About the writer: Kari Leibowitz, PhD
If you’re here, you might know this already: in 2014 I moved to the Arctic. I spent the year living in Tromsø, Norway - a city so far north that for two months each winter, the sun doesn’t rise. I spent that year studying wintertime mindsets, and found that people in Norway see, and experience, winter differently: by embracing all the season has to offer, they see winter as full of opportunity.
What was meant to be a one-year research project has become bigger than I could have imagined. I’ve written about this research in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and my work has been covered in outlets from National Geographic to Full Circle with Anderson Cooper. Throughout my psychology PhD program at Stanford University, while I was researching how to harness our mindsets to improve health and wellbeing, a pattern emerged: each year, as the days got shorter and the temperature dropped, my inbox would fill with podcast and radio invitations, requests to speak with journalists, and letters from readers sharing their thoughts on my articles. Year after year, people wanted to talk about my time living in the Arctic and the idea that our mindsets can influence our experience of winter. Winter lovers ask for advice for making the most of the season. Winter haters just want tips for making this time of year suck a little less.
So now I’m writing a book to help people around the world change their mindsets about winter. How To Winter: Harnessing Your Mindset to Embrace All Seasons of Life will be published in fall 2024 by Penguin Random House in the US, by Pan Macmillan in the UK, and (so far) will be translated into Romanian, Dutch, and Spanish as well! How To Winter will blend cultural insights and scientific research to give readers concrete practices and strategies for changing your mindset, embracing winter, and finding joy in the cold and dark.
About the newsletter
The goal of my bi-weekly (that’s every other week), seasonal newsletter will be to preview some of the tips and strategies from my book to help you cultivate a more positive wintertime mindset, embrace winter, and feel more joy, coziness, and wonder during the season.
In each newsletter, I’ll issue a winter challenge for you to try at home. These challenges are practices you can use by yourself or with friends or family. Many of these will be evidence-based, with psychological research that supports them. Lots of them will be inspired by cultures around the world where people really know how to enjoy winter. All of them will be things I’m doing myself, right alongside you.
For a chance to have your experiences shared in How To Winter, you can send me your thoughts and experiences with the winter challenges. I want to hear: what worked, what didn’t? Did you try something and have an insight, or a new experience, or see winter differently? I want to know about it. You can always reach me at kari@karileibowitz.com.
Be part of the journey
If you want to come along with me this winter, you can subscribe to Wintry Mix here. Feel free to forward to a friend or two - as we’ll see, cultivating a more positive wintertime mindset works best with a buddy. In this case, the journey to embracing winter begins with a single click.
Learn more
You can learn more about me and my work on my website: karileibowitz.com.
P.S. Thanks to my bestie Becky Lee for coming up with the name “Wintry Mix.” I love it.
