The Winter Creativity Grift

A Field Guide to Doing Nothing (Productively)

It’s January. You haven’t written anything meaningful in three weeks. Your last “creative session” involved opening a Google Doc, typing the word “Chapter”, and then spending forty minutes researching whether otters hold hands while they sleep. (They do, and it’s adorable, but it’s also not writing.)

You know what you need, don’t you?

Not discipline. Not a better routine. Not to actually sit down and do the bloody work.

No, what you need is the right winter creativity hack.

Because according to the internet, winter isn’t a season where things die and everyone gets a bit miserable and vitamin D deficient. Winter is actually a sacred portal to your deepest creative self. You’ve just been doing it wrong.

The Hygge Hustlers

Let’s start with the Scandinavian cottage industry that’s convinced half of LinkedIn that the secret to creative brilliance is… candles.

You see, you’re not blocked. You’re not lazy. You’re not scrolling through TikTok at 11am in your dressing gown wondering where your life went wrong. You’re simply not cosy enough.

What you need is:

Seventeen pillar candles (unscented, naturally, because you have taste)
A chunky knit blanket that cost more than your monthly grocery budget
Ambient noise that sounds like a Norwegian forest in light rain
A mug of something warm and beige
Fuzzy socks (this is non-negotiable, apparently)

Once you’ve assembled this Instagram-ready tableau, the words will simply flow. The novel will write itself. The newsletter will materialize fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s head, except it smells like cinnamon and has better lighting.

Except it won’t, will it?

Because what actually happens is you spend three hours arranging the candles, take forty-seven photos trying to get the “casual creative workspace” shot just right, realise you’ve forgotten to actually light any of them because you were too busy curating the aesthetic of productivity, and then you give up and watch true crime documentaries until your eyes hurt.

But at least you looked creative. And in 2025, isn’t that what really matters?

The 5am Fascists

Then we have the productivity bros. The ones who’ve somehow decided that winter isn’t the problem… you are. Specifically, your weak, pathetic sleep schedule.

Real creatives, they’ll tell you, wake up at 5am. Or 4:30am. Or, if you’re truly committed to the bit, 3:47am, because that’s when Hemingway woke up. (He didn’t, but facts have never stopped a productivity influencer before.)

Here’s their routine:

Wake up before the sun (and your will to live)
Cold shower (because comfort is for the weak)
Green juice (tastes like punishment, which is the point)
90 minutes of deep work before anyone else is awake
Feel smug about it on Twitter

The logic is bulletproof: winter mornings are dark anyway, so you might as well be awake for the darkness. It’s atmospheric. It’s liminal. It’s giving Sylvia Plath energy, except you’re writing LinkedIn posts about SaaS marketing instead of poetry.

What they don’t tell you is that waking up at 5am in January when it’s -2°C outside and your heating doesn’t kick in until 6:30am isn’t “tapping into your creative flow state”. It’s just suffering. You’re not Byron. You’re not Hemingway. You’re not even the person you were at 11pm last night when you convinced yourself this was a good idea.

You’re just cold, resentful, and writing sentences like “synergistic solutions for B2B stakeholders” while your soul quietly files for divorce.

But hey, at least you’re optimising.

The Mystics

And then… oh, then we have my personal favourites. The people who’ve rebranded “I haven’t done anything in six weeks” as intentional rest.

Winter, they’ll tell you, is a fallow period. Nature is resting. The earth is dormant. And so, by extension, should you be. This isn’t procrastination, darling. This is honouring your cyclical creative energy.

They’ve got it all worked out:

Winter is for “integration”
Spring is for “emergence”
Summer is for “expansion”
Autumn is for “harvest”
All year round is for talking about these seasons like they’re personality types

You’re not blocked, you see. You’re wintering. You’re in your cocoon era. You’re gestating ideas. You’re composting thoughts. You’re doing incredibly important inner work that just happens to look exactly identical to lying on the sofa watching Netflix and eating cereal for dinner.

The creativity will come in spring, obviously. That’s when you’ll emerge, fully formed, like a butterfly made of motivation and finished manuscripts.

Except spring will arrive, and you still won’t have written anything, because it turns out “honouring your seasons” is just procrastination with better PR. The only thing you’ve been gestating is guilt. The only thing you’ve composted is time.

But it sounds spiritual, doesn’t it? It sounds so much better than “I scrolled through Instagram for four hours and then had an existential crisis about whether I’m wasting my one wild and precious life”.

The Lamp People

Special mention must go to the SAD lamp evangelists. The ones who’ve decided that what stands between you and creative greatness is 10,000 lux of artificial daylight.

Buy the lamp, they say. Sit in front of it for 30 minutes every morning. Flood your brain with synthetic sunshine. Trick your circadian rhythm into thinking it’s June. Problem solved.

And look, I’m not saying SAD lamps don’t work. I’m not saying seasonal affective disorder isn’t real. I’m saying there’s a specific type of person who buys a £200 light box, uses it twice, and then spends the rest of winter using it as an expensive surface to stack books on while posting threads about how “we’re not designed to be productive in winter, actually”.

The lamp sits there, glowing with promise and unused potential, much like your Google Docs folder.

The Actual Truth (Sorry)

Here’s what nobody wants to hear: winter is harder for creativity because winter is just harder, full stop.

It’s cold. It’s dark. Your body is designed to want to hibernate, not to write 2,000 words about content strategy before breakfast. Seasonal affective disorder is real. Vitamin D deficiency is real. The part where it gets dark at 4pm and you feel like you’re living in a coal mine is real.

And sometimes… you’re just not in the mood. You’re tired. You’re uninspired. You’ve got nothing to say. And that’s not a moral failing or a sign you need a new routine or better candles or a more optimised morning. It’s just being human.

The creativity industry has convinced us that if we’re not producing, we must be doing something wrong. We need to fix it. Optimise it. Hack it. Buy something. Try something. Do something differently.

But sometimes the thing you need to do differently is… nothing. Just accept that January is a bit shit, you’re allowed to have a slower month, and the world will not end if you don’t write your magnum opus before February.

The real creativity hack is this: give yourself permission to be a bit rubbish for a while.

Don’t buy into the grift. Don’t convince yourself you need to be hygge-ing at dawn in front of a SAD lamp while journalling about your fallow period. Don’t turn your very normal, very human struggle with winter into a productivity project.

Just… be cold and uninspired for a bit. Watch the otters. Light a candle if you want to, but don’t make it a whole thing.

And when the ideas come back, whenever that is, they’ll come back. Not because you optimised yourself into creative submission, but because that’s what ideas do.

They leave. They come back. They don’t give a toss about your morning routine.

Winter is long. Your creativity isn’t going anywhere.

Neither are the bloody candles.

Until Next Time