If you find yourself struggling to get out of bed and yearning to sleep in as the winter solstice approaches, darkness lengthens, and daylight gets squeezed; it’s not in your head.

It’s in your body. No matter what the clock says when the alarm sounds, if long hours remain before sunrays begin to dye the horizon, the body will resist waking.

Humans are, after all, seasonal creatures. 

A study published earlier this year showed that the body's rhythms shift with the seasons, and as they do so, it becomes harder and harder to adjust to work schedules — especially when shifts occur at odd hours. The impact goes beyond a bit of pre-coffee grogginess. The researchers looked at how the circadian clocks of 800 first-year medical interns were affected when they started the shift work common among physicians-in-training. The results showed that when an intern worked a shift misaligned with their circadian rhythm, they reported more symptoms of depression.

The impact was even more pronounced in winter. But, regardless the season, the effect is so significant and has been identified so frequently that the authors noted, “circadian disruption is increasingly being considered a risk factor for suicide.”

Despite these risks, thanks to the lights and heaters and other indoor accoutrements that free us from adhering to slippery solar time, most people follow schedules misaligned to the cycles of Earth and body.

But give the body a chance to adjust and, in short order, it will rest and rise with the sun.

One July, physiologists in Colorado studied the sleep habits of eight adults over a period of two weeks. In the first week, they went about their lives as normal: working, eating, socializing, and sleeping according to their standard habits, exposed the whole while to whatever artificial lights came along with those activities. In the second week, the participants spent a week camping in the Rocky Mountains, and though everyone was still permitted to follow their own schedule and divert themselves as desired, they couldn’t use flashlights or personal electronics; aside from sun, moon, and stars, camp fires were the only source of light.

By the end of the second week, the circadian rhythms for all the participants – even for the self-identified night owls – had shifted two hours earlier on average, with their bodies increasing melatonin production just after sunset and decreasing it before they’d even woken up. Under artificial lighting, however, melatonin typically didn’t subside until they’d already been awake for two hours.

That delay is true for most people, which is why many often feel sleepy well into the morning.

While this particular study didn’t extend beyond the summer, others have investigated sleep changes over the course of the year. Unsurprisingly, people slept longer in winter.

In one small study in the US, the effect was small but notable: a quarter of an hour. A much larger study in Japan found a more pronounced effect: 40 minutes. Still, these are two heavily industrialized countries with hardcore work cultures and all the electric comforts engineering can offer, which may interfere with what the body aims to accomplish. The pre-industrial San people of southern Africa, for instance, tend to sleep for an additional hour when nights are longest and day shortest.

One of the main obstacles to getting extra sleep during the long dark comes from a cultural commitment to endless economic activity.

9-to-5s know no seasons.

At times, our approach to the economy feels almost inevitable and all but inescapable, yet there is nothing innately human or natural about it. Ecology reveals such. This time of year, trees shed leaves; beavers cache food; bears pack on pounds to hibernate; migratory birds flee to warmer climes. In the industrialized world, however, we continue to plug along day by day according to the same schedule we follow the rest of the year, daring to defy nature’s rhythms even as our bodies clamor for us to slow down, get cozy, sleep in.

If we learned how to adapt our lifestyles, cultures, and economics to shift according to the seasons – in particular to allow for a winter slowdown, or outright stoppage – we’d all be happier for it.

What would it look like to return to life according to the seasons, particularly in the winter when the rest of the world is at its most languid? To answer that question, we can look to beavers, monkeys, and the secret life of trees.

Beavers are, for me, always an excellent example of what humans could do if we put our engineering abilities to use working with the natural world instead of against it.

They are among the most prolific ecosystem engineers on the planet, reshaping waterways and spreading wetlands with wooden dams that they build upon generation after generation.

But despite the enviable work ethic they expend on their lodges and dams in other parts of the year, when fall arrives they turn their attention to building up a food cache and eagerly wrap up projects and repairs so that they’re ready for winter. When frost settles on the land and ice overtakes their lakes, beavers spend most of their time resting and eating in their lodges.

You’ll rarely see a beaver doing any sort of building during the dark season. Conserving energy is, after all, a matter of survival in lean times.

This autumn period of productivity ensures that their lodges are well-insulated for the plunging temperatures of winter and, since transporting branches across a frozen pond presents a tremendous challenge, the excessive activity of autumn put into building up an underwater pantry ensures that they need not waste energy foraging.

These strategies might be focused on survival, but it’s still something that humans could use our penchant for biomimicry to replicate. After all, what’s the point in working all year long, toiling away week after week whether flowers bloom or snows fall if we never get to enjoy a true stretch of rest and leisure, save a week here or long weekend there that tend to race by before we know it.

Since our bodies follow the seasons whether we like it or not, perhaps it’d be best if we found ways to spend the winter resting. That may entail brief spurts of increased work to wrap up tasks for the year ahead of the winter so that we can enjoy a well-earned break, but it would also mean that there could be months in which nothing is demanded of us.

The idea of taking months off work, however, verges on unimaginable.

Our economy presupposes that we’ll create and consume in an endlessly swelling cycle. But this can’t continue forever. Already humans as a whole consume nearly two Earths worth of resources each year, with America and other over-developed nations driving that trend. Hence the emergence of a “post-growth” movement that envisions a world in which people’s needs are met without the requirement for an ever-expanding economy to keep people gainfully employed. Central to this movement lies the idea of working less.

Most experts and advocates in this space argue for establishing a 4-day, 32-hour work week as the new norm for year-round work, but there’s no reason the vision couldn’t include seasonal slowdowns.

While doing fieldwork in Nova Scotia and eastern Canada for a study on work ethics and degrowth, sociologist Karen Foster found communities where months-long breaks are common. “Many choose to shut down and take a break from January to April,” Foster wrote — albeit, those breaks have more to do with the absence of tourists than winter itself. Still, it shows that taking months off is possible.  And it’s already happening.

Vervet monkeys and deciduous trees teach us what the best ways would be to spend those new found breaks.

Vervet monkeys rely on spending time with friends, family, and close acquaintances to survive when temperatures plunge in South Africa during the winter, particularly overnight. During the day, when temperatures are well-over freezing, the monkeys will often groom each other, which improves how well their fur can insulate them.

“It’s like fluffing a duvet,” one scientist told National Geographic. Once the sun sets, vervets will huddle together with as many partners as they can manage to share body heat and keep themselves buffered from the cold as temperatures drop and frost spreads.

In other words, cuddling has evolutionary benefits.

Other primates, specifically Barbary macaques, have similarly been shown to better withstand the cold as their social networks grow.

And surely though space heaters, weighted blankets, and hot soups have made group hugs an unnecessary survival tactic, we still share many of the same genetic predispositions as these other primates do.

People need people. We tend to be happier and healthier the more time we spend with those we care about, and a winter work stoppage would be the perfect opportunity to gather with friends and family. Winter celebrations like Christmas, Hannukah, and Kwanzaa are already common around the world. Why not give people ample space to enjoy them? Having weeks or months where work responsibilities evaporate would allow us to lean into those holidays, which would in turn help us combat the isolation epidemic. Researchers have already noted that work hours are a major impediment to a robust social life.

Even outside of getting together with loved ones, having time to just do nothing but prioritize our mental and physical health could be hugely beneficial. Many post-growth advocates even argue that when people are given the space to work less, they should spend more time doing nothing: idling, “liming” as they say in Trinidad.

This leisure time could even improve our well-being and ready us for the year ahead. It’s what deciduous trees do.

From the outside, these trees appear to spend winter entirely dormant. Certainly, they’re bare of leaves and their trunks, boughs, and branches aren’t growing. But scientists have found that their roots remain active, growing, repairing themselves, and collecting stores of nutrients and carbohydrates that they can send coursing through their every limb once it’s time to bud, blossom, and leaf. It’s a form of invisible work that supports their ability to optimize the rest of the year.

Though this preparatory work would doubtless be different for each person, it could include reading, meditating, journaling, mending clothes, finishing long-neglected home projects, or engaging in self-reflection on the accomplishments of the past year and the aspirations for the one ahead.

Though the world is not yet ready to give you the space to enjoy a winter absent of work responsibilities, you can still strive to find ways to honor your bodily rhythms. That could mean, for one, getting outside more and taking in more natural light.

In the Colorado camping study, researchers found people were exposed to far more light while camping than during their typical, indoor, electric lives. The effect was most significant in the morning. The only time of day when people got more light during their regular lives than when camping was after sunset and before going to sleep.

The takeaway, then, is that we need to get ourselves exposed to more light earlier in the day — ideally by getting outside and going for long walks when possible —  and less light later in the day: little lights, not big lights.

Beyond that, it’d be worth finding ways to reduce your workloads and responsibilities during the winter to give yourself the space to rest and sleep in whenever you can manage.

Of course, getting a little more light and letting yourself rest a little extra is great, but it’s no substitute for systemic change. And were there to eventually be a world in which we tune down our work hours in the winter, it would – somewhat ironically – take a lot of work to get there.

We’d need to build the kind of robust, sustained labor movement that won the 40-hour work week generations ago and put that energy behind the fight for a national 32-hour work week that Bernie Sanders and others in Congress have put forth bills for, then expand that toward a broader economic shift.

The best place to begin the push is in your own work place. Talk to your coworkers. If you’re in a unionized workplace, get a 32-hour week on the bargaining table. If you’re not, start a union drive, and make this one of the demands.

Whatever steps you decide to take, there’s no doubt that organized labor will be essential to creating a work culture and an economy that aligns with the rhythms of nature and the human body as the seasons shift.