8 Brain Hacks to Beat the Winter Blahs
8 Brain Hacks to Beat the Winter Blahs
It’s that time of year. The time when the days get shorter and darker, the air gets colder, and the weather gets more and more unruly. The weeks between when the clocks “fall back”, and when the days start getting longer again can have a dramatic effect on our body’s internal clock and sap energy that comes more easily in the warmer months. There are days when we find it hard to motivate our basic to do list items, which are suddenly full with end of year events such as final exams, work obligations, and holiday planning. Additional stressors such as strained finances, prolonged social interactions, rich foods, and societal pressures to create the perfect holiday experience can leave our nervous systems overwhelmed and our brains and bodies caught up in hybernation-like inaction.
Indeed, our nervous systems are greatly affected by changes in temperature, sunlight, and activity levels that come with the winter seasons. Luckily, there are a few simple ways we can trick our nervous systems into performing for us, so we can stay active. Below are 8 brain “hacks” to beat the winter blahs.
Frame Each Task as a Choice
In our busy lives, there are things we can control and things we cannot, and the way we talk to ourselves about these can greatly impact the way we see them. Many cognitive counselors work with clients on how they talk to themselves about their problems, helping to identify how subtle changes in word choice can impact the emotions we associate with it. For instance, the sentence “I don’t know how to do that” takes on a radically different tone when we add “....yet” at the end as in “I don’t know how to do that yet.” The same goes for the many tasks that we need to accomplish in a day. Instead of telling ourselves, “I have to determine a menu for the dinner party by tomorrow,” we might simply say, “I want to determine the menu for the dinner party by tomorrow” or even a slightly more neutral “I’m going to determine the menu for the dinner party by tomorrow.” If we use this kind of language, it helps us to recognize that we have options. Even more so, humans are hard-wired to feel better when they feel like they have autonomy over the challenges they face.Framing a task as taking control of a problem can trick us into wanting to do it even more. If we make these subtle language shifts habitual, we can actually train our brains to view our challenges with an open-minded curiosity instead of avoidance or pessimism.
2. Activate a Somatic Reset
Often we wait for a thought or feeling in our brains to go down to our bodies to tell them to move. That signal may seem not to come, because top-to-bottom is actually not the direction that the strongest signals travel. Our nervous systems are actually designed to prioritize information that is coming up from the body and traveling to the brain – not the other way around. The reasons for this are due to historical traits that helped our ancestors stay alive. After all, who was more likely to live – our ancestor who reacted to a sight or sound and then figured out whether it was a tiger or a kitten OR our ancestor who wasted precious time figuring out that it was a tiger before starting the process of reacting? If we waited for our brains to decide what it was, make a decision about what to do, and then send a command back to our body to move, we wouldn’t have survived!!! This mechanism of bottom-to-top communication can be used in our favor by providing stimulation to our brains to give them a wake up nudge. Going outside for a burst of cold air and some fresh air in our lungs are great ways to wake our bodies up. Similarly, a splash of cold water on our faces or hopping into a chilly shower can achieve the same ends - resetting the neurotransmitters that motivate us and telling our cardiopulmonary systems to shift out of anxious states. Our bodies will take the threat of being cold and/or wet as a “negative” stimuli, making anything we do immediately after seem more enjoyable - like that task we’ve been putting off!! Another tactic is to take a brisk walk around the block or do a few jumping jacks or push ups. Both will shift our blood and oxygen levels, uplevel our metabolisms, and give our brains a dose of feel good neurotransmitters – giving us some energy to get started on our to-do list!!
3. Take Smaller Steps
Imagine being at a party, running into a friend we haven’t talked to in a while, and deciding to catch up. If there is a loud crash across the room, it won’t matter how interesting the conversation is. For just a second, our bodies and minds will redirect their energy to the new information that has been presented to us, fully engaged in determining if the sound indicates a danger to our well-being. Additionally, we will feel a sense of being “startled”, and it might take a moment to concentrate on our friend again. Indeed, as much as we try to convince ourselves that we are able to think about more than one stressful thing at once, we cannot. A similar principle applies when we try to complete a task that has multiple steps. To say that we are going to “write an essay for English class” may feel so big as to overload our brains. Creating several smaller steps and writing them on a single piece of paper make it easier to see exactly what needs to happen. Instead, we might identify five specific steps: review the assignment description, read three research articles about the topic, create an outline, write a draft, and then edit the draft. Perhaps we will find a new step to complete as we go, but this technique will help us focus on one step at a time. A bonus is that crossing each step off the list one at a time will motivate us to keep going!!
4. “Frontload” Rewards and Change “Friction”
Those who have ever been responsible for a dog or a child will be familiar with how rewards encourage certain behaviors. But how and when they are received has the greatest impact on aligning our behaviors with our goals. Frontload most of the reward at the start of a task. For example, if we are struggling to exercise, we might make most of our reward contingent on putting on our gym shoes and driving to the gym, as we are unlikely to immediately go home and will likely go inside to do a few exercises. Instead of rewarding ourselves with something lavish, we may find that putting a check on our calendar or taking a moment to revel in how proud we are of ourselves will suffice and also be easier on the budget! Additionally, “decreasing or increasing the friction” makes a desired behavior easier to do while making a competing behavior harder. For example, if we want to make sure we do a yoga session in the morning but know that we often spend that time scrolling on our phone, we might spend a minute before bed putting our yoga mat on our bedroom floor while also putting our cellphone in another room.
5. Use Short Bursts
Despite our best efforts, our lives are often very busy, and some days we may be too tired to accomplish our goals. However, short bursts of activity can help us to make small dents in our project. Instead of spending several hours re-organizing all our kitchen cupboards, we can work on a single shelf or a single type of item, like the area where we keep our pots and pans. We can also define the burst by time instead of by task. For example, when struggling to organize our email inbox, we can set a timer and spend just 10 minutes deleting any email that we know for sure is spam. Ten minutes may not be enough to get to the whole inbox, but reducing our inbox even a little helps, and maybe it will keep us going a little bit longer.
6. Visualize the Impact
Humans have survived for as long as we have in amazingly harsh conditions and created complex systems because of our unique ability to engage in future planning and imagine places that we’ve not directly experienced. Our brains also prioritize strong feelings, so we will take actions to either decrease them or increase them. So if we can not just imagine what the results will look like, but how it will feel, we will feel a stronger desire to accomplish the work that will get us there. For example, when starting a new hobby like woodworking, we might consider an easier project like a shelf that we can create while stuck indoors all winter. After that we might think about a larger project like a picnic table that we will be able to enjoy the following summer. We should not only focus on what these items will look like but also how we will feel when we have completed them, really take the time to imagine how it will feel to put books on a shelf we made ourselves or eat a lunch full of summer time treats while sitting in the sun with our friends.
7. Engage in Group/Partner Support
Another reason that humans have come as far as we have as a species is because we have evolved to work in groups. There are certainly those of us who feel more comfortable working alone than in a group, but we do receive a brain-based reward when we accomplish things with others. Sometimes just having another person present can not just motivate us to start a task, but can keep us out of our mind and long enough to complete the work. For others, just saying the goal out loud, and talking through the steps and possible barriers can serve as a version of accountability. However, in these cases, it is important that we know what motivates us and whether we will then complete the task just to avoid feelings of guilt or shame, as these patterns are not necessarily healthy in the long term.
8. Make All Experiences as “Good”
In a study of math students, children who were given encouragement while they focused on completing their homework assignments believed that they were better at math and were more likely to keep trying to learn math than those who only received encouragement if they earned a high score on a final project or exam. So while it is important to imagine what it will look like and feel like to have a clean house full of family and friends who are enjoying a holiday party, it is equally important to enjoy the process of getting there – maybe by turning on fun music, making chores into a game with our spouse or children, or mindfully noticing how good our bodies feel during the effort. And when the task is complete, it is important that we see that anything that has happened is useful, if only because it tells us something about how we operate. If we have achieved our goals, it is important to ask ourselves, “How exactly did I do that?” It didn’t just happen. There were likely a number of processes that we can reflect on and use more intentionally in the future. We can identify what motivated us and what got in our way. At the very least, sometimes the best we can do is congratulate ourselves for at least trying, even if the result wasn’t exactly what we’d hoped, because it shows that we have integrity, perseverance, and are allowing ourselves to grow and change.
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Motivation can be hard, especially in the winter months. Working with a mental health professional can help clients learn about their patterns, assess and address their challenges, and celebrate their successes – even the ones that others in their lives may not fully understand or appreciate. Dr. “E” Elisa Woodruff (she/they) has training in cognitive, behavioral, and neuroscience-informed modalities that can help clients achieve many behavior based goals. Along with traditional talk therapy methods, Dr. Woodruff holds certificates in Neuropsychotherapy (exercises that help to strengthen and balance the brain), the Assessment and Treatment of Attention Deficit Disorder, Insomnia, and related challenges. Dr. Woodruff is currently taking new clients. Call 630-216-9151 to set up an appointment!
