How I keep going in December when all I want to do is hibernate
December is the month where my body wants to slow down and my calendar doesn't always allow it. Here's how I've stopped fighting that and found a middle path.
My body has been making the same argument since approximately the second week of December. It goes like this: it's cold, it's dark before four in the afternoon, you've been going since January, and there is a perfectly good blanket on that sofa. The argument is, frankly, compelling. And for a few years I spent a lot of energy fighting it — the early morning motivation content I'd consume, the year-end sprints I'd attempt, the elaborate December productivity system I'd construct in my notebook and then quietly abandon by the twelfth.
This year I've stopped fighting. Not because I've given up — but because I've finally understood that fighting the darkness of December is like fighting the tide. The biology makes a case that's worth listening to. And I think the kinder, smarter thing is to find the middle path: to keep going, yes, but to keep going differently.
Here's what that actually looks like for me.
What the body is actually doing in December
The days are dramatically shorter right now. I'm not seeing natural light in the morning when I get up, and often by the time late afternoon arrives it's already twilight. There's real science behind why this makes everything feel slower — the reduced light, the drop in temperature, the way the cold makes even small efforts feel larger. I'm not going to go into the biology in any detail because honestly I'm not qualified to and this is just what worked for me, not medical advice. But I've found it useful to simply acknowledge that my body has legitimate reasons for wanting to slow down.
We don't give this enough permission, I think. Especially those of us who've built an identity around consistency, around showing up, around not being the kind of person who slows down. I had to separate "caring about consistency" from "performing output regardless of conditions." Those aren't the same thing. And December kept teaching me that lesson until I sat still enough to hear it.
The year-end pressure that doesn't fit everyone
There is a very specific kind of content that floods the internet in December, and it's built around the idea of "finishing strong." End-of-year pushes. Q4 targets. The sprint to complete your goals before midnight on the thirty-first. I understand the appeal of it — there's something emotionally satisfying about the idea of arriving at the new year with everything ticked off, everything tidy. A clean slate achieved through sheer grit.
But I've noticed that this framing suits certain kinds of people and certain kinds of lives and not others. If you have a rhythmically busy job, a team, quarterly targets, a type of work that genuinely accelerates in December — that urgency might be real and appropriate. For me, making content from a small flat, filming myself talking about feelings, writing things slowly in a paper journal — there's no external sprint clock. The urgency is entirely invented. And when I started questioning why I was importing pressure that had nothing to do with my actual life, December got a lot easier.
The "finish strong" messaging is not wrong, exactly. It just doesn't belong to everyone. It's fine to let it scroll past.
What I do instead
I've landed on something simple. Every day in December I identify one thing — just one — that genuinely counts. Not everything on the list. Not the most impressive thing. The one meaningful thing that, if I did nothing else, would make the day worth having.
Some days that's recording a video. Some days it's answering three emails I'd been avoiding. Some days — and I'm fully serious about this — it's calling someone I love who I haven't spoken to in too long. Once it was just leaving the flat when I'd spent two days inside, walking for twenty minutes in the cold, and feeling my head clear.
And then — this is the part I had to really practise — everything else becomes optional. Not failed. Optional. The unopened laptop on Saturday afternoon is not a dereliction. The evening I went to bed at nine instead of filming the video I'd planned is not a collapse. It's just a softer version of a day that was also allowed to exist.
The one-meaningful-thing method has honestly transformed December for me. Instead of measuring the day against a list of things I didn't complete, I measure it against the one thing I decided was enough. And almost every day, I've done that thing. Which means almost every day in December, I've succeeded. That's a very different emotional arithmetic than the one I used to run.
By the lamp on a grey afternoon
I want to describe a particular afternoon from this week because it's the image that keeps coming back to me when I think about what December is actually for.
It was a Saturday. The light outside was that specific low grey of a December afternoon — not threatening, just soft and still, like the sky had put on a cardigan. I had a book I'd been meaning to finish for three weeks. I made a cup of tea, actually sat down to drink it, and read for two hours. The blanket was around my shoulders. The city outside the window was muffled — that particular cold-weather quiet where sound doesn't carry far. There was nothing to prove. Nothing pending that couldn't wait until Monday.
I finished the book. I sat with it for a few minutes after. Then I made another cup of tea and called a friend I'd been meaning to call since October.
That was my one meaningful thing that day. And when I went to bed that evening I didn't feel behind. I felt — this is the word — restored. Like I'd actually given myself something instead of just processing the day and moving on to the next one.
December is allowed to be slower. That's not failure — that's the intelligence of the season being smarter than your to-do list.
The rest I've stopped apologising for
The early nights — I've stopped fighting those. When I'm tired at nine, I go to bed at nine. There was a period where I'd push through to eleven out of some vague obligation to "evening productivity," arrive at bed wired and annoyed, and then spend the next day running on hollow. The early nights are a gift. I've received them.
The long baths — yes. The laptop I genuinely didn't open on Sunday — yes. The morning where I just sat with my tea for forty minutes watching the light change instead of filming, editing, posting — yes. None of these are laziness. They are the recovery that makes everything else possible.
I think early morning motivation content is wonderful and I genuinely appreciate the people who make it. But I want to also say, clearly, for the person reading this who has been exhausted since October and is white-knuckling their way to January: it is okay to move at a different pace this month. The version of yourself that rests in December is going to have so much more to give in January. The sprint isn't the only option. The quiet middle path is also valid. It's actually, for a lot of us, the smarter choice.
Show up. Do the one meaningful thing. Let the rest be what it is. That's a December I can actually live in — and it has, year on year, taken me through to January feeling like a person rather than a husk.
One more thing, because I want to be careful not to romanticise rest in a way that becomes its own pressure. Sometimes December is genuinely hard — financially, emotionally, family-wise. The dark and cold are beautiful to some of us and genuinely difficult for others, and I know that the gentle-lamp-and-blanket version of December isn't available to everyone equally. If you're navigating something harder right now, I see that and this post is not suggesting you simply lean into the slowness. It's more for the person who has given themselves permission to rest, theoretically, but can't stop feeling guilty about it.
For that person: the guilt is not evidence that you should be doing more. The guilt is just the old voice, the one that equates your worth with your output. It's been speaking loudly for a long time and it takes longer than one quiet December to quiet it completely. But each day you rest anyway, you're gently disagreeing with it. That adds up. I've been disagreeing with it for several Decembers now and it's noticeably quieter than it was.
The middle path isn't passive. It takes more self-awareness to keep going at a sustainable pace than to either sprint or collapse. And the version of you that arrives in January having slept, having rested, having done the one meaningful thing daily without burning everything down in a year-end push — that version has so much more available to give the year ahead.
Whatever pace you're moving at right now, it's the right one for December. I genuinely believe that. 🤍