PERSONAL GROWTH

10 Tips To Beat The Winter Blues & 10 Well-Being Enhancing Holiday Gift Ideas.

RELATIONAL TRAUMA RECOVERY • December 11, 2016

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

As we wind down the end of this (very intense) year and the days shorten but the pace only seems to quicken, many of us can experience the onset of “the winter blues” — a sense of sadness, anxiety, depression, or for some, full-blown Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

If this feels familiar for you, or if you’ve been seeing this show up for your loved ones, I want to offer up 10 tips to help “beat the winter blues” and also share with you 10 holiday gift ideas to help enhance your well-being or the well-being of your loved ones.

Why is it that people often get “the winter blues” during this time of the year?

“The winter blues” is a term that often gets thrown around that can mean different things for different people with different reasons for its presence.

For some, “the winter blues” may mean an increased sense of anxiety about the end of the year and the upcoming holidays — whether that’s because of goals unmet at work or in your personal life, anticipating spending time with family you’d rather avoid, or clocking in another holiday without a loved one that you’ve perhaps lost to death or to a breakup.

For others, “the winter blues” may arrive in the form of seasonal depression, more commonly known as seasonal affective disorder (S.A.D.), which, according to the DSM-5, is considered to be a reoccurring subtype of major depression or bipolar disorder that typically occurs at the same seasonal period each year, typically Fall and Winter for most people.

While the intensity of seasonal depression symptoms and the reasons for onset may vary from individual to individual, it’s thought that the decreased levels of sunlight in the Fall and Winter months may affect an individual’s serotonin levels, a neurotransmitter that affects our well-being and happiness. For some, a reduction in naturally-produced serotonin levels can contribute to the onset of SAD each year.

Whatever the reason, root, or cause, “the winter blues” can feel very challenging for many of us, so please know you’re not alone and that there are some things you can specifically do to enhance your wellbeing at this time of the year.

So how can we help “beat the winter blues”?

There are endless ways and methods to support your overall well-being levels and, while there is certainly no one-size-fits-all prescription that will work for everyone, most of us can support our overall mental health and well-being by focusing on the following seven recommendations:

1. Recognize and realize that mental health is every single bit as important as physical health and invest in your mental health by seeking out comprehensive and regular professional support when and if you need it.

2. Take very good care of your physical health and, with professional support, rule out any underlying health conditions that may be contributing to your lack of happiness and well-being.

3. Build nourishing relationships in your life and reduce (or eliminate) contact with those relationships that drain, diminish, or don’t support you.

4. Deliberately plan play and joy and adventure into your daily and weekly routines.

5. Spend time in nature.

6. Limit time spent on social media (or be curious about how you can better use it to support your mental health).

7. Connect to something bigger than yourself be it nature, a social justice cause, or a form of religion or spirituality.

Also, if you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you know that I’m a big believer in self-care and in cultivating a large “toolbox” of activities, resources, and methods to help support your mental health.

When working with my clients who are looking for at-home remedies or activities that would help them “beat the winter blues,” after ruling out the need for any pharmacological or physiological supports or screenings, I then invite them to consider these:

Questions to consider:

1. What are you already doing in your daily or weekly routine that brings you joy or some sense of support and nourishment? Whatever it is, first do more of that. For instance, does taking a work break by Skyping with your beloved nephew bring you joy? Could you do more of that throughout the week?

2. If there’s nothing that is currently a support in helping you feel less sad or depressed, can you think about a time in your past where certain activities felt supportive and helpful to you? Could you imagine revisiting some of those past activities? For instance, if when you felt generally better and happier in the past few years, and hosting a potluck for your girlfriends felt really good to you, could you imagine doing that again?

3. Consider building a “toolkit” of emotional coping mechanisms that engage all of your senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Design a variety of soothing activities that engage all or some of your senses and engage in these when you are feeling sad, depressed, or in need of some comfort. For instance, can you wrap yourself in a fleece blanket with a steaming cup of your favorite tea under some Christmas lights while you listen to your very favorite albums?

The sky’s the limit when it comes to imagining and cultivating creative self-soothing, home-based activities, resources, and methods to support your mental health. So be curious about what is, has, and will work best for you personally and then try those activities out regularly (and don’t be afraid to tweak and adjust as needed!).

And most importantly, please remember this:

So what kind of holiday gifts could help boost your wellbeing to help you “beat the winter blues”?

While my general belief is that products don’t necessarily make us fundamentally happy or fill our lives with meaning, I do believe that they certainly can bring a greater sense of relief, ease, and enjoyment into our lives, all of which contributes to greater levels of wellbeing as we journey through “the winter blues” or any other stage of our lives.

The following is a list of suggestions I often share with my clients and friends when they are looking for gifts — either for themselves or for their loved ones — that are soulful, well-being enhancing options that include both actual products, services, and creative suggestions.

1. Sign up for services that make your life easier!

Is there is a service you could purchase – either for yourself or for a loved one – which would help bring more joy, ease, and relief to your/their life? For instance, this may look like hiring a TaskRabbit to help cut back on the amount of chores you/they have to do at home each week. Or perhaps, this looks like setting up a Munchery or BlueApron account so you/they don’t have to stress about preparing and planning healthy meals each night.

2. Purchase that one special thing you’ve had your eye on forever.

For example, purchasing a piece of clothing or art that you’ve had your eye on for ages may boost your happiness levels each and every time you wear or look at it.

3. Make a deposit against your dreams!

For example, set up a separate savings account and start funneling money into there for the dream trip you’ve been eager to take. Or set up a savings account for a loved one and put in an initial deposit for that dream they’ve been longing for — going back to school perhaps.

4. Purchase some nostalgia.

For some, spending money on products or items that bring a sense of nostalgic delight is a genuine way to boost happiness. For example, maybe it’s making sure you have some imported British groceries in your kitchen that remind you of your study abroad days in the UK, or maybe it’s going onto Ebay and purchasing that vintage toy you dearly loved as a child just because.

5. Purchase a healing book.

I’m a lifelong, diehard bibliophile so to me, there’s nothing better than a healing, soulful book to help me navigate life’s tough times and feel more grounded. The following are some of my top book suggestions for you and your loved ones:

• Women who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
• Transformation Soup: Healing for the Splendidly Imperfect by SARK*
• Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Beautiful, Messy Life by Glennon Doyle Melton*
• A Little Handbook for Life’s Tough Times by Annie Wright, MA, MFT

6. Use the power of audio gifts to help “beat the winter blues.”

I highly recommend the following products if you, like me, love audios and apps that are designed to nourish, ground, and make you feel better.

• Headspace: An app for mindfulness training.
• Guided Meditations to Relieve Stress by Belleruth Knaperstack, LCSW: a downloadable guided imagery mp3.
• A Guided Meditation to Help Relieve Depression by Belleruth Knaperstack, LCSW: a downloadable guided imagery mp3.

7. Get in touch with your inner child.

Get in touch with your inner child and your inner calm with Adult Coloring Books*. This has been such a huge hit with therapy clients and clinicians because these adult coloring books are terrific supports if you deal with anxiety or depression. There’s a huge amount of types and options of adult coloring books on Amazon so just find one that speaks to you and have at it. Also, obviously, you’ll need colored pencils to partner with this.

8. The Transformation Game.

My dear friend SARK first introduced me to this incredible multiplayer personal growth game created by teachers at Findhorn Foundation and I never fail to be amazed at the guidance, clarity, and calming power of this game. If you or your loved one likes board games and appreciate the idea of doing some deep reflection and growth while playing together, this could be the perfect soulful holiday gift.

9. Angel Cards.

Angel Cards are a sort of mini tarot for personal guidance that’s a classic in the personal growth industry. I keep a bowl of them in my office and let clients pull a card while they hold a question in their mind to see what the Angel Cards have to say. It’s a rich guidance practice and a great soulful, well-being enhancing product.

10. Invest in therapy.

You probably saw this coming, but much like purchasing a service that makes your life easier in point #1, investing in a service like therapy can be a tremendous asset not only in “beating the winter blues” but also in helping bring about change and healing to any area of your life that may need it. If now feels like the time to sign up for therapy yourself, or to encourage and maybe even financially support your loved one in pursuing therapy, that may be the very best way to help “beat the winter blues.”

I hope this article felt helpful to you.

Now I’d love to hear from you in the comments below:

Leave me a message and I’ll be sure to respond.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Frequently Asked Questions

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). American Psychiatric Publishing.
• Lam, R. W., Levitan, R. D. (2000). Pathophysiology of seasonal affective disorder: a review. Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience.
• Wirz-Justice, A. (2006). Biological rhythm disturbances in mood disorders. International Clinical Psychopharmacology.
• van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
• Golden, R. N., Gaynes, B. N., Ekstrom, R. D., et al. (2005). The efficacy of light therapy in the treatment of mood disorders: a review and meta-analysis of the evidence. American Journal of Psychiatry.
• Place, D. (2000). The Angel Tarot Cards. Hay House.
• Curry, N. A., & Kasser, T. (2005). Can coloring mandalas reduce anxiety? Art Therapy. Journal of the American Art Therapy Association.

Both/And: Holding the Complexity of Your Experience

In my work with clients, I find that the most important breakthroughs happen not when someone chooses one truth over another, but when they learn to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time.

You can be grateful for what you have and grieve what you didn’t get. You can love someone and acknowledge the harm they caused. You can be strong and still need help. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the texture of a fully lived life.

The driven, ambitious women I work with often struggle with this because they’ve been trained to solve problems, not sit with paradox. But healing isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a process to inhabit. And the both/and is always where the deepest growth lives.

And if none of that feels possible yet — if even reading this felt like too much — that’s information, not failure. Your nervous system is telling you something worth listening to. Start where you are. Start with the recognition that you’re here, which means some part of you already knows the truth about what happened and what you deserve now.

The Systemic Lens: Seeing Beyond the Individual

When we locate suffering exclusively in the individual — “What’s wrong with me?” — we miss the larger forces at work. Culture, family systems, economic structures, and intergenerational patterns all shape the terrain on which your personal struggle plays out.

This matters because the driven women I work with almost universally blame themselves for pain that was never theirs alone to carry. The anxiety, the perfectionism, the chronic self-doubt — these aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptive responses to systems that asked too much of you while offering too little safety, attunement, and genuine support.

Healing begins when you stop asking “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking “What happened to me — and what systems made it possible?”

Your Nervous System in Winter: What’s Actually Happening

There’s an important piece of the winter blues picture that often gets overlooked in wellness content: the role of the nervous system and early attachment in how you experience seasonal changes.

For most people, winter brings a natural invitation to slow down—less daylight, colder temperatures, the biological pull toward hibernation that we share with the animal kingdom. For driven women with relational trauma backgrounds, this invitation can activate an old terror. Rest doesn’t feel like rest. It feels like danger. Because the stillness that winter creates exposes what constant activity has been keeping just below the surface.

Amy, a 37-year-old attorney who came to me every November when her mood reliably cratered, described it this way: “In summer, I’m busy enough that I can outrun it. In winter, there’s nowhere to go. And then it’s all just there—all the stuff I haven’t let myself feel. It’s like the season won’t let me keep pretending.”

This is not simply seasonal affective disorder, though that may be a piece of it. This is the nervous system, confronted with the absence of its usual distractions, finally making audible what has always been there. The winter blues, for some women, is actually an invitation—uncomfortable and unwanted, but genuine.

When the Blues Become Something More

I want to be clear about something important: there is a difference between the winter blues—a temporary dimming that responds to light, connection, movement, and self-care—and clinical depression, which is a genuine medical condition that requires professional attention.

Peter Kramer, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of Against Depression, has written extensively about how the romanticization of depression—treating it as a natural response to difficult circumstances rather than a treatable illness—can prevent people from getting help that would genuinely change their lives. If what you’re experiencing extends beyond the seasonal, if it follows you into spring, if it has you struggling to function in areas of your life that used to feel manageable—please take that seriously. That’s not weakness. That’s a physiological state that responds to treatment.

The tips in this piece are for the winter blues—the genuine seasonal heaviness that many people experience. They are not a substitute for professional support when professional support is what the situation calls for. If you’re not sure which you’re experiencing, that uncertainty itself is a reason to talk to someone. You don’t have to diagnose yourself in order to reach out for help.

If you’d like to explore whether working together might be useful for what you’re navigating this winter, here’s where to begin that conversation. You don’t have to wait until things are bad. Sometimes the best time to start is before they get that way.

The Most Underrated Winter Medicine: Connection

There’s one tool that I’ve come to believe matters more than any other for beating the winter blues, and it’s one that driven women often resist: genuine, face-to-face human connection.

Not networking. Not performing togetherness at a holiday party where you’re scanning the room and calculating impressions. I mean the kind of connection where you sit across from someone who actually knows you, in a room that’s warm, and let yourself be seen. The kind where someone asks “how are you actually doing” and you answer honestly and they don’t flinch.

John Cacioppo, PhD, neuroscientist at the University of Chicago and author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, spent his career documenting the physiology of loneliness and its profound consequences for health and mood. His research demonstrated that chronic loneliness is as damaging to health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. And for many driven women who have built impressive external lives, chronic loneliness in the relational sense is exactly what the winter blues is exposing.

The invitation of winter, if you can receive it, is to slow down enough to let people in. To be a little less impressive and a little more real. To allow yourself to be known rather than admired. That’s a different kind of warmth than you get from a lightbox—and in my clinical experience, it’s the one that actually lasts past February.

If you find that the winter months reliably bring you to a place of struggle, and that the tools in this piece help only so much—I want to invite you to consider whether the struggle might be pointing to something that deserves more than seasonal management. Working together is one way to explore what’s beneath it.

Winter doesn’t ask you to be less. It asks you to be differently. To turn inward in the way that seasons have always asked humans to turn inward—with more slowness, more warmth, more attention to the inner life that the busyness of summer made it easy to avoid. You don’t have to love winter to receive what it’s offering. You just have to be willing to stop outrunning it long enough to find out what’s underneath.

The tools in this post work. The research supports them. And they work best when you’re also doing the deeper work of understanding why you struggle—why rest is hard, why connection feels risky, why the darkness feels like something to escape rather than something to sit inside. That deeper work is what trauma-informed therapy does. It’s slower and harder and more valuable than any gift on any list. If you’ve been putting it off, the beginning of another winter is as good a time as any to start.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

How to Heal: Finding Your Way Through the Winter and Back to Yourself

If you’ve been trying to will yourself out of the winter blues — telling yourself to just get it together, push through, or be grateful for what you have — I want to gently tell you that willpower isn’t the medicine you need right now. What I’ve seen consistently in my work with clients is that the nervous system responds to winter’s darkness in ways that are physiological, not moral. Amy, whom you may have met earlier in this post, didn’t need to try harder. She needed a different framework entirely — one that started with her body and worked outward from there. That’s the approach I want to walk you through here.

Here’s the path I walk with clients, in roughly this order:

1. Start with your nervous system, not your motivation. Before you overhaul your schedule or stack on self-care strategies, it helps to understand what your nervous system is actually doing during winter. Reduced light genuinely disrupts circadian rhythm, dampens serotonin availability, and can shift your autonomic state toward shutdown — what some researchers call a dorsal vagal response. That’s not weakness; it’s biology. In my work with clients, I start by helping them notice the texture of their shutdown: Is this a flat, foggy kind of low? A heavy, don’t-want-to-move feeling? Or something edgier, more irritable? Getting specific about the flavor of your winter state helps you choose the right intervention rather than throwing everything at the wall. We’re not trying to force cheerfulness — we’re trying to restore enough regulation to make good choices from.

2. Name what the season is actually bringing up. Winter has a way of making old griefs louder. The dark, the cold, the social pressure of holidays — all of it can surface losses you thought you’d managed, family dynamics you’d found a way around, and a particular kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with how many people are in your life. Part of healing is naming this honestly: This isn’t just the blues. This season is touching something real about my history. As we explored in the section on relational trauma, the winter blues in driven women often carry a layer of old attachment pain — the child who didn’t feel seen at holidays, the teenager who learned to disappear into productivity when things got hard. You can explore more about how early relationships shape those patterns in our guide to attachment therapy. Naming the layer beneath the layer is where real relief begins to live.

3. Build small, physiologically grounding practices — one at a time. Once you have some language for what’s happening, you can begin to experiment. I don’t mean a 12-step morning routine; I mean one thing, done consistently, that tells your nervous system there is light, warmth, and safety available. A ten-minute walk outside before noon to catch whatever pale winter light there is. A single warm drink you make slowly and actually taste. Five minutes of gentle movement before you open your laptop. These feel embarrassingly small — and that is exactly why they work. Your nervous system is looking for evidence, and small evidence still counts. Build the practice first; the motivation will follow, not the other way around.

4. Do the deeper work inside a reliable therapeutic relationship. If the winter blues arrive with regularity, or if this season is touching something that feels older and heavier than the calendar, that’s important information. Individual therapy offers something that no amount of light therapy or vitamin D can replicate: a consistent, warm, attuned relationship in which you can actually feel what it’s like to be held through the dark. In my clinical work, I find that winter is often the season clients make their most significant breakthroughs — because the defenses drop, the armor gets heavier, and something real finally has room to surface. If you’ve been managing alone for years, you don’t have to keep doing that.

5. Hold the systemic lens: some of this is bigger than you. One of the things I want you to take away from this post is that your winter struggle is not a personal failing. You live in a culture that doesn’t honor rest, that treats darkness as something to defeat rather than move through, that demands productivity during a season our bodies are wired for quiet. Many women from relational trauma backgrounds have an especially hard relationship with this season because slowing down removes the buffer of busyness — and without that buffer, the older pain becomes hard to ignore. Understanding the connection between trauma and the nervous system can help you see your winter response as an adaptive legacy, not a defect. That shift in framing — from self-blame to self-understanding — is itself healing.

6. Reconnect with at least one source of genuine human warmth. John Cacioppo, PhD, social neuroscientist and researcher who spent decades studying loneliness, was clear: isolation amplifies pain, and connection is not optional for wellbeing — it’s biological medicine. During winter, the instinct is often to contract further. I’d ask you to make one small counter-move: reach out to one person who knows you and let yourself be known, even briefly. Not to perform okayness, but to practice the kind of contact that actually regulates the nervous system. You don’t need a full village right now. You need one honest conversation with someone who sees you.

Winter is a season — and so is this version of you who’s struggling through it. If this time of year consistently brings you low, or if you’re recognizing a pattern that goes deeper than the season itself, I’d love to support you. You’re welcome to explore individual therapy, work through foundational patterns in Fixing the Foundations, or simply schedule a consultation to talk about what would fit best. You don’t have to white-knuckle your way through another winter alone.

You don’t have to love winter or master it or turn it into a productivity opportunity. You just have to survive it with a little more grace than last year. And the fact that you’re reading, gathering tools, paying attention to your own wellbeing—that already counts as grace. The season will turn. So will you. Give it time, give it light, give it the warmth of genuine connection. That’s enough. It’s always been enough. And if you find yourself needing more support than a list of tips and a well-lit corner can provide, please don’t hesitate to reach out. You don’t have to white-knuckle another winter alone. Winter is asking something of you. You get to decide whether to answer. That decision, made in the quiet of December or January, can be the beginning of something that lasts far past spring.

Medical Disclaimer