Welcome to Girl Winter
On tanning shops, breakfast soup, and supporting the life you're actually living.
Merry Christmas, everyone. Happy solstice. It’s certainly a big week for winter heads, and as good a time as any to round out our winter series. Read part one, with Reyjkavik-based healing arts practitioner, Erla Sól, here:
My relationship to winter has always been a bit complicated. In college, newly landed in New England after 18 years in the Midwest, I was braggadocious about my cold tolerance, often stepping out of my dorm in nothing but a tank top and jeans.
Later, living in New York, the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction. I became a bit obsessed with circadian biology and TCM, faithfully heating up my Kettle & Fire bone broth every morning before heading to the neighborhood park. Morning sunlight was a non-negotiable, and I often went to bed as early as 8pm — practices that sound great on paper, but also never really had a place to land (more on that in Health Gossip #100).
These days, I fall somewhere in the middle, maintaining routines that I know serve my highest good while also allowing room for contradiction (a marker of good health, IMO).
Wired headphones and Future. Gelatinous breakfast soup and nicotine. Microdosing the tanning bed responsibly.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been referring to this approach as “Girl Winter” — a playful nod to Carlisle Studer’s Girl Science, which favors intuition over biohacking, n=1 experiments over linear logic.
Girl Winter applies that same approach to the season itself, honoring nature’s initiations while also creating the conditions to stay warm, connected, and vital. In practice, this looks like:
Defining “health” as our capacity to receive and participate in the world around us.
Treating beauty and adornment as life-giving practices.
Prioritizing warmth (physical, communal, energetic, and otherwise).
Loosening the grip on outcome-based routines, instead focusing on rituals that support our energy levels and sense of feeling alive.
These principles aren’t limited to winter, or women, but are particularly relevant to both.
With that said, let’s dive in…
Below: 6+ niche practices to support you this winter, from optimizing your light environment to prioritizing adornment and beauty.
