Steel-lit days. Charcoal evenings. Dark nights.

Winter is part of the cycle of life. Every season brings us something different. Something to celebrate. And that includes winter.

This is the season of rest and repair, reminding stressed humans that just like the rest of the natural world, we are not machines. We can’t be endlessly productive, always full-on, routinely and reliably the same. That’s a madness that took hold during the Industrial Revolution when, for the first time in evolutionary history, humans started to tick on clock-time, no longer following the pattern of the seasons.

Few of us would want to live without electricity or central heating, the comforts of modern life, but everything comes at a cost and it’s more than the monthly bill.

Of all four seasons, winter is the one that can slow us down. It’s a chance to move sideways from the over-lit, hamster-wheel world of our usual life. Sure, you have to get the kids to school and go to work, but there are opportunities to be found in these cold, short, grey days, sometimes shot through with sharp sun.

We can side with winter. And if we do, we might find that winter sides with us.

December 21 is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, but it also marks the return of the sun. This was perfect imagery for the Christ story – hope born in the bleak midwinter.

No one has to believe in a sky-god to recognise the beauty of the image. We can repurpose that deep desire for hope and light in the darkness. Midwinter is a time for reflection and realignment. Time as a human being as well as a human doing. It’s more than an advert for hot chocolate and sheepskin slippers.

Life has an inside as well as an outside. A secular society has many virtues, but it’s bad at recognising such a simple truth. Or perhaps a free-market economy prefers to upset that balance, because only what is on the outside of life can be tracked and monetised. Wellness and mental health have become revenue-raisers, but it need not be so.

There are plenty of activities, events, and rituals that don’t belong in the money-zone. Including the glory of doing nothing. Here’s what helps me.

Slow-cook weekends. If I make a casserole early on a Saturday morning, the prep is only a half hour, including softening the onions, while the rest gets chopped up. Then, it’s over to the oven and I can go outside. In winter, we need to make the most of the light.

Don’t go shopping! Online or off. It’s a discipline to get the food in on a Friday night, but it frees you to use the weekend to be outdoors as much as possible. Fill a flask, make sandwiches, take a walk. Keep the time unstructured, if you can, and don’t spend it on your phone. Nature is a healer. Take no selfies. Post no selfies. Don’t count your steps. Breathe. Relax in movement.

Come home to a lovely meal ready in the pot for you. I like eating seasonally. Root vegetables are little capsules of stored sunshine. Their leaves took the light all summer and transferred it to the root as slow-release sugars. Carrots, parsnips, turnips, radish, humble potatoes. Yes, they are carbs, but walking ahead of the meal will raise your metabolic rate. Nobody needs flown salads and strawberries in winter. Aligning yourself with winter includes the joy of winter food.

Short days make any outdoor exercise harder, and excuses easier, so if you don’t keep a dog, give yourself a Thought-Dog. Just like you did when you were a kid – though maybe then it was an imaginary dragon. Your dog needs to be walked. Real dog or Thought-Dog, use the time to ponder on what matters to you. This is not selfish. For women, especially, it might be your only personal time, time when you are not meeting the needs of others. Walking and thinking are sympathetic activities – the brain lives in a cage made of bone and gets a kick from being outside.

The stimulation of fresh air, bigger vistas, plus the sights and sounds of nature, help the brain to enliven the mind. Cold air is lovely for walking. It’s physiological – blood flow. It’s psychological – you feel free.

Obviously, I am going to include the joys of reading in any set of my winter activities. Reading is inner time; time away from the clock. Time that is both concentrated and expanded. We sit in our favourite chair. Our mind escapes. And if you do this after taking your body for a long walk, you have doubled your freedom for the day.

On a winter’s night I love to light candles. Candles are a wonderful way of bringing preindustrial light into a modern home.

Shadows change the way we notice things. We see shapes differently. Not stark. Not outlined. Softer. Blurred.

Electric light is great, but it keeps us wakeful and busy. Even a lamp suggests activity. In winter, I eat earlier and I go to bed much earlier. This includes the bonus of drinking less, or not drinking at all.

I get more sleep in the winter, which feels right, when some mammals are hibernating. I wake up naturally and, although it’s dark, it makes it easier to get up on those dreary mornings. Enough sleep means morning doesn’t feel like a threat.

Try it, but don’t fly straight to the bright electric light – use a lamp, or even a candle (I do) while you make your coffee and remember your dreams and slowly come back to yourself.

I know people like to have personal time when the kids are in bed, but personal time can happen early morning as well and it has a different quality to it. Aware, alert, but relaxed, too, before the klaxon of daylight.

But winter is not all about inner time.

The Feast of Candlemas falls on 2 February. That’s halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Our ancestors understood that to get through life at all, especially in the winter, we need a party about every six weeks. (If you don’t believe me, you will see that May Day comes next, then the summer solstice). This is such good sense.

We know that humans are becoming more isolated, more online, more socially anxious, more depressed. We need to meet each other. If you are using winter for reflection and rest – less scurrying and hurrying, then you will delight in the contrast of a party that isn’t the forced jollity of Christmas.

Some simple food and wine, good friends, also people you know less well, and perhaps someone you don’t know at all, someone who might be lonely. If home is not suitable, meet at the pub, a restaurant or café, or turn a weekend walk into a party. This isn’t about throwing money at time, it’s about social time together. Everyone can chip in.

There’s a lot of self-help talk about how the light gets in. But that’s only half of it.

How does the light get out?

In the dark days of winter, we can each be a light. For others and for ourselves.

Ready for a big sleep?

What we can all learn from nature’s hibernators. By Vladyslav Vyazovskiy

Winter is often associated with darkness and cold, when everything in nature slows down, falls asleep. There is a word for that – hibernation, which originates from Latin hībernus (winter). Many animals hibernate during winter, which is a very clever way to escape adversities, and is completely reversible, despite being as close to death or nonexistence as it can possibly get.

During hibernation, all physiological processes in the body slow down and animals remain in a state of suspended animation for many months, idling patiently until the world outside is once again full of colours and light, and ready to welcome them back.

Hibernation is not sleep, strictly speaking, and we are not yet clear on when sleep ends and hibernation begins. For us humans, being tired, sleepy or depressed during the winter months does not mean we are anywhere near the state of hibernation. If it were that easy! It is possible that seasonal low mood may be related to our inability to hibernate – all we have left from our ancestors who knew how to do it.

Researchers spend years studying creatures, big and small, from tenrecs and hedgehogs to bears, lemurs and even hummingbirds, trying to unlock the mystery of torpor. Reverse engineering hibernation for human applications will open up many possibilities – from critical care and longevity to even space travel.

Hibernation is not only about energy saving, but also about surviving other calamities, such as drought or wildfires. It is about staying out of trouble, to survive. Is it not paradoxical that entering a death-like state became a strategy to avoid annihilation? Or are we just looking at hibernation from the wrong angle? What if it is among our default states of being, alongside sleep, the only state when we are safe, and in peace with ourselves and the world?

In some ways we are an advanced species, but still have much to learn from dormice or chipmunks. If they could speak they would tell us that the best way to make it through the short and gloomy days of winter is not to resist our ancestral drive and to sleep.

Vladislav Vyazovskiy is professor of sleep physiology at the University of Oxford

It’s time to dig into winter

As plant growth slows, let a gentler pace of gardening begin. By Poppy Okotcha

Over the last few years I have consistently ended summer with a feral and disheveled looking garden. Bindweed scrambling around anything it can find. Brambles stretched all over the place. The herbs, vegetables and ornamentals look tired and overcome. “Come save us!” they cry out.

In those years, instead of growing the garden, I have grown a baby, first in my tummy and then on my hip. More than ever, summer’s end came as a relief. When light levels drop and temperatures fall, plant growth slows and the growth rate of the garden finally matches my working pace. For the majority of us, who tend our gardens alongside work, family life etc, winter might be the only point in the year that the space moves at a manageable speed.

I think winter is an excellent time to start a garden and its arrival is certainly no reason to pause tending and wait for spring. I often suspect that mild winter blues can be caused by a simple lack of time spent outdoors. The brisk exercise out in the damp or crisp cold generates an internal warmth unmatched by hot baths or central heating. The instant impact of one’s efforts offers a welcome dopamine hit and the knowledge that this preparation will only improve the spring/summer garden to come provides a hopeful and spacious, long-view perspective… Handy to have when the short days feel endless.

Poppy’s satisfying winter garden tasks
1. Clear or create paths.
2. Weed and mulch! By the book, this is not best done in the wet of winter, but sometimes that’s the only time available.
3. Build compost bays.
4. Prune fruit trees, such as apples and pears. Don’t prune stone fruits in winter though – that’s a summer job.
5. Dig a pond to be filled by winter rains.
6. Plant bare-root perennials.
7. Sow tomatoes, aubergines and chillies.
8. And a cosy indoor job: plan the garden and order seeds or summer bulbs. My sustainable gardening calendar could be handy for this (poppyokotcha.com).

A Wilder Way: How Gardens Grow Us by Poppy Okotcha is published on 24 April
by Bloomsbury at £18.99. Order it for £17.09 at guardianbookshop.com

Connecting to nature

Green ways to boost your mood. By Sue Stuart-Smith

Get your morning sunshine fix Low levels of daylight can make us want to retreat to bed. Catching the early morning light first thing helps to combat this. I have a simple stretch routine that I do in the garden most mornings, usually in my pyjamas.

Spot green shoots When you are out walking or wandering through a garden, make a conscious effort to notice small changes happening in the plant life around you – proof that the days are getting longer and small green shoots are pressing up through the earth.

Step outside in all weathers Light is a form of nourishment but the blue light in the sun’s rays is what sets our circadian rhythm and regulates levels of the vital neurotransmitter, serotonin. Even when the day is overcast there will still be enough light filtering through to gain some benefit, so it’s important to get outdoors – whatever the weather.

Look ahead Gardening is intrinsically forward looking – so sort out seeds and plan what to grow. If you don’t have a garden you can still grow herbs and annual flowers in pots or in a window-box.

Sue Stuart-Smith’s The Well Gardened Mind is £10.89 at guardianbookshop.com

From art to Arctic snow, tales to chill

Favourite seasonal books chosen by nature writer Robert Macfarlane

1. The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. This cult-classic novel opens on the eve of Midwinter Day, a heavy snow about to fall, a young boy called Will Stanton about to turn eleven – and the power of the “Dark” rising in the landscape around Will’s Oxfordshire home. No other novel I know catches the eerie, strange-making power of heavy snowfall, and winter’s witchiness.

2. Winter: Five Windows on the Season by Adam Gopnik. Here, the New Yorker writer and essayist explores how winter and its officers – cold, frost, snow and ice – have shaped music, literature, art in especially, the temperate zones of the northern hemisphere. Breugel The Elder’s Hunters in the Snow, Henry Raeburn’s The Skating Minister, Schubert’s Die Winterreise – they’re all here, in a blizzard of connections, excavations and wintry creations.

3. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg. I still remember the spell this novel cast over me when I first read it: austere, intricate and utterly gripping. It manages to be both a detective fiction/thriller and a literary work of art. Snow is everywhere in it: as weather, archive, language. As Trump blusters and sabre-rattles at Greenland, here is a novel which examines some of the colonial complexities and dark winter-shadows of Denmark’s long, acquisitive relationship with the island.

4. A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter. An extraordinary autobiographical account of the year that Ritter, an artist, spent living in a rundown hut on the shores of an Arctic fjord on the island of Spitsbergen in the 1930s. She is initially appalled at the danger, privations and perpetual night of the year-long winter in which she finds herself –– but slowly begins to apprehend a luminous, alien beauty to this otherworld. “A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to everyone,” Ritter later said, “Then you will come to realise what’s important in life and what isn’t.”

Robert MacFarlane will be speaking about his new book, Is A River Alive, at St Martin in the Fields at 6.30pm on 28 January as part of the Conversation, London’s newest literary festival (28 January to 6 May, £15, online £10 (stmartin-in-the-fields.org)

Lines written for cold spells

The poet Alice Oswald recommends five poems that will lift the mind

1. I love the Laurel Green by Charles Causley. Here is a sonnet as singable as a carol – full of old-fashioned ‘Viriditas’, yet daggers, bonfires and battles fortify its freshness, so that when I read it, my mind goes first green then evergreen and now I find I can outlast the winter.

2. The Workings of Fate, by Sakhr Al-Ghayy, translated by James Montgomery. This Arabic hunting poem is ideal for a grey day, recharging me with what Beckett calls ‘the pitiless light of that which hope hides’. It’s a list of animal deaths laid out like offerings before the death of a human.

3. A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day, by John Donne. A pitch dark poem for midwinter which is slowly illuminated by the blind Saint Lucia. In grief for his dead wife, Donne made a poem so vulnerable and yet so melodic and patterned with images, that the mind lifts even as it falls.

4. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, translated by Helene Foley. Do not underestimate this long folktale about grief. It contains a vision of world-wide famine, an ancient Greek spell against death, plus a set of instructions for how to communicate secretly with the earth in order that spring should return.

5. The Mind is an Enchanted Thing by Marianne Moore. Marianne Moore’s hymn to ‘conscientious inconsistency’ is much needed in these fanatical times. She’s as metrically inventive as Donne and as bright-sighted and cutting as noone but herself. This poem will warm your wits.

Wellbeing tips for cold days

How to energise body and soul. By Hayley Myers

Winter warmers Keep out the cold with a fiery virgin Picante: 50ml of Mother Root (a switchel made with organic British apple cider vinegar and ginger), 50ml of lime juice, 15ml of jalapeno brine, the juice of 1 clementine and fresh chill to garnish. If sleep is elusive, induce calm by simmering 450ml of oat milk with a teaspoon of turmeric, a pinch each of cinnamon and pepper and a tablespoon of honey.

Colour yourself cosy If you can’t get out into nature, boost your mood by wearing spirit-lifting colours with warming properties, says psychologist Suzy Reading, author of Self-Care for Winter. Go for yellows, oranges, reds and pinks on your body, lips or nails.

Let off steam Regular saunas of 10-20 minutes, three times each week during the winter months can improve cardiovascular health, strengthen immunity and reduce congestion. Experience the joy of löyly (the Finnish word for the rising steam) at one of the community saunas across the UK.

Body-brush every day It’s not only your teeth that need a daily brush – your body does too. Dry body brushing exfoliates the skin, boosts circulation and stimulates lymphatic flow. Arm yourself with a brittle brush. Then, starting with your feet, brush in a clockwise, circular motion upwards, avoiding irritated or sensitive areas. Rinse off dry skin in the shower, moisturise.

Get winter-ready If you already make chutneys and jams, act on those preserver instincts, says Katherine May, author ofWintering:The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. Better still, go all-out Nordic and bake cakes, fill the freezer (easy wins include soups, stews and fruit crumbles), do house repairs, and stow away summer clothes and get the woolies out. Comfort and cosy is the watchword.

Let’s get cosy

Warming products to make your home a haven. By Nell Card

The recent cold snap has emphasised the need for our homes to act as a place of rest and retreat. Here, we have gathered a selection of home accessories that will bring warmth and comfort to those dark starts and long evenings spent indoors.

Let’s start at the beginning of the day. Rising before the sun is made just a little more bearable if you light a candle. Place these wall-mounted candle holders (Pooky; £61.50) strategically around the house (in the bathroom; near the kettle) and allow the lightly hammered brass to cast a golden glow on your winter morning routine. Once your eyes have adjusted, you can switch on a few lamps. HAY’s PC portable, table light is great for brightening dark corners and comes in seven colourways (scp.co.uk; £89.25).

Time for breakfast. You need a wide mug that you can wrap both hands around for bottomless hot drinks. Eren Armitage’s handmade Matt Drip Glaze Cup and Saucer (pophamshome.com; £45) is inspired by the landscapes of the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors that surround her studio. A mound of seasonal citrus fruits – Seville oranges, pink grapefruits, lemons and limes – will bring some much needed brightness (and vitamin C) into your home. Let your seasonal fruits take centre stage in a piece of vintage studio pottery, such as this Bulgarian slipware bowl (moldeshop.co.uk; £65).

Rugs that can be rolled out for winter are invaluable. Ikea’s sheepskins come in two shades (cream or light brown) and are sourced as by-products from the food industry, meaning the whole animal is used (ikea.com; £35). If you have draughty corridors, the Braided Rug Company sells hard-wearing jute rugs and runners in a range of colours and sizes (braided-rug.co.uk; from £40). If you really want to bury your toes into something special, A New Tribe sources deep pile, vibrant vintage rugs from Morocco (anewtribe.co.uk; from £650).

Is any fireside scene complete without a wooly armchair? Zara’s light beige Terry armchair (zara.com; £249.99) will work well in any setting. Alternatively, plump for a set of shearer seat pads made from New Zealand sheepskin (loaf.com; £65 each). A special blanket will complete the picture. These reversible lamb’s wool blankets (toa.st; £210) are woven on the Pembrokeshire coast by Melin Tregwyn to a pattern created in the 1950s.

Soft, strokeable cushions are a must in winter. The White Company’s sheepskin cushions are now on sale (thewhitecompany.com; £42). For those who are looking for something even curlier, check out John Lewis’s Mongolian sheepskin cushions (johnlewis.com; £48). Stoov makes wondrous, wireless heated cushions (uk.stoov.com; from £89.99). Choose from a range of colours and fabrics, charge up the battery and allow the infrared technology to gently warm you for up to 9 hours.

As the sun dips, it’s time to light another candle. The evening calls for something scented. Paul Smith’s Bookworm (paulsmith.com; £75) smells like a wood-panelled library and comes in a reusable glass vessel. Muji’s Log Fire tin candle (uk.muji.eu; £5.95) emits a gentle, smokey scent and is the next best thing to a real fire.

Frosty nights call for additional layers of comfort in the bedroom. We love Rosie Sugden’s cashmere bed socks in clashing sweet-shop colours (rosiesugden.com; from £25).