Do you feel like the same person in February as in June? For most people, the answer is a resounding no.
During winter, your energy tends to dip, and you may feel less social. In contrast, spring's longer days can make you feel like you're coming alive with energy. A 2021 review led by researcher Taylor Turrisi found that physical activity was greater in summer than winter.
These rhythms affect your ability to deal with stress, including work deadlines and even traffic jams. Resilience is never a fixed state but a dynamic balance between a person's capacities and the demands placed on them.
The body's capacity is subject to its internal clocks. Among the clocks that affect you every day are the sleep-wake, or circadian, rhythm and your chronotype, the body's natural timing preference, often described as being either an early bird or a night owl.
Collective deadlines, such as school terms and workplace quarter ends, can abruptly change the demands placed on people. Meanwhile, temperature and daylight affect energy levels. Seasonal effects on mood and biology also vary markedly depending on how far from the equator you live.
When these rhythms interact, for instance, during an end-of-quarter push at work during winter's cold, dark days, you can experience a period of high stress and reduced performance.
People working across countries and hemispheres may have colleagues on a different seasonal cycle: team members in one hemisphere may feel lethargic in the summer heat, while their colleagues elsewhere feel the slowdown of winter.
One practical step is normalizing conversations about stress, seasonal capacity, and workload. Boston Consulting Group surveyed about 28,000 employees across 16 countries in 2022. Its 2024 report found that 12% of those feeling least safe speaking up at work said they were likely to quit within a year, compared with 3% of those feeling most safe. Teams can also protect time for recharging.
So, are you the same person in February that you are in June? Probably not, and that's not a flaw to fix but a rhythm to work with.