Healthy soup, night walks and portable sleeping bags: how to prepare for winter - and even embrace it

Winter is coming and the beauty of fall - red and gold are spreading over the neighborhood trees; low fog; a morning flicker of frost – has an eerie quality this year. I don't need to explain why we all face the next few months with real trepidation: almost every title does that for me. The grim bonus is that meteorologists are predicting that La Niña could mean a colder-than-usual start to winter.

But even in the best-case scenario, I don't think not that we as a nation face winter with gusto. It is something to be endured or escaped rather than enjoyed or even enjoyed. Personally, I focus on Christmas, a frenzied emotional maelstrom — more powerful even than the John Lewis ad — of family, financial anxiety, and festive frankenfoods. Then I embark on an absurdly puritanical “new year, new you” diet for four minutes before giving up and spending months in gray, snotty, cream-fueled lethargy. But should it be so? I spoke to experts about how eating, dressing, moving and living a little differently could help me embrace and even enjoy winter.

“It can be very tempting in the middle of winter to lock yourself inside, look out the window and be like, 'Oh, I don't. don't like it," says Linda Geddes, author of Chasing the Sun, an exploration of the science of sunlight. But there are good reasons to get out, in terms of alertness and mood. "When you're exposed to bright light, the part of your brain responsible for waking you up and making you feel alert is activated," says Geddes. Light is measured in lux: depending on the weather, a standard office will be between 80 and 250 lux; outdoors will reach 2,000-2,500 on a dark day and on a sunny winter day can reach 80,000 lux. "So it's definitely worth trying to go out and get that 'light snack'." A 10-15 minute walk around the block is enough to benefit.

What about the Sad lamps, designed to combat the extreme form of winter blues known as the name seasonal affective disorder? The mechanism by which light affects mood is still unclear, but it does. Mood, Geddes explains, operates on a 24-hour cycle, with the lowest around 4 a.m. The main theory of Seasonal Affective Disorder is that low light in winter means our circadian rhythms can't "reset" like they normally would on a daily basis, leaving some people jet lag, still waking up in that low mood of 4 hours of the morning. Sad lamps can give your circadian clock an artificial reset, but they only work if used correctly: first thing in the morning and up close. “Sit right next to them,” advises Geddes. "Having it on your table when you're...