Do not fertilise in winter
Your grandmother slowed down in winter. You have a Q4 target to hit.
I was reading the care instructions for my newly adopted plant when my eyes got stuck on one sentence: "Do not fertilise in winter!"
The label explained why. In the colder, darker months the plant slows down. Its roots take in very little, so the fertiliser just sits in the soil. The salts build up, and slowly they burn the roots they were meant to feed.
Basically, more food at the wrong time becomes damage.
I read the label again and thought about every January I have ever started with a new goal, a bigger target, and a quiet promise to push harder. And that made me feel we might be the only creatures on this planet who don't respect the seasonality of life.
Look around.
A tree lets its leaves go in autumn. It draws what it can back into its branches and roots, and it stops spending water it can't replace.
A bear eats well through late summer, then lowers its heart rate and body temperature and sleeps through the lean months.
Ducks and geese shed their flight feathers each year, and for a few weeks they can't fly at all while the new ones grow.
Farmers have always left fields fallow so the soil can recover.
Tulip bulbs need weeks of cold in the ground before they can flower. Without the winter, there is no spring bloom.
In nature, the quiet season is part of the design and for most of human history, we lived this way too. We ate what the season gave us, worked the land when it needed working, and slept longer when the nights grew long. Winter was for mending, for stories, for staying close to the fire.
Is it possible that our bodies still keep this calendar?
We tend to think of seasons as something happening outside the window, but research suggests they happen inside us too.
You've probably felt a softer version of this yourself: the heaviness when it's already dark at five, or the pull to stay under the duvet when the mornings are still dark.
In one study, researchers gave volunteers real winter nights. For about a month, they spent 14 hours of every day in darkness, the way people lived before electric light. Within weeks their bodies changed. They slept longer. Melatonin, the hormone that tells the body it's night, flowed for longer too. Many of them began waking in the middle of the night for an hour or two of calm, quiet rest before falling asleep again [1] Give the body long, dark nights, and it moves into winter on its own. Most of us never feel it, because our evenings stay bright.
Another study looked at blood and fat tissue from people in Europe, the US, Australia and The Gambia. The activity of more than 4,000 genes rose and fell through the year, and in Australia the pattern ran the opposite way to Europe, following their own winter. During the European winter, the immune system shifted towards inflammation. The researchers suggest this may help us fight off winter infections. It also means the body is adjusting to seasons and quietly working harder in the background [2].
This research is still young, and I don't want to stretch it. It doesn't mean you need to hibernate, but it does suggest that your body keeps a calendar of its own. And that calendar has very little to do with your company's financial year, where ...every season is a harvest season.
Look at the calendar most of us live by. January brings Kick-Offs and new targets. Spring is the planning cycle, summer the mid-year review, autumn the budget. Q4 is the push to close the year strong. Then it's January again. There's a season for planning, a season for pushing and a season for proving yourself. There's no season for rest.
Every quarter asks for fruit.
We live under the same light all year. The office is 22 degrees in December and in July. Screens glow long after sunset. The signals that would tell the body to slow down barely reach us, and when they do, we override them with coffee, discipline and one more item on the list.
So when you feel heavier in autumn, when your motivation thins out in the dark months, you decide something is wrong with you. You need more discipline, better habits, vitamin D3 drops or a new system.
The plant label would tell you something else: this is winter.
Stop feeding it growth or your roots will burn.
The World Health Organization describes burnout as the result of chronic workplace stress that hasn't been successfully managed. The word that stays with me is CHRONIC. Maybe our bodies are built for effort followed by recovery: a hard push, then rest (like a busy harvest, then a long, quiet winter).
The neuroscientist Bruce McEwen called the cost of skipping proper recovery allostatic load. It's the wear and tear that builds up when the body keeps adapting to demands without the time to reset [3]. Many of us know what it feels like when this load finally finds the weakest link of our system and "breaks free"...
Burnout rarely arrives as one big crisis. It builds up slowly, like salt in the soil.
That's often how it feels from the inside - you keep feeding yourself more: more goals, more courses, more productivity tools, more self-improvement. But none of it seems to take - the roots aren't absorbing any more, and the feeding itself starts to hurt.
I spent twenty years in corporate life fertilising myself through every winter. I called it ambition, but my body had another word for it. For years it whispered. Then came the pain, and with it, the winter I had refused myself for so long.
So what would winter look like for you?
You probably can't cancel Q4, most of us can't. But you can still notice which season you're really in, even when the calendar on your laptop says otherwise.
What you can do is stop treating every month as harvest.
Winter in nature looks empty, yet a lot is happening underground. A tree with bare branches often keeps growing its roots whenever the soil is warm enough. A tulip bulb uses the cold to prepare its flower. Without the winter, there is no spring.
Seasons don't only come with the weather, either. Life has them too: the months after a big launch or a promotion, a new baby, a loss, a move to a new country, a body recovering after illness. These are winters, and so many of us walk through them at harvest pace, because nothing on the calendar tells us to slow down.
If you live somewhere like the Gulf, as I do, even the weather's winter arrives in August, when the heat keeps everyone indoors.
One question to carry with you this week: what season am I actually in? Ask your body first, and your calendar second.
If the answer is winter, you haven't fallen behind but doing what every living thing does before it grows again. In practice, it could mean going to bed earlier while the nights are long. It might mean finishing what's already growing instead of planting something new. It might mean letting a quiet month be quiet, without calling it failure.
So when you catch yourself reaching for more, whether it's another goal, another fix or another push, pause and ask whether you're feeding growth or feeding a winter.
Your grandmother knew. The plant knows. Your body knows too.
References: [1] In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10607034/
[2] Widespread seasonal gene expression reveals annual differences in human immunity and physiology https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25965853/
[3] Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9428819/
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