Why Your Soul Needs a Winter Season: The Psychology and Biblical Wisdom of Rest
- Hannah
- Dec 3, 2025
- 4 min read
How seasonal slowing, nervous system rhythms, and God’s design for rest protect your mind, body, and spirit from burnout.
Winter is not a setback. Winter is God’s design for restoration. Psychology, Scripture, and even the trees themselves reveal the same truth. Growth requires seasons of slowing. Rest is not avoidance. Rest is repair. When we force ourselves to keep producing in a season meant for stillness, we break the very system God built to sustain and strengthen us.
The Ground We’ll Cover
In this post, we’ll explore:
What winter means psychologically for the body and nervous system
The biblical pattern of seasons, rest, and holy slowing
The redwood study and why forced growth destroys what it tries to strengthen
How to embrace your own winter season without fear
Practices to help your body and spirit soften into restorative rest
The Invitation of Winter
There is a quiet truth that emerges every year when the light fades and the world grows still. Creation itself slows its breathing. The soil settles. Roots deepen. Trees loosen their grip on leaves they no longer need. Even the sky feels lower and quieter.
Winter is a holy pause in the natural world. And the soul is not exempt from that rhythm.
We are not machines or endless reservoirs of energy. We are living, breathing ecosystems. And like the land, we require time where the outward parts of us quiet so the hidden roots of us can absorb what we have neglected all year.
Winter is not the absence of growth. Winter is the preparation for it.
The Psychology of Wintering
Psychologically, winter represents a season where your internal world asks for slower rhythms. Your nervous system naturally shifts into conservation mode. Energy turns inward. Your body becomes less efficient at constant output and more attuned to rest, reflection, and integration.
In a world that worships pace, this often feels wrong. But it is deeply right.
Research shows that during colder, quieter seasons the human body becomes more sensitive to depletion. Stress hormones rise more easily. Emotional processing deepens. Creativity sleeps a little. We are not meant to be at full capacity all twelve months of the year.
Your body knows how to winter even if your mind resists it.
Wintering as a Holy Practice
Scripture teaches that life unfolds in seasons. God created the world with rhythm, not relentless motion.
"To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven." Ecclesiastes 3:1
God built periods of rest into the Hebrew calendar, into agricultural cycles, and even into the land itself. Fields were commanded to lie fallow every seventh year. Rest was not optional. It was required so the soil could recover and remain fruitful.
If the land needed rest to yield more life later, so do we.
Jesus honored seasons of retreat. He sought solitude often. He stepped away from crowds to pray. He invited rest as a spiritual discipline, not a luxury.
Winter reminds us that stillness is not laziness. Stillness is obedience to the way we were made.
The Redwood Study: What Happens When You Force Growth
There was a study done with redwood trees where researchers injected them with adrenaline during the winter months. The goal was to force them to continue growing when they were supposed to rest.
It worked. For a moment.
The trees surged with artificial productivity. They pushed out new growth. They acted like spring in the middle of winter.
Then they died.
The forced pace burned through the resources they needed to survive. Their roots had not been given time to strengthen. Their systems were not meant to run at full power without pause.
Redwoods needed winter. And we do too.
Every time we skip our own winter, we borrow from resources that are already stretched thin. We cut into reserves meant for stability. We outrun our root system.
The soul cannot be fueled by adrenaline without consequence.
How to Embrace Your Own Winter Season
Wintering is not giving up. Wintering is honoring the season God has placed you in.
Here are gentle ways to soften into it:
Let yourself slow without guilt.
Choose quiet over constant input.
Allow your body to rest when it asks.
Trade productivity for presence.
Notice what you feel instead of pushing past it.
Spend time in Scripture that anchors you in God’s pace, not the world’s.
Let your roots recover before expecting new leaves.
This is the season for internal strengthening, deeper grounding, and holy recalibration.
A Closing Thought
You were not designed to bloom in every month of the year. You were created for seasons. You were created for rhythm. You were created for restoration.
Do not fear winter. Let it work for you. Let it deepen you. Let it prepare you for the spring God is already growing in the dark.
💛 Hannah
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