Embracing the Winter: A new outlook on the new year

January. Yuck. Miserable weather, no sparkly lights, and no excuse for indulgence. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we all want to write a list of overly ambitious resolutions with which to motivate (or punish!) ourselves for the year to come. What if we try instead to find small ways to help us embrace the calm and recover after the festive storm?

It’s only cold if you’re standing still

When it comes to this time of year, resisting the urge to stay inside is paramount. While instinctively the shorter days and post-holiday lull can make us feel like staying home and keeping warm, a walk in the crisp wintry air can be rewarding and make the hunkering down afterwards feel all the better. Unless the rain is pouring down, it takes a lot to beat the sensation of getting yourself moving and clearing out your lungs from the mugginess of central heating. Just as long as you’ve invested in a good coat and found some routes with a coffee kiosk somewhere along the way! The National Trust is often a good place to start.

Let food be thy medicine

After the excesses of December, we can often feel conflicted by the desire to rein in our consumption, yet also comfort ourselves with something warm and delicious. Somehow a green salad is just not going to cut it when the wind is howling outside! And whilst you might not be inclined to spend your evenings trying to peel a butternut squash (without cutting off at least one finger in the process because it is sooooooo tough) to make wholesome batches of a hearty but uninspiring soup, perhaps we can reframe our expectation of what constitutes a treat? Once the house is no longer full of chocolates and cake, investing in a healthy shop-bought soup once in a while, enjoyed in your favourite mug while you’re wrapped in a blanket on the sofa, could still feel pleasingly indulgent. Especially if it follows that lovely brisk walk! And there are plenty of nutritious bread options like wholegrain sourdough to accompany your soup! Check out this podcast by ZOE Science and Nutrition ‘can bread be healthy?’ to make an informed choice!

Sleep is the best meditation

While we all know how important it is to get enough sleep, it still manages to evade most of us a lot of the time. How can we make sure that we are responding to our bodies and fuelling them with enough good quality sleep to get each day off to the best possible start? Firstly we need to try to sense the initial wave of exhaustion - the first melatonin hit - and act straight away by starting our bedtime routine. But for many of us there’s a disconnect here and we often miss or fail to interpret cues from our bodies. We’re conditioned to ‘power through’ so it’s easy to overlook the physiological ‘power-down’ feeling. And our lifestyles mean that we chronically override our bodies’ natural cues with TV, mobiles, caffeine, or late eating. One good and readily available option is to use a meditation app (such as Headspace or Calm) to help you to focus inwards, amplify the body’s relaxation response and increase sensitivity to that surge in melatonin. Simple breathwork like nasal breathing and deep sighing with your mouth closed can also help. And if you’re feeling congested, you can follow this simple video to help offload the nasal sinuses.

Block out the noise

I don’t mean literal noise, but the barrage of media messaging about completely revolutionising your life and changing all your habits in search of ‘something better’ in the new year. Is this really that helpful? Maybe instead of transforming our lives post-holiday season, we can take stock of the things that are working for us and commit to prioritising these to get us through those first dreary weeks of the new year. Adopting a mindset focused on retaining and tweaking our habits for the longer term rather than an intimidating lifestyle overhaul can be a much better catalyst for progress.

Needless to say, making sure you keep up with your Pilates practice will be top of the list as we embrace the Winter in early 2023 😊.

And who says you can’t have twinkly lights up until Spring?!