Why I Think the Modern World's Disconnection from the Seasons Is Making Us Ill

Kathy Postelle Rixon
18 hours ago
11 min read

We have built a world in which it is always the same temperature, always light, always available, and we are paying for it in ways we don't yet fully understand.

I live in a part of England where winter is real. Not the picturesque kind, but the grey, low, damp kind that settles in around November and doesn't fully lift until March. For much of my adult life, I treated this as a problem to be solved: more light bulbs, more productivity, more commitments to keep me moving through it, as though the season were simply an inconvenience to be powered through rather than a reality to be inhabited.

Then I began shamanic practice, and my relationship with the year changed entirely. Not because shamanism is romantic about nature - it isn't - but because it starts from a premise our culture has largely abandoned: that we are not separate from the natural world and its rhythms, but expressions of them. That what happens in the land happens, in corresponding ways, in us. And that when we sever ourselves from that correspondence, something in us goes wrong.

I no longer think this is metaphor. I think it is biology and I think the evidence for it, from both the scientific literature and the accumulated wisdom of traditional cultures, is more compelling than our collective behaviour would suggest.

Woman and child gardening outdoors — Your body knows what it needs

WHAT THE BODY KNOWS

The Science of Circadian and Circannual Biology

The human body is not a machine that runs identically regardless of input. It is a biological system exquisitely calibrated to time, specifically to light, temperature, and the rhythmic cycles that govern life on this planet. This calibration operates at every level, from the molecular to the behavioural, and it is far more pervasive than most people realise.

The circadian rhythm, the approximately 24-hour cycle governing sleep, hormone secretion, metabolism, immune function, and dozens of other processes, has been studied intensively since the discovery of the molecular clock mechanism earned Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael Young the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology. What that research established, beyond the existence of the mechanism itself, was how comprehensively disrupting it damages health. Shift workers, who chronically misalign their biological clock with the light-dark cycle, show significantly elevated rates of cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorder, certain cancers, and depression. The disruption alone, and not any other variable, is sufficient to produce measurable harm.

THE SCIENCE

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology confirmed that virtually every cell in the human body contains its own molecular clock, regulated primarily by light. Misalignment of these clocks, through artificial light at night, irregular sleep, or shift work, is associated with increased risk of metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, mood disorders, and impaired immune function.

Beyond daily rhythms, the body tracks the year. Seasonal changes in day length regulate melatonin secretion, cortisol patterns, serotonin availability, immune activity, reproductive hormones, and appetite. These are not minor fluctuations; they are fundamental seasonal recalibrations that our physiology expects and requires.

But the circadian rhythm is only part of the picture. Less discussed, though equally well documented, is the circannual rhythm which is the body's tracking of the year. Humans, like most mammals, are profoundly seasonal creatures. Day length, registered through specialised retinal cells that feed directly into the hypothalamus, triggers seasonal shifts in melatonin secretion, serotonin availability, cortisol patterns, immune activity, thyroid function, and appetite. These are not minor seasonal variations. They are fundamental biological recalibrations that occur annually and that our physiology has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to expect.

What happens when we override them? We live under electric light that tells the brain it is always midsummer. We heat our homes to the same temperature year-round. We eat strawberries in January and expect our productivity to be identical in February as in July. We demand of our nervous systems a constancy that nothing in our evolutionary history prepared them for.

The consequences accumulate. Seasonal affective disorder is the most visible expression, but it is probably the tip of something much larger. The research on immune seasonality says that immune systems are less effective in winter, with infections peaking not merely because of cold air but because of the seasonal suppression of certain immune pathways. This suggests that our year-round demand for consistent function is running against a biological tide. The research on metabolic health and light exposure, on testosterone and progesterone cycles across the year, and on the seasonal variation in gut microbiome composition points toward the same uncomfortable conclusion: the body is designed to change with the year, and when we prevent that change, we pay a price.

WHAT THE TRADITIONS KNEW

The Shamanic View: Living In Rhythm With the Seasons Is Not Optional

Every pre-industrial culture on earth organised its life around the seasons. Not out of romantic attachment to nature, and not because they lacked the technology to do otherwise, but because direct observation over many generations had made it abundantly clear that trying to live against the grain of the natural cycle produced suffering, illness, and spiritual dysfunction. The calendar was not merely practical. It was therapeutic.

In shamanic cosmology, the seasonal cycle is not a backdrop to human life but one of its primary structuring forces. Each season carries a quality of energy, a characteristic teaching, a set of activities and orientations that are appropriate to it and actively harmful when ignored or inverted. To live in alignment with the seasons is not a lifestyle choice, but it is, in the shamanic frame, a fundamental act of health. To live out of alignment is to court precisely the kind of depletion, disconnection, and illness that so many people in the modern world carry as a chronic baseline.

SPRING: Emergence and new direction
The season of initiation when energy that has been composting underground begins to push upward. In shamanic terms, spring calls for clarity of intention and the courage to begin. Physiologically, rising light levels trigger serotonin increases and cortisol recalibration. The body is primed to move, to start, to renew. Forcing this energy in winter by the culture's demand for year-round initiative and productivity exhausts the adrenal system and produces a particular kind of joyless striving.
SUMMER: Fullness and outward expression
The season of maximum outward engagement with connection, creativity, and celebration. Shamanic traditions across the northern hemisphere mark midsummer as a peak of power, the moment when the veil between worlds is thin and the life force is at its most available. Biologically, long days support sustained activity, social engagement, and the accumulation of vitamin D that will be metabolised through the darker months. This is the season to give generously of energy but only because the other seasons provide the conditions for its renewal.
AUTUMN: Harvest, release, and letting go
The season of discernment, of what to carry forward and what to release. Shamanic practice treats autumn as a time for honest reckoning: clearing what is no longer needed, preparing for the descent. Physiologically, shortening days trigger melatonin shifts, appetite changes, and the beginning of the body's move toward consolidation. Resisting this, by maintaining summer's pace into October and November, is one of the most common patterns of depletion I see. The body is trying to slow down. The culture demands otherwise.
WINTER: Rest, depth, and inner work
The most consistently violated season in modern life. Winter is not the failure of summer; it is the necessary condition for it. In shamanic traditions, winter is the time of the deep interior: dreaming, storytelling, ritual, the tending of what has been gathered. It is a season of reduced outward activity and increased inner life. Physiologically, longer nights support extended sleep, reduced metabolic demand, and a genuine slowing that the nervous system requires. To force winter into summer's pace, which the modern world consistently does, is to deprive the system of its most essential renewal.

THE ILLNESS OF DISPLACEMENT

What Living Out of Rhythm Actually Produces

I want to name something I have observed repeatedly in shamanic practice, and which I now recognise in myself in the years before this work: there is a particular kind of exhaustion that has no adequate name in the modern medical vocabulary. It is not burnout, though it resembles it. It is not depression, though it shares some features. It is not anxiety, though it produces a chronic low-level agitation that looks similar.

It is the exhaustion of being perpetually out of phase. Of living in a body that is trying to do one thing while the demands being placed on it require another. Of being in February but living as though it were June. Of reaching for vitality that has not been earned because the conditions for its renewal have not been honoured.

The shamanic term for this is something like loss of resonance, or the state in which a person has become so desynchronised from the rhythms that sustain them that their energy no longer replenishes in the ordinary way. It is not a dramatic crisis. It is a slow, incremental dimming. Things that used to bring pleasure no longer quite do. Sleep does not restore. The year loses its texture and it no longer feels like it has seasons, only a uniform grey of demand and recovery, demand and recovery.

We have created the most comfortable built environment in human history, and we ar

I do not think this is coincidental. I think the loss of seasonal rhythm is one significant thread in a larger pattern of disconnection from the natural world, alongside the loss of darkness, the loss of silence, the loss of contact with the ground, the loss of the kinds of meaning that only come from participating in something larger and older than the individual self.

The research on nature contact and mental health increasingly supports this. Studies on what has been called 'nature deficit disorder', a term coined by Richard Louv and which has attracted serious scientific attention in the years since, consistently find that reduced contact with natural environments correlates with elevated rates of anxiety, depression, attention disorders, and immune dysfunction. Time in natural settings lowers cortisol, reduces activity in the brain regions associated with rumination, and measurably improves mood and cognitive function. These are not small effects. They are large, consistent, and dose-dependent.

THE HARDER QUESTION

Why We Resist This

If the evidence, both scientific and experiential, points so consistently toward the necessity of seasonal attunement, why do we so persistently refuse it?

Part of the answer is structural. Late capitalism has a powerful interest in abolishing seasonality. A consumer who is always available, always productive, always awake, always wanting, spends more and produces more than a consumer who honours winter's call to rest and spring's requirement for new direction. The 24-hour economy, the always-on digital environment, the year-round availability of everything: these are not accidents. They are the conditions of a particular economic system, and they are incompatible with human biological reality.

But there is also a psychological resistance that goes deeper than economics. To honour the seasons is to accept that we are not in control. It is to acknowledge that there are rhythms larger than personal will, that the body is not a machine to be overridden, that some things cannot be forced or optimised or scheduled. It is to accept limitation, and more than that, to accept that the limitation is not a failure but a design feature.

This is exactly what shamanic practice asks. Not the romanticisation of hardship, not the rejection of all that is modern, but the honest acknowledgement that we are creatures embedded in a world that has its own rhythms and that our flourishing depends on our willingness to move with them rather than perpetually against them.

YOU CANNOT BE MORE ALIVE THAN THE WORLD YOU ARE PART OF PERMITS. YOU CAN ONLY PRETEND YOU CAN.

WHAT RETURNING TO RHYTHM LOOKS LIKE

Small Recalibrations, Significant Consequences

I am not going to suggest that anyone dismantle their modern life and retreat into a medieval agricultural calendar. That is neither possible nor the point. What I am suggesting, and what shamanic practice and the biological evidence both suggest, is that even modest steps toward seasonal attunement produce measurable returns because the body is primed to respond. It has been waiting for permission.

Getting outside in natural light in the morning, even on grey winter days, is not a wellness cliché. It is the single most powerful way to resynchronise the circadian clock because the specialised retinal cells that feed into the hypothalamus are most sensitive in the blue-light spectrum of early daylight. Twenty minutes outside before 10am does more for sleep, mood, and metabolic health than almost any other single intervention the research has tested.

Reducing artificial light after sunset matters more than most people believe. The body cannot distinguish between the light of the October moon and the light of a smartphone screen. Both suppress melatonin, delay sleep onset, and tell the hypothalamus that the sun is still up. This is not a minor disruption. It is a chronic, nightly lie we tell our endocrine systems.

Eating seasonally, not as a food philosophy but as a biological practice, means the gut microbiome, which shifts with the seasons in ways that are only beginning to be understood, receives the inputs it has evolved to expect. The fibre profiles of summer and winter foods are genuinely different. The microbiome responds to this difference. When everything is available year-round and we lose the seasonal variation in our diet, we lose something in the microbial ecology that appears to matter for immune function, mood, and metabolic health.

And then there is the practice that shamanic traditions have always known to be essential and that modern life most consistently refuses: actually stopping in winter. Not a holiday, not a long weekend, but a genuine seasonal reduction in demand and output, a willingness to let the year have a quieter quarter, a recognition that the energy available in January is genuinely different from the energy available in July, and that pretending otherwise is not ambition but a form of self-betrayal. I do this myself and call it 'wintering'.

None of this requires belief in anything supernatural. It requires only the willingness to take the biology seriously and to consider that the traditional practices our ancestors developed over tens of thousands of years were not superstition but accumulated knowledge, refined by the most rigorous method available: living with the consequences of getting it wrong.

THE LARGER INVITATION

Belonging to Something Bigger

The shamanic understanding of seasonal attunement goes beyond biology, though it includes it. At its deepest, it is an invitation into a different relationship with existence: one in which the human being is not a self-sufficient unit managing its environment but a participant in a web of relationships that includes the land, the light, the animals, the ancestors, and the turning of the year itself.

This participation is not passive. It requires attention, the kind of sustained, embodied attention to the natural world that our built environment systematically prevents. It requires ritual, not necessarily ceremony, but some regular, intentional act of acknowledgement: the marking of the solstice, the noticing of the first light changing in February, the deliberate harvest of what needs to be released before winter. These acts are not decorative. They are, in the shamanic frame, the mechanisms by which the individual self stays in relationship with the larger rhythms that sustain it.

And they produce something that is genuinely difficult to name but unmistakable in experience: a sense of being held. Not by anything sentimental, not by a benevolent universe that guarantees outcomes, but by the simple fact of belonging to a cycle that is older than human suffering and will continue beyond it. The year turns. It has always turned. Being in conscious relationship with that turning does not solve the hard things, but it places them in a context that makes them bearable in a way that the uniform, seasonless, always-on world cannot.

I think this is what so many people in the modern world are actually hungry for when they report feeling disconnected, purposeless, or inexplicably depleted. Not more productivity tools. Not a better morning routine. But the simple, ancient, biologically grounded experience of being creatures of this earth: responsive to its rhythms, nourished by its cycles, held within something they did not make and cannot control.

The seasons will turn whether we attend to them or not. The question is only whether we are present enough to be changed by them.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is a researcher, philosopher, and shamanic practitioner. She works with people who are ready to move out of chronic depletion and into genuine relationship with the rhythms, both internal and external, that sustain them. She can be reached at kathy@magicinharmony.com or www.magicinharmony.com.