Yule Glimmers

Seeking small joys as we reach the Winter Solstice ✨

Glimmer [n]: a faint or wavering light, a faint feeling or quality.

As we approach the longest night and shortest day with the arrival of the Winter Solstice tomorrow, I’m searching for every bit of that light. First coined by social worker Deb Dana, the term “glimmers” is one being increasingly used in the field of psychology, referring to micro joys that help us feel safe, hopeful and calm. Glimmers are the opposite of triggers - cues associated with past experiences that activate your threat system, sending you into fight, flight, freeze or fawn. There’s a growing body of research that demonstrates how searching for positive cues (glimmers) can take you out of this stress response (the sympathetic nervous system) and into a state of rest and calm (your parasympathetic nervous system).

While glimmers may only offer faint light, training our brains to search for that light, especially during the darkest days of the year, can offer vital hope in our complex, overstimulating world. As we head towards Yule, here are the glimmers I’ve been seeking out this month…