TROMSØ, Norway —This morning, I opened my eyes to darkness. In my pre-dawn confusion, I was, for a moment, a child in October rural Northern California, shaken awake by my mother to turn over the soil for the winter garden. My five sisters and I would stumble in the small light, toppling Jenga-like stacks of sneakers in search of a match, then stamping on frosty earth as we tugged on work gloves and claimed our tools. We worked under a gray-purple sky until it bloomed orange and pink, shedding layers of fleece as the trees shed dew. When the sun warmed our backs and tilled black rows lined our half-acre, it was time for school.
But this wasn’t the early autumn California of my childhood. It was November 21, 2024, about 5,000 miles to the northeast, near the very top of the world. And this “pre-dawn” was in fact a quite leisurely 8 o’clock in the morning; the sun wouldn’t emerge till about noon. Soon, it wouldn’t appear at all. This was the final week before the mørketid, or polar night: On November 27, the top of the planet would be pitched into perpetual darkness, untouched by the warmth of our star until late January.
Since the September 21 solstice, sunlight has been seeping from both ends of the day like a two-sided leak, soaking quickly into all-absorbent dark. Six hours of daylight, five-and-a-half, four. November was the most disorienting month yet, challenging how strongly I associate darkness with “before” or “after.” For the first half of the month, around noon, the sun emerged for a few hours, compelling people out of their offices for sun-stunned lunch walks that ended in twilight. On November 18, I walked to the harbor. Snow covered the mountain range, so that the entire “day” was cast in the pink-gold of a continuous rise-set. Day to day, the ever-narrowing strip of daylight felt like the slow droop of a drowsy eye.
If I wasn’t careful, my own eyes took the cue. On November 19, I learned that “work from home” no longer worked for me. I made the mistake of taking a call from my apartment during the crucial sunset-hour. At 2:30 p.m., I signed off and surfaced from my screen to a dark-windowed, silent apartment. I felt so suddenly dissipated, so confused by the late-evening atmosphere that I started making dinner within the hour. I was asleep by 7 p.m., embarking on a coma-like 12-hour cosmic journey that I worried was a sign of impending illness, and felt was certainly unsustainable. So I learned to create my own “day”: By staying out of my apartment in the waking hours, feeding off of the social warmth of busy cafes and libraries, I could keep the integrity of my association of home-dark with dinner, rest and sleep.
“But it’s not dark, it’s blue!” So my friend Henriette, a local northern Norwegian, defensively insisted on November 20, pulling off her scarf as she sat down beside me, her cheeks ruddy from the cold.
She was right. As your eyes adjust, and as the gathering snow reflects even the smallest light, you learn that “dark” is far too blunt a word to describe the hues of this ever-shifting world. Each hour comes with its own shade, varying with atmospheric changes, too. There’s cloudy-blue (a kind of swollen near-gray) and clear-blue (a more opaque, royal hue). In midday hours, the sun, although out of sight, still warms the sky to a dusky purplish, distant rays sometimes breaking through with streaky pink. What I would call dark (a pitch color often laced with green-purple foxtail auroras) won’t arrive until the depth of night. But I find mid-mornings the absolute sweetest: As I shovel snow from my front porch, the blue stuns in its bright depth, crowning my island with a radiant cathedral-ceiling glow.
Under a constant, low-hanging waxy moon, this blue world feels like another planet. And, like true aliens, beings here have evolved their own behaviors. The first time someone handed me a stiff piece of reflective plastic, I looked at her dumbly. Then she slapped one against her own wrist, and it sprung into an armband. Many add the same around their ankles, a polite signal to passing cars. Residents keep these “slap-wraps” by the door with their keys and wallet, and don them reflexively. During my own snow-crunching commute, I watch children run to catch a bus with lights dangling from their parkas. From across the street, those dark figures bouncing with pink, blue and green look like little bioluminescent fish tracing the deep ocean floor.
Before I moved here, “polar night” was a charged, dangerous-sounding phrase. Friends, family and the folks with my ICWA fellowship all raised concerns about my well-being. But this snow-decked shade, in all its silencing strangeness, holds an undeniable preciousness. Passing under streetlamps, I find my eyes searching out faces, like lanterns of human warmth wreathed in hats and scarves. It’s a Caravaggio effect: A world brimming with shadow renders each illuminated object holier.
For many in Tromsø, this is the best season of all. It’s a time of expertly rendered indoor warmth: candles, blankets and slippers abound. They ski, they walk, they run (with spikes in shoes). Life doesn’t stop. Children and dogs alike now wear reflective vests to climb on ever-higher piles of snow. Their rosy warmth, their cheery activity, their indulgent dinners and at-times lengthy sleeps all challenge my image of a haunting, isolated gloom.
Can a diurnal creature learn to love the dark? I’ve lived more than three decades in a 24-hour relationship with our star. There are plenty here who think you need to be born in the north to truly recalibrate that cycle. As I enter two months of night, I begin to ask myself what I take “darkness” to mean. When the sun retreats, what do I expect of the world that’s left, and what do I expect of myself in it? In these dimmed yet shadowless spaces, will I see a world covered or a world revealed?
* * *
On November 25, I called Kari Leibowitz, psychologist and author of the 2024 book How to Winter. In 2015, she traveled to the University of Tromsø on a Fulbright to study psychology. Leibowitz grew up on the Jersey Shore, in a “super summer-centric community,” and was raised to dread and resent winter. Like me, she was surprised to find that many residents of Tromsø embraced, and relished, this dark season. That inspired a research topic: Does mindset influence our experience of winter?
The short answer is yes—quite dramatically. Leibowitz and an adviser surveyed 238 people in southern Norway, Tromsø, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. She found residents of high-North communities actually had more positive experiences of the winter than those in Oslo (which has similar cold temperatures but much more light). Observing Tromsø residents helped her coin a new term: “positive wintertime mindset.” Soon after, Leibowitz went to Stanford to pursue a PhD in psychology, working with Carol Dweck, author of Grit and Mindset and other researchers. Leibowitz has become a kind of winter-mindset guru and has written editorials about her work for the likes of The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Guardian.
In much of the modern world, Leibowitz says, winter darkness suffers from a bad reputation. But there are “two sides to the story,” she adds. Of course, human sleep and wakefulness patterns are tied to light exposure, which deeply affects our experience. Sunlight stimulates the production of cortisol, which is linked to alertness. In darkness, we release melatonin, which helps us fall asleep. It’s human biology, she says, to generally slow down with less light exposure. But that’s where she draws a distinction: The idea that the slowdown is negative is mostly a learned idea, reinforced by cultural narratives.
“My personal take is that the impact of light is really overblown,” Leibowitz told me. “The objective impact is real, but small, yet these narratives about the meaning of darkness carry a lot of weight.”
Embracing the darkness of winter, she says, begins with accepting that seasons will change—and we ought to change along with them. That could mean letting ourselves slow down or purposefully staying active and prioritizing well-being in a darker world. But in many modern urban cultures, she adds, we don’t like to change our work schedules and can start to resent winter as a barrier to some ideal summer experience. But that’s unrealistic. For example, Leibowitz notes, London experiences a dramatic 10-hour annual shift in daylight. Yet when she lived there, she says, people seemed to work even harder through the dimmest period, in a rush of end-of-year deadlines and holiday stress. When your expectations of your own energy levels don’t change, it’s easy to assume there’s something wrong with you when you fall short.
“Tromsø is a really good example where, certainly, I think a lot of people feel the effects of the polar night,” she said. “They feel more tired, they’re ready to slow down. But there’s a lot more of a perception of it as cozy, as restful, as beautiful.”
I asked Leibowitz about a common criticism of mindset research: that it tends to minimize the many socio-cultural barriers to behavior change. For most of the world, slowing down is a luxury people just can’t afford. If your responsibilities don’t change, is it realistic to say that a mere change in attitude can transform your winter experience? Leibowitz agrees that although the research shows that mindset can take you far, it’s not everything. Indeed, she says, social psychologists often think of behavior change in two parts, “the seed and the soil.”
If mindset is the “seed,” Leibowitz says, the “soil” is infrastructure. That includes literal infrastructure: For instance, Tromsø has a lysløpa (light-trail), a fully illuminated ski trail through a forest spanning the island used by sporters and commuters alike. But infrastructure also refers to social and cultural support. Leibowitz lists the many mechanisms that northern Norwegians have put in place to bolster themselves. They light candles, gather more often and revel in winter sports. Tromsø’s international film festival is held every January— explicitly scheduled to help carry residents through the long dark month.
“You can have a flower that grows in a crack on the sidewalk but it commonly grows bigger and better and more easily in a garden, right?” Leibowitz said. “You don’t need the perfect conditions to adopt these mindsets but it certainly makes it a lot easier if you have some.”
I told Leibowitz about my Russian friend Igor, who grew up in the Arctic city of Murmansk. Although he comes from the Arctic, he said he’s always hated the polar night. His theory is that Murmansk was a Soviet city created just a century ago and populated by a diverse collection of people from across Russia. His grandparents were emigrants from a southern region, so it’s not in his “genetics” to tolerate the long night.
Leibowitz said that Igor’s beliefs were a great example of both mindset and infrastructure at work. Igor’s mindset was perhaps socially built by an absence of a positive winter culture, in a society without customs that mark or adapt to the polar night. But it was also likely reinforced by what he described to me as an extremely rigid daily routine of Soviet life, which certainly wouldn’t allow for flexibility with the radically shifting rhythms of light.
My friend Guro, raised near Oslo, said that even in southern Norway, there’s no winter like in Tromsø. “In Tromsø, everyone accepts that you will move slower and do less.” she said. “Here, we know we need the rest, and that’s completely normal. And we need each other more, too.”
Winter here, I’ve found, is extremely social. It helps that the dark main street illuminates faces inside, so that even a stroll through town with an audiobook might reveal familiar people who pull me into an unexpected gathering. I meet friends at the climbing gym, the movie theater, at the jellyfish tank at the aquarium, for quiz nights and jam sessions and Sunday-spanning meals. In one local bar-slash-cafe, a friend routinely brings knitting needles for herself and colored pencils for me. While keeping our hands busy, we can chat late into the evening.
That may be the singular character of this small city, hard to replicate at scale. Still, Leibowitz said, anyone can carry many of its lessons to their own winters, to get outside more and prioritize community. To sleep when you’re tired—and forgive yourself for how often and for how long that may happen. Don’t attempt a stunted summer day and mourn your imagined losses. Once your eyes adjust, you can look for the opportunities to enjoy the dark.
* * *
“Dark, sad, gloomy and depressing has December been. A continuous Night in mind and Nature,” the Danish astrophysicist Sophus Tromholt wrote in Under the Rays of the Aurora Borealis, an 1882 account of his winter studying the northern lights in the town of Kautokeino, Norway. “And Nature’s gloom stamps the human mind.”
On November 22, I visited the Polar Library for historical lessons in coping with the polar night, pulling from the stacks and flipping through stiff old pages. This one wasn’t promising. Tromholt clearly fell into a deep depression, with “only a few hours’ faint dawn in the middle of the day” to assure him “that the sun is not dead,” he found that “the bright flowers of the soul are buried together with those of the field, and the well of emotions dries up like the stream yonder, and the thoughts drag as heavily along as the dull mass above.”
But reading further, I learned Tromholt spent this “unbearable” winter wholly alone. He was the only one who stayed in Kautokeino for Christmas; the rest of the town, “both Norwegians and Lapps” went to a seasonal fair, making him “the only man within a radius of some 50 miles.”
By contrast, on the famed Endurance Antarctic expedition, the British explorer Ernest Shackleton spent the June 1915 winter stuck in the ice with a determinedly positive and pro-community mindset that would make social psychologists proud:
“The disappearance of the sun is apt to be a depressing event in the polar regions, where the long months of darkness involve mental as well as physical strain,” he wrote in South, his account of the expedition. “But the Endurance’s company refused to abandon their customary cheerfulness, and a concert in the evening made the Ritz a scene of noisy merriment, in strange contrast with the cold, silent world that lay outside.”
At the Sámi Parliament offices in Tromsø, the Sámi language expert and reindeer herder Risten Turi Aleksandersen told me that the nomadic Indigenous Sámi don’t talk much about the polar night. This period isn’t something to be gotten through with either grit or positivity, it’s the distinct flavor of winter as natural as the 12-hour cycles closer to the equator. But, Aleksandersen said, in recent decades, the Sami have started using the word Seudnjesáigi—which literally translates to mørketid—causing controversy in the community.
“Mørketid is a Norwegian word,” Aleksandersen said. “We know of course it’s not so dark, we always have the light of the moon. Weather is the real thing to watch.”
The Sami track time according to eight seasons, with careful attention to changes in snow and ice that influence reindeer behavior. The polar night spans Tjaktjadálvve, or autumn-winter, from November to December, and Dálvve, or winter, from December to March. These describe two periods of reindeer behavior: when they migrate from the high-elevation summer grazing areas to the low-level winter plains.
Mørketid arrived on the dawnless morning of November 27. In the near-black of 6:30 a.m., I shuffled down an icy slope to Pust (Norwegian for “breath”), the rickety wooden sauna directly on the Tromsøfjord. On yet another cue from the locals, I’ve started coming twice a week to stun myself awake. Here, surrounded by a silent fellowship of sweating bodies, I can begin the wakeful hours that I’ve now stopped calling “day” with a view of blue-black water, white mountain and starry sky.
This is, of course, only day one. And I’m aware that the novelty will wear off over a very long period. I’ve yet to experience the post-holiday gloom or, even after the sun re-emerges, a relentless winter that persists through May and into June. But I have learned a few things already.
One is that winter brings a sense of acute proximity to the natural world. Despite its “city” status, in the winter, Tromsø’s urbanity frays. When you can’t get out the front door without a shovel, there’s no pretending that you’ve transcended nature. The window-high snow and persistent dark have planted me in an undeniable context. And my body’s spooky recalibration to the changing light has raised more questions: What other unconscious signals might it be taking from the seasons, the climate, even the species around me?
That feeling of connection brings new curiosity. On long walks around Prestvånnet, the ice-rimmed lake at the top of the island, I’ve taken to bird-watching. That may sound like a mad hobby to try in darkness. But a snow-covered world is, in fact, incredibly revealing. Its stark and vivid contrasts make it easy to spot the red feet of the black guillemot or the brilliant orange nose of the king eider. With practice, I don’t need light at all: A darker wood only sharpens the reedy trill of the willow warbler.
In her 2020 memoir Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, the writer Katherine May describes a period of extreme stress and a mysterious illness followed by a retreat to the quiet winter in northern Finland. She makes the point that humans evolved with the seasons and that when we ignore nature, our bodies can claim their own “winters,” often through physical and mental illness. Drawing lessons from both northern societies and hibernating species, May suggests there are lessons to be learned in embracing our own “fallow periods.”
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt,” she writes. “Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
In the cedar-scented steam of the dark sauna, it took about 15 minutes for sweat-dew to merge into streams running down my legs. Then I stood, opened the door and stepped carefully onto an icy dock lined with eerie greenish lights. Radiating a halo of sweat-steam, I descended a ladder into 40-degree saltwater and submerged before my body could register its protest.
About a foot beneath the surface, I held myself in place and rotated quickly with eyes squeezed shut. When I opened them, I was staring straight at a white-yellow orb that I realized, in a rush of disorientation, was not the moon but a gently pulsing jellyfish. Taking its cue, I relaxed my own muscles and turned my face up to the starlight refracted through the trembling surface. For a moment, we were just two beings floating in a frigid everything, connected in the infinity of unbroken inky blue.
Top photo: In mid-November, before the full polar night, sunrise blends with sunset for an hour or so around midday
