Dreading Winter? How to Prepare Emotionally and Build Self-TrustDreading Winter? How to Prepare Emotionally and Build Self-Trust
Underground Confidence Recovery
Shelley Treacher talks about how winter affects mood and behaviour differently for everyone, and offers practical questions and prompts to help people build self-trust and choose genuinely supportive habits. The focus is on understanding personal patterns, easing into healthier options, and creating a gentle plan for getting back on track when old comforts take over.
13:52•30 Sept 2026
Preparing for Winter: Self-Trust, Small Choices and Emotional Recovery
Episode Overview
- There is no single correct way to prepare for winter; emotional needs vary widely from person to person.
- Generic advice like exercising more or socialising only helps if it fits your actual patterns and needs.
- Comfort behaviours such as scrolling, overeating or texting the wrong person can signal unmet needs rather than simple weakness.
- Self-trust grows by asking reflective questions about your choices and noticing what genuinely makes you feel more like yourself.
- Simple written prompts about what you lose and what helps in winter can guide you towards a realistic, kind plan for the darker months.
“Learning to trust yourself is about listening to your needs enough to support them.”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety and emotional balance when the days get shorter and colder? This episode of Underground Confidence Recovery focuses on preparing for winter in a way that actually works for you, rather than forcing a rigid, perfect routine.
BACP Accredited Somatic Psychotherapist Shelley Treacher talks about how winter can make life feel smaller – less movement, fewer people, more screens and snacks – and why generic advice like “exercise more” isn’t enough on its own. Drawing on research with 428 people with depression, Shelley explains that “there isn’t one way to emotionally prepare for winter”, because half the people in the study weren’t affected by seasons at all, and the rest didn’t always struggle in winter.
Shelley links this to recovery behaviours, showing how scrolling, overeating or texting someone who isn’t good for you can be attempts at self-soothing rather than “bad habits”, and says, “Recovery doesn’t mean never doing these things or giving yourself a hard time for doing them.” She offers four simple sentence prompts – such as “In winter, I lose…” and “I already know that I feel more like myself when I…” – to help you map out what disappears from your life in the darker months and what reliably helps you feel more like yourself.
Instead, you’ll hear practical questions and prompts to help you understand your own patterns: do you genuinely need more rest or more movement? Does routine support you or leave you feeling boxed in? The aim is to build self-trust: noticing what you need, making it easier to follow through (even if that just means buying a warmer coat), and having a gentle plan for getting back on track when you drift.
If winter tends to knock you off balance or pull you back towards old coping habits, this episode gives you a calm, down-to-earth way to ask: what do I already know that I need this winter, and how could I start trusting myself enough to give it to me?
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