How To Stay Sane, Rested, and Useful During Hard Times | Katherine May

What It Covers

Katherine May, author of *Wintering*, joins Dan Harris to explore how humans can navigate difficult life periods by drawing on nature's seasonal rhythms. The conversation covers practical strategies including ritualized rest, segmented sleep, cold water swimming, news consumption limits, and the distinction between control and agency during times of collective crisis.

Key Questions Answered

• •Wintering as a framework: Difficult life periods — illness, job loss, grief, family crisis — are not personal failures but predictable, recurring seasons that all humans experience. May coined the term "wintering" to normalize these downturns. Accepting that hard times are structurally inevitable, rather than evidence of individual inadequacy, reduces the compounding shame that makes difficult periods significantly harder to endure.
• •Control vs. agency distinction: Believing you can control external events causes measurable suffering. May separates control (which humans rarely have) from agency (always available). When facing distressing news cycles or collective crises, identify one concrete action within your actual sphere — donating, helping a neighbor, showing up locally — rather than fixating on outcomes beyond your reach.
• •News consumption limit: May recommends choosing two or three trusted news sources and reading them once daily, mirroring the pre-digital newspaper model. Unless a situation directly affects your household, one informed daily check is sufficient to stay engaged without triggering the chronic danger-signaling loop that social media amplifies, which exhausts people and ultimately reduces their capacity for effective action.
• •Segmented sleep normalization: Historian Roger Ekirch's research documents that before electric lighting, humans routinely slept in two distinct blocks of roughly four hours each, with a waking "watch" period in between used for prayer, conversation, or quiet reflection. Blood chemistry during this middle-night window resembles a meditative state. Waking at 2am is historically normal — getting up to read rather than catastrophizing about lost sleep is the practical response.
• •Ritual as seasonal anchor: Marking calendar transitions — winter solstice, early February's Celtic Imbolc, Halloween — gives psychological structure to long, undifferentiated winter months. May suggests starting small: light a candle at sunrise, invite one friend to watch a meaningful film, or join an existing community ceremony. Rituals work best when held loosely, welcoming participants as they actually are rather than requiring performance.
• •Rest without performance: Effective rest bears no resemblance to curated wellness imagery. For many people, rest occurs in motion — walking, swimming — not stillness. May recommends cold water swimming specifically for pleasure and bodily awareness, not optimization metrics. The key test, borrowed from Tantra teacher Barbara Carrellas, is finding the "resilient edge of resistance" — the point where sensation feels good just before crossing into discomfort — rather than maximizing duration for social media content.