Preparing for Winter: How to Get Your Mind Ready for Crappy Weather & Dark Nights

I’ve been lucky. I’ve travelled to a lot of bright sunny places. Places where winter seems scarcely real. Britain has weather, other places have climate. But I always come home, and every time I have the shock of Northern Europe’s cold, brooding winters. Of course, the UK doesn’t have it half as bad as Scandinavia. If there was a bleakness Olympics, we might not reach the podium per se. But that knowing it’s darker and colder elsewhere hardly lifts my soul. But I do have a bag of tricks to survive the gloom.

Let’s start with the most obvious; winter leads to spring, spring leads to summer, and summer leads to cruel vindictive judgements about my beach body. Mine will never be good enough, not by my own judgement. But I can always be better. The old saying is that when you start to workout it takes two weeks for you to notice, a month for your S.O., and six weeks for everyone else. Great for those able to arrange their lives for a Hollywood style workout and diet programme.

In reality, it takes probably two months for me to be happy with any kind of workout results. I need to work, and I don’t completely control when overtime hits. I have family responsibilities, and to be quite honest, my mates are down the pub waiting for me. Until a major film studio talent spots me as I walk down the street and signs me with a massive advance payment, so I can quit my job start my new healthier lifestyle, it’s going to take me longer. In all honesty, it will take me many, many months.

So, when I start heading home from work in the dark, that is my workout starting gun. Time to lift some weights, get on a treadmill, and generally emulate a montage from Rocky (including soundtracking my workouts to Bill Conti). Well, all this to a certain point. Life will get in the way, I’ll overindulge at Christmas, and enjoy the odd hot chocolate with marshmallows. I don’t do without those. I need my civilised comforts. But when I indulge, I feel I earn it.

Feeling better physically is just one aspect, but it is important. Frankly, throughout summer I scarcely think about my workout routine, there are enough fun things to do outside, swimming, cycling, running, long walks in the countryside (for real), that I don’t think about it. Winter, I need to be scientific in my approach. I carry that into other areas of life. As the leaves start to brown, and I reflect on my own journey through life, I look for deficiencies. I look for solutions.

Winter is the perfect time to start any kind of self-improvement course. Last winter, I took cooking classes. Again, in summer, I don’t want to be stuck indoors. If I took an Italian class in June or July, it would be too late to learn anything useful for a holiday, and I’d be staring out of the window at everyone else enjoying themselves. In winter, as the rain hammers away outside, I’m memorising ‘un gelato, per favore, bella’ and practicing my winks in the mirror. Next summer is going to be great.