even when it is masked by cloud cover or blurred by rain. This addition, I know from experience, helps me feel like I have experienced the day which makes the dark of night a happier more satisfying time. Instead of feeling the drag of missed opportunity once the dark sets in I will be more contented to do inside things because I have been outside, I have breathed the fresh air, and I have walked in the daylight.
• Reflection: is an additive process and facilitator for adaptation. By way of writing a daily blog post I’m inviting myself into an opportunity to think about what I’m doing, how well its working, what challenges I’m facing, and what might need to change to support my overall appreciation of winter. It’s a meta-step – it’s a process about a process that impacts the process. I have a covert purpose here as well. I’m hoping a daily writing practice well help jump start my wayside writing projects. More on this topic another time.

My daily interventions are by necessity pragmatic. They serve many short- and long-term purposes and are concise and contained in scope so that there is low friction to implementation and so that they can survey as base to return to when life gets unmanageable. In addition to the daily interventions, I also intend to add sauna, cleaning and clearing, and rest as interventions at regular but less frequent intervals.

• Sauna – I have a theory that a missing element of my winter experience is heat. My pet theory coupled with the use of sauna by winter immersed cultures lends me to believe that I may gain mood or physiological enhancement from regular use. My plan is a minimum once per week sauna that may build up to three or four times per week.
• Cleaning and Clearing – I intend to celebrate New Years in Japanese style with a thorough cleaning of the spaces I occupy, at which point I will explore this topic in more depth. In the lead up to and following the new year I will prep for cleaning and plan and action decluttering. This added activity is likely to take on a variable schedule that fits around work and events and holidays and ultimately needs its own attention and planning. It will serve as an intervention against oppressive feelings of darkness. Its purposes is to bring lightness through expanding and clearing physical spaces, clearing old and making way for the new.
• Rest – I’ve already written about the season’s call to slow down. In a related way the winter also welcomes rest. It’s only natural that many people feel a kind of desire to hibernate when it’s cold and dark. As summer offers excellent conditions to be active, winter offers the opposite, but not reverse, mode. Growth and productivity are still occurring during rest. Much of recovery where new ideas are reinforced in the brain and muscles are repaired and strengthened comes from high quality deep rest or active rest. Adding rest as an intervention to my 10 Weeks of Winter just makes sense to me, but I’m not sure yet what shape it will take. Some of the other interventions, like breathing exercises, should help facilitate rest, but I believe there are more lessons from winter to draw from and use. Perhaps it is only that the idea of rest as something you “do” instead of an act of “not doing” is foreign to me. What if rest can be a priority within the 10 Weeks of Winter? I have unanswered questions on this subject, but I will follow my intuition and dive deeper as the days get darker.

With a few simple and subtle interventions at hand I’m hoping to navigate this winter differently, optimally, with ease and lightness. This first week I have begun by adding, and next week I will expand my approach to removing, stopping, or limiting, and to maintaining. More on these kinds of changes next. To the Americans, Happy Thanksgiving!