On cold, surrender, and the body’s elemental work.
I’ll be honest about how it started. I didn’t turn off the heating because I had read something compelling or because someone told me to. I did it the way I do most things that end up mattering: I was curious about what would happen if I stopped managing something I had always assumed needed managing.
Four winters ago. And I haven’t gone back since.
What the Cold Actually Does
The first thing I noticed was not what I expected. I expected discomfort, and while there was some, underneath it, fairly quickly, appeared something else. A kind of alertness. A sense of the body waking up and taking itself seriously in a way that central heating had been quietly preventing.
What I understand now, having lived it, is that the body in cold is not a body in distress. It is a body at work. Metabolism rises. Circulation shifts, prioritising what needs warmth and drawing resources inward. The immune system activates. Detoxification deepens. Repair processes that are easy to overlook in the comfortable middle temperature of a heated room run harder in the cold.
The lethargy of deep winter is real. I feel it every year. Nights hitting zero, the pull toward stillness, the way the body wants to slow and quieten and do less to settle back in itself for needed reparation. I have never had the chance to notice it. Now I recognise it for what it is: devotion. The body fulfilling its oldest duty, the one it has been carrying out every single winter for as long as human bodies have existed. Restoring itself. Processing what accumulated. Preparing for what comes next.
This is real work. The kind that happens in the background, out of sight, and is easy to mistake for nothing because nothing visible is happening.
Living With the Seasons
What surprised me more than the physical changes was what happened to my sense of time and rhythm. When you stop controlling the temperature of your environment, you start actually living in it. The seasons become something you are genuinely inside of.
Winter became winter again. Not a period to get through with adequate layers and a thermostat set to twenty degrees. Something with its own texture, its own demands, its own gifts. The body started telling me things I had not been able to hear when I was busy keeping it comfortable. When to move. When to stop. When to eat more and when less. When to sleep longer and when the darkness was asking for something other than sleep.
I started to understand that the body knows what it needs when we stop overriding it. That the instinct to slow down starting usually mid-November is not laziness but intelligence. That the impulse to eat more densely in cold months is physiology. That the body is reading the environment and responding accordingly, the way it always has, the way it was always meant to.
On Sickness
I get sick rarely now. Not never, but rarely, and when I do it is brief.
I think about sickness differently than I used to. The conventional picture is of something arriving from outside — a pathogen, a virus, a thing that attacks — and the body defending against it. But what I have witnessed in my own body is something closer to a release. A clearing. The body processing what has built up when the ongoing renovation work has been interrupted or insufficient.
What we call the flu, when we are lucky enough to get the mild version, might be the body finally catching up. Finally getting the space and resources to do what it has been trying to do all along. The fever is not the enemy. It is the mechanism. The fatigue is not failure. It is the body appropriating all available resources for something more important than productivity.
What I believe, from living this, is that sickness happens more readily when we don’t allow the constant process of renewal. When we override the signals, push through the lethargy, keep the temperature artificially stable, stay busy when the season is asking for stillness. The build-up has nowhere to go. And eventually it goes somewhere anyway. The scrolling through seasons in the same exact way and pace doesn’t align with our body internal regulations.
What Winter Asks For
Now when the cold deepens I lean into it rather than against it. Nourishment and sleep become sacred rituals. I move when the body wants to move and I stop when it wants to stop. I let the darkness be dark and the cold be cold and the slowness be slow.
And I witness, every year, the quiet astonishment and satisfaction of a body doing exactly what it was built to do.
If only we let things happen more naturally. The wonders that would become visible.