On routines, resilience, and the lie of optimal timing
Living in Montana, I’ve heard plenty of advice about surviving winter. Get a hobby. Find something to do indoors. Pick up skiing or snowshoeing so you have a reason to get outside. The underlying message is always the same: winter is something to endure until summer arrives.
I understand why people feel this way. The days are shorter. The skies are gray. The cold keeps you inside. But after several years here, I’ve come to look forward to winter the same way I look forward to any other season. Not because I’ve found the right winter activity, but because I’ve built a life that works regardless of what’s happening outside my window.
That wasn’t always the case.
For most of my thirties, I was easily derailed. A gray morning. A night of poor sleep. A vague feeling of being unwell. Any of these was enough to justify skipping the workout, pushing back the early alarm, letting the day happen to me instead of directing it. I had goals, but they were fragile things, easily knocked over by whatever I was feeling when I woke up.
The frustrating part was that nothing looked obviously wrong. I wasn’t overworking. I wasn’t eating poorly. I wasn’t drinking excessively. By any external measure, I was doing the right things. But I felt persistently unwell. Not sick enough to stop functioning, but aware enough of the problem that it colored everything. Doctors suggested acid reflux and prescribed medication. Tests came back inconclusive. I tried elimination diets, went vegetarian, then vegan, then had food allergy tests that pointed me in circles.
What nobody asked about was the rest of my life. The stress I was carrying without realizing it. The accumulation of small things that weren’t problematic individually but were compounding in ways I couldn’t see. Was I depressed?
During this period, I heard the same advice everyone hears: push through. Just do it anyway. Your feelings don’t matter; discipline does. And I think there’s truth in that, but it’s incomplete. You can push through mental resistance. You can override the voice that says you don’t feel like it today. But if you’re pushing through while ignoring genuine signals from your body, if you’re treating symptoms while the underlying cause goes unaddressed, you’re not building discipline. You’re building toward burnout, or perhaps something worse.
The problem is that it’s hard to tell the difference. The feeling of resistance and the feeling of genuine unwellness can look remarkably similar from the inside. Both show up as a reluctance to do the hard thing. Both whisper that maybe tomorrow would be better. The only way I found to distinguish them was to stop looking for a single external solution and start looking at everything.
Eventually I reached a point where I was done. Done waiting for the diagnosis that would explain everything. Done searching for the book that would perfectly explain how to fix everything. Done being the last one out of bed, the one who used to be a morning person but somehow wasn’t anymore. I decided to take control of what I could control, starting with how I began each day.
I started getting up early again to work out; not because I felt like it, but because I had decided to. And something interesting happened. That one decision created space for other decisions. Better choices cascaded through the rest of my day. The routine I was building didn’t just give me structure; it gave me data. When I was consistent, I could actually tell the difference between resistance and genuine signals. When everything else was stable, the variables became clearer.
The change didn’t happen overnight. But over time, I stopped being easily derailed. Setbacks that would have sent me spiraling, an illness, a stressful situation, a disruption to my schedule, became things I could absorb without losing myself. I had bandwidth I didn’t have before. Not because I became tougher or more disciplined in some abstract sense, but because I had built a foundation that could handle pressure.
This is why winter doesn’t bother me anymore. When the weather forces you inside and your home routine isn’t working, the season becomes unbearable. But when you’ve built something sustainable, when your expectations for yourself are realistic but not comfortable, high enough to grow but not so high that they belong to someone else, the season is just the season. It has its limitations and its benefits, like any other.
I love summer. Swimming in the lake, being outdoors, the long days. But I also love what winter offers: the quiet mornings before sunrise when I can accomplish more than most people will all day, the forced simplicity of fewer options, the chance to build while others wait.
Because that’s what it comes down to. You can treat any season, literal or figurative, as something to endure until conditions improve. You can wait for the weather to change, for your schedule to clear, for the health issue to resolve, for the stress to pass. There’s always a reason to wait. There’s always something that would make starting easier.
But time is the one resource you can’t get back. And the optimal conditions you’re waiting for? They don’t exist. Not really. There will always be another obstacle after this one, another reason why now isn’t quite right.
The question isn’t whether you feel ready. It’s whether you’re willing to start anyway, with realistic expectations, with awareness of your actual limitations, with a willingness to adjust as you learn what you’re capable of. Not someone else’s standard. Yours. Set high enough to require growth, but grounded in who you actually are and what you can actually sustain.
Winter is here. What are you going to do with it?