You went to bed early. You got eight hours.
You woke up this morning, looked out at the same flat grey sky you’ve been looking out at for weeks now, and made the same calculation you’ve been making since November. Coffee. Move slowly. Get through the morning. See how it goes.
By 2 PM the light is already starting to drop. By 4:30 it’s done.
You’re not depressed, exactly. You’re not sick. You’re showing up to everything. The work is getting done. You’re meeting your people for the dinners and the things.
And underneath all of that, there is a specific kind of heaviness that you’ve been telling yourself is just being a little tired.
It isn’t tired. It has a different shape. And until you can name it accurately, you can’t actually respond to what’s happening.
You’re wintering.
What Wintering Actually Is
Wintering is what a body and a nervous system do when they’ve been living through a Canadian winter long enough that the cumulative cost has started to show.
It looks like:
- Energy that doesn’t come back from sleep
- A bracing in the body that you’ve stopped noticing because it’s been there for months
- A reduction in the colour of things - food tastes a bit less, music lands a bit less, the joke is a bit less funny
- A heightened sensitivity to small inputs that wouldn’t move you in May
- A vague, persistent sense that you’re behind on something but can’t name what
- A pull toward warmth, carbohydrates, and being indoors that isn’t laziness - it’s a real signal
Most people who live through real winters spend half the year in some version of this and never give it its own name. They call it being busy. They call it being tired. They call it the year being a lot.
Those words don’t quite fit. They’re close, but they aren’t accurate. And the inaccuracy matters because if you call it tired, you’ll try to sleep more, and sleep isn’t really what this needs.
Why Pushing Through Winter Doesn’t Work
The standard Canadian approach to wintering is to power through it. Eat better. Get outside even when it’s awful. Use the light therapy lamp. Schedule the social thing even when you don’t want to. Don’t let the season win.
Some of that helps. It also has a particular cost, which is that it teaches your system that the answer to genuine signals from your body is to override them.
The conscious mind - the part picking the light lamp, scheduling the walk, making the smoothie - accounts for about 5% of your total mental activity. The other 95% is the subconscious, and it has its own read on what winter is asking of you.
For people who push through winter without acknowledging what it’s costing, that 95% is usually running something like: Don’t slow down. You’ll lose ground. The dark months are just to be survived. Being tired in winter is a personal failing. Other people are managing.
That isn’t a thought you walk around with. It runs quietly, like background processing. And every override - the light lamp, the gym session, the forced positivity - gets layered on top of it.
You feel better for an hour. The underneath response continues. The wintering deepens, in the quiet, into something that has accumulated by March in a way you can’t quite ignore by then.
What Reaches the Underneath
I came across Inner Influencing as someone who had powered through enough winters to know that the powering-through wasn’t actually working - it was just delaying when the cost would land. Usually mid-February. Sometimes earlier.
What I found in Inner Influencing was something that operated on completely different logic. Different enough that I went on to train as a Master Practitioner, and it’s now the foundation of the work I do with clients.
Inner Influencing is an established methodology for communicating directly with the subconscious mind. A direct instruction, structured in a specific way the subconscious can receive without resistance. The pattern doesn’t have to be analyzed or understood to be updated. It just needs the right signal.
That signal comes through a carefully worded statement using a trigger phrase - "Purple Cow" - that’s deliberately unusual. The oddness is functional: it cuts through habitual mental processing and tells the subconscious that what’s coming is a direct instruction, not another thought to file away. One statement. Said once. No repetition required.
Try It for Yourself
Read each statement below slowly - out loud if you can. Say it once, then stop. Let a moment of quiet follow before moving to the next.
Notice whatever comes, even something small. A small lightening you didn’t ask for. A breath that lands. A sense, even faint, that the heaviness just got a different kind of attention.
Statement 1 · The Surface Pattern
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the cumulative weight of wintering I’ve been carrying as if it were just being tired, and stop overriding the real signals my body is sending, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful.”
“Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then pause and notice.
Statement 2 · The Hidden Layer
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of any belief that I have to push through winter without acknowledging what it costs, or that being heavy in February is a personal failing, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful.”
“Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Take a breath. Let it settle.
Statement 3 · Opening the Positive
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will make it easy for me to meet winter honestly, move through it at a pace that doesn’t accumulate damage, and arrive in March intact, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful.”
“Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then simply rest for a moment.
What Just Happened
Whatever you noticed, even something faint, even just a moment where the heaviness wasn’t quite as anonymous - that was your subconscious receiving an instruction at the level where the wintering is being held.
It doesn’t usually arrive with drama. Sometimes it’s quiet. A breath. A small permission to feel what the season is actually asking you to feel.
What you just experienced is just the beginning of how Inner Influencing works. The deeper practice reaches the older layers - the early instructions about powering through, the inherited beliefs about what counts as a real reason to slow down, the patterns that have been teaching you to override every body signal that wasn’t on the approved list.
The free Inner Influencing Discovery Kit takes you further into the practice, explains the science behind why it works, and opens the door to that deeper clearing.
You’re not just tired. You’re wintering. Once you can name it, you can actually meet it — and that changes the cost of the rest of the year.