Stop trying to maintain constant productivity: Your ability to cope with stress changes with the seasons and your own biological clocks

Masha Remskar, Arizona State University

Do you feel like the same person in February as in June? For most people, the answer is a resounding no.

During winter, your energy tends to dip, your immune system takes a hit and you may feel less social. Research finds that people are less inclined to stick to a workout routine in winter.

In contrast, spring’s longer days can make you feel like you’re coming alive with energy, with summer reported as the most active and social of the seasons.

And depending on what part of the world you live in, your energy in February or June will be very different from family members and colleagues in the opposite hemisphere.

I am a behavioral scientist with a decade of experience researching how the brain, body and behavior influence each other. My work has explored how technology can help measure and promote these connections for better health, such as by tracking activity through wearables or delivering mindfulness training through mobile apps.

While these approaches can be incredibly effective, I believe that most research misses the effects of the seasons and other cycles the human body is subject to. Though you may expect your productivity and mood to remain constant regardless of context, these rhythms affect your ability to deal with the stressors in your life: parenting, health concerns, work deadlines and even inconveniences such as traffic jams.

Rhythms affecting stress and resilience

Stress resilience is affected by several cyclical processes, ranging from individual, cellular-level mechanisms to the universal cycle of the seasons. Importantly, all of these rhythms stack on top of each other and interact, meaning that resilience is never a fixed state but rather more of a dynamic balance between a person’s mental and physical capacities and the demands placed on them.

On the individual level, the body’s capacity is subject to its internal clocks, a series of intricate feedback loops powered by physiological signaling mechanisms, such as hormones and neurotransmitters, which dictate our daily rhythms and are brought in synchrony by the body’s master clock.

Some of the bodily clocks that affect you every day are the sleep-wake, or circadian, rhythm and your chronotype, which is the body’s natural timing preference – often described as being either an early bird or a night owl. Slower bodily rhythms, such as the female reproductive cycle, can further affect energy, physical readiness or mood.

Humans have agreed on several collective deadlines and rhythms that keep society running. These include school terms and the breaks in between them and workplace push periods, such as quarter ends. In addition, each country has its own widely observed holidays and festivals, and most even agree on arbitrary deadlines, like a Tax Day.

These rhythms can abruptly change the demands placed on people, such as when school-age children are on break but parents are still expected to work at the same pace.

The seasons can also dictate major changes in our environment, lifestyle and even physiology: Temperatures, the weather and the amount of daylight a person is exposed to are important determinants of energy levels, seasonal food sources and what areas people have access to for recreation or socializing. Seasonal effects on mood and biology vary markedly depending on how far from the equator you live.

When these rhythms interact with one another – for instance, an end-of-quarter push at work during winter’s cold, dark days – you can experience a period of high stress and reduced performance.

A challenge for global teams

With the rise of hybrid and remote working since the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses increasingly rely on collaboration across countries and hemispheres. Roughly 1 in 3 meetings now span multiple time zones.

Along with its many upsides, such a global workforce creates unique challenges for organizational performance and resilience. For instance, many people now regularly work with colleagues experiencing a different set of seasonal and regional cycles. Team members in the middle of a Paris heat wave may feel lethargic due to the heat, while their colleagues in Santiago, Chile, feel the slowdown of winter, but team members in Calgary, Canada, are feeling energized by the pleasant temperatures and long summer days.

In this way, seasonal shifts in stress and resilience have implications for the well-being and performance of global teams, although they are currently rarely acknowledged by leadership.

One practical step teams can take is normalizing conversations about stress, seasonal capacity and workload management. A 2024 survey of nearly 28,000 employees across 16 countries found that when leaders foster a culture of psychological safety, employees are happier and far less likely to quit. This survey found that employees feeling least comfortable raising topics such as workload, mental health and productivity fluctuations are roughly 10% more likely to leave their job, compared to those most comfortable.

Teams can also harmonize their efforts across continents and cycles by offering tools for regularly monitoring stress, such as wearables or mood-tracking mobile apps, and by protecting employee time for personal development and recharging. This approach proactively cultivates resilience and mitigates stress year-round, building a skill my colleagues and I call “stress intelligence.”

How to build resilience that works with the rhythms

Resilience in the face of changing demands and capacity is an ongoing balancing act, both for individuals and for global teams. Based on the latest scientific evidence, I suggest three steps you can take to help build and maintain it.

• First, acknowledge: Recognizing fluctuations in all of these rhythms as normal can help you reframe healthy bursts of stress as enhancing focus and output, and low-capacity periods as key for rest and sustainable performance. These techniques are supported by considerable evidence from mindset psychology, the study of how the way you think about the world shapes your perceptions, behavior and even physiological responses. You can also map out which rhythms affect you at every level – individual, societal, planetary – and what beliefs you hold toward them. I also recommend looking into evidence-based resources, such as the book “How to Winter” and Stanford University’s Rethink Stress online tool kit.

• Second, integrate: Where possible, adjust to work with your rhythms, not against them. This may mean bringing your bedtime forward by 30 minutes to get more sleep during winter months, or aiming for a greater proportion of light-intensity exercise to keep your workout plans realistic. In the workplace, you might block out the times of day best aligned with your chronotype – that is, when you feel sharpest – for work that requires the most focus. Or schedule a strategically timed long weekend away to recharge after the end of a busy quarter.

• Third, adapt: There will inevitably be situations where adjustments are not possible – where the deadline is set, or the only available time for a meeting isn’t ideal for your sleep-wake cycle. The best way to prepare for these is to build a resilience buffer with healthy habits, such as sufficient sleep, a fresh, varied diet and regular exercise.

More targeted stress regulation strategies, such as mindfulness training, are also helpful to have in your toolbox. And if you need a quick reset, even a two-minute grounding exercise such as box breathing or bringing to mind three things you are grateful for can provide in-the-moment relief.

So, are you the same person in February that you are in June? Probably not – and that’s not a flaw to fix but a rhythm to work with. When you stop treating resilience as a constant, you may find that you stop being surprised by your own dips – and those of the people around you – and start embracing them instead.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.