Dark Days, Stronger Will: How to Hijack Your Motivation This Winter

The clocks go back. The mornings bite. The light disappears before you’ve even laced your shoes.

This is where motivation usually drops off a cliff.

Studies show that exercise adherence falls by almost 30% in winter (Independent, 2022), and even seasoned athletes report lower energy, mood, and consistency.

But it’s not just about cold air or dark skies. It’s psychological.

In summer, motivation is effortless. Sunlight triggers serotonin, routines align, and the social pull of shared sessions keeps you going.

Winter removes those cues, leaving discipline to do all the heavy lifting.

Most people will try to double down on willpower, but that’s where they go wrong. Instead we need to redesign your mental system for a new season and hijack your motivation.

Redefine Success for the Season

Your summer system doesn’t work in winter, and that’s not a failure, it’s biology.

Performance psychologists call this contextual recalibration: adapting how you measure success to the environment you’re in.

You’re not chasing peak performance now, you’re building resilience, learning, and consistency.

We see this in the popular motivation model, the PEL triangle (Gallwey, 1998):

• Performance might dip

• Experience might not always feel great.

• Learning is something we can prioritize.

How do you adapt, experiment, and show up when conditions aren’t perfect.

Success in winter doesn’t have to be this was “my fastest session.” It can be, “I did the session anyway.”

Adjust Your Training Identity

Motivation is strongest when behaviour aligns with identity.

So instead of thinking “I have to train”, let’s ever so slightly tweak that language to thinking “I’m the kind of person who trains whatever the weather”.

Identity-based motivation (Oyserman, 2009) shows that aligning your actions with who you believe yourself to be increases persistence under challenge.

So, tying your dark dreary workout to an identity value of persistence, showing up and doing the thing, will create an alignment of the action with your desired identity, boosting motivation.

That identity shift reframes the discomfort, it’s not resistance, it’s proof of commitment.

Engineer Your Environment

Habit formation research (James Clear, 2018; Wood & Neal, 2016) is clear: your environment shapes behaviour more than motivation does.

In summer, cues are everywhere, daylight, people training outdoors, post-work energy.

In winter, you must create those cues artificially:

• Stack habits: Pair your workout with a pre-existing cue (coffee → train, commute → gym).

• Reduce friction: Layout kit the night before, pre-set playlists, book classes early.

• Add accountability: Train with others or share post-session proof in your community.

You don’t need more discipline, you need fewer decisions between you and the goal behaviour of working out.

Shift From Motivation to Momentum

Motivation is emotional, it ebbs and flows. Momentum is mechanical, it builds with movement.

Start smaller. Commit to a 2-minute rule: lace up, start moving, and if after 2 minutes you still want to quit, you can. But you rarely will.

That’s behavioural activation at work (Martell, Addis & Jacobson, 2001), the psychological principle that action and emotion are inherently linked. We know that emotions can inform action whilst the inverse is also true, therefore we are hijacking this cycle and consciously choosing to add an action that will drive our emotions towards motivated action.

Move in the direction you want your mood to follow.

Train for Light, Not Against Darkness

Lack of sunlight hits more than your mood. It lowers serotonin and disrupts circadian rhythm, two key drivers of motivation (Melrose, 2015; Peiser, 2009).

So optimise what you can control:

• Chase daylight: Train outdoors at lunchtime or on weekends.

• Use light strategically: Morning exposure boosts alertness and dopamine.

• Reclaim night workouts: If evenings are your only option, turn them into rituals, favourite kit, warm-up playlist, or post-session reward.

The goal isn’t to avoid darkness. It’s to create light in it.

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Final Reflection

Winter training isn’t a punishment phase. It’s just another season of training that we have to adapt to.

The weather shifting is an inevitability that we have to plan for, and that starts with our mind. So that, when everyone else slows down, you’re refining your process, staying consistent, and getting in those extra reps.

If you want to uncover your mental barriers to training through the winter period, complete your Mental Edge assessment on the Getahead app.

It’ll reaffirm your mental strengths and highlight blind spots. Then it will create a personalised mental training plan to keep you motivated and training hard through the winter months!

Robin Hughes

Head of Mental Fitness, Getahead