Picture this; it’s the end of a perfectly respectable fall semester. Winter break has now come and gone, and its time to dive back into classes, research, and routine. The spring semester has begun, but all you want to do is eat and sleep. Many of us experience winter fatigue in different ways. While I lack feelings of melancholy that can accompany winter fatigue, this is a period of tiredness, excess sleep, and extreme brain fog for me. I dread the spring semester every year. I’ve fallen in love with my bed, proposed to my sweaters, and professed my love to many a bowl of soup. There is no way I’m giving up my cave of a room for lectures and chilly university buildings willingly.
This can be a precarious time for many of us in academia. Graduation may be right around the corner, maybe you’re working hard to maintain that GPA, or you’re staring down a list of applications for jobs, internships or fellowships whose deadlines are coming up any day now. All of this, on top of winter fatigue, is enough to make anyone want to throw in the towel and go right back home to the parents. To deal with this exhaustion and brain fog during the winter and early spring months I always keep a few things in mind.
Just Keep Moving
Keeping yourself in a perpetual state of motion throughout the day can do wonders for productivity in the winter. Whether its actively planning outings with friends, attending study sessions on campus, or getting up to stretch a few times during the day, the best winter mantra is “just keep moving.” Is your 5am alarm going off despite your desire to sleep in? Just keep moving; roll out of bed and start getting dressed. Time to go to that study session, but you really just want to go home to eat and bed rot? Nope, just keep moving; walk yourself over to the study spot and wait for everyone to show up. Is it that last push at the end of the day when you have just a little left to do, but you really want to put it off for tomorrow? Take a deep breath and keep moving.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t find time to rest and take longer breaks if needed. But if you find that your productivity seriously plummets in the winter, try and see what happens when you keep things in a state of motion, rather than a state of dormancy. Telling myself to keep moving or to just do something always seems to do the trick when I’m between action and non-action.
Find Your Best Working Hours
Finding the hours that allow you to effectively work can take some trial and error. You may have the most energy in the mornings but find that jumping into research makes you drowsy. The afternoons may prove productive, but only in the right workspace. Or maybe you’re sluggish throughout the day and get a burst of energy in the evenings. Taking time to recognize these patterns can help to alleviate that sense of guilt experienced when we plan something for a certain time and just can’t manage to get the work done.
Finding your best working hours is essential if you experience low energy and apathy during the winter months. By paying attention to when you work best, you’ll have better opportunities to be productive while also getting to use your down time to actively and effectively rest.
Make Some Sacrifices
Taking things off of my daily palanner is never ideal. I have a million hobbies and goals and if I can’t make a little progress towards those things each day, I feel as if it’s all going to fall apart. In the winter, though, this is completely unreasonable. I truly cannot do everything I want to do in a day, nor can most people. Making sacrifices in the winter means taking an honest look at everything you are hoping to accomplish, and often just working on the top priorities.
These sacrifices, while challenging, create space and time to rest and go with the flow of the winter months while still striving towards your essential goals. Allowing yourself to actively remove things from your day-to-day can help you to stay positive and avoid feelings of failure.
Rest
This is probably one of the most important parts of dealing with winter fatigue while in school: prioritizing rest. It’s the winter, and we are mammals after all. There is no reason why you shouldn’t get an extra hour or two of sleep, take time to make and eat hearty meals, and enjoy a few extra movies or shows when your attention is shot. Rest doesn’t just look like sleep. It also looks like longer breaks, slower moving, and less attachment to outcomes for certain activities.
By prioritizing rest in the same way we prioritize things like assignments, deadlines, or socializing, we can transform rest into a necessary good, rather than a hinderance to our other goals.
Final Word
If you struggle with winter fatigue like I do, I hope these tips helped you in some way or got you thinking about pathways to prioritize rest while still getting to be productive. Let us know what you do to get though the cruelest months of academia 🙂
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