What summer actually does to your mental health

Summer is supposed to be the good bit. The sun comes out, the days stretch longer, and there is a lightness in the air that the winter months simply do not have. There is something real in that. When the sun is on your face and the light is more intense, you do get a lift, a kind of zing in your step that has nothing to do with willpower or mindset. It is physical, and it is genuine.

But here is the thing. Feeling better is not the same as things being better. The pressures do not take the summer off. Work is still there. Family is still there. The relational dynamics that were complicated in February are just as complicated in July, possibly more so, because now everyone is around more. Aging parents still need looking after. Young children still need looking after. The sun does not pause any of that. It just changes the backdrop.

The tiredness that builds before the break

By the time summer arrives, there is often a tiredness that has been building for months. Everyone is ready for a break. Everyone is counting down to the holidays. And then the holidays arrive, and for a lot of people, particularly anyone in a caring role, whether that is for children, for parents, or for someone else entirely, the holidays do not actually feel like a holiday. They feel like more work.

If you are used to some kind of structure during the week, school, childcare, a routine that gives you pockets of time to yourself, summer can take all of that away in one go. Suddenly there is no childcare. Suddenly it is all you, all day, every day. And somewhere in the middle of that, a thought creeps in that a lot of people feel guilty about even having: a quiet nostalgia for being in your twenties, when you were really only responsible for yourself. That sense of freedom. It is worth saying out loud, because most people who feel it assume they are the only one.

Why the school holidays bring such a particular kind of stress

A lot of the stress around the school holidays comes down to one thing: everything changes. The routine that has been holding the year together disappears, and what replaces it is uncertainty. What are we going to do with all this time? What are the kids going to do with all this time?

And the shape of that uncertainty shifts as children get older. With younger children, the question is who is going to look after them. As they grow, it becomes how do we keep them occupied, and then, not long after that, how do we get them off their phones, will they ever actually be home, because they are always off seeing their friends.

Underneath all of it is proximity. Suddenly everyone is in the same space for much longer than usual, and life does not stop just because it is the holidays. Someone still has to unload the dishwasher. One person might be thinking I am on holiday, while someone else in the same house is thinking yes, but I am still at work, and I still have things to do, I still have the washing to deal with. Those small mismatches, those little flashpoints, are where a lot of the friction actually lives.

The loneliness of everyone else having a great time

There is a particular kind of loneliness that shows up in summer, and it often starts with a feeling that everyone else is having a great time except you. When we are feeling low, we tend to project that outward. We look at the world and assume everyone else has it figured out.

Picture a Friday evening at a local cricket club. A hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred people. Families, laughter, gin and tonics, everyone looking like they are living their best lives. And in that moment, that is exactly what it looks like.

But the reality, for most of those people, is that they are all going through something. They are all just doing the best they can to get through it. Maybe it has been an exhausting week and they are running on empty. Maybe normal bedtime for the kids is six o'clock and here they are at half past seven, rolling the dice on how the night is going to end. From a distance, none of that is visible. All you see is the snapshot, and everything looks better in the sunshine. The gloom of winter has a way of making struggle visible. Summer has a way of hiding it, even from the people living it.

What actually helps

Summer does offer something genuinely useful, and it is mostly about access. It is warmer, it is drier, there is less preparation involved in just getting outside. Going for a walk in nature in winter takes a certain amount of grit. In summer, the barrier drops. There is more opportunity to get into the woods, into a park, to breathe fresh air, to feel the wind and the sun on your skin.

That kind of thing gets dismissed sometimes, the idea that simply being outside, noticing what is in blossom, getting some distance from the noise of everyday life, can actually do something. But it can. Walking therapy is part of this too, taking the work of therapy out of a room and into the trees, away from the crowds, with space to notice what is around you.

Beyond that, anything that gently builds awareness of your own body tends to help. Yoga, pilates, walking, that kind of thing. But this is genuinely personal, and it is worth saying so rather than pretending there is one right answer. One person's favourite form of movement is another person's least favourite. Some people want something bounded and controlled. Others want something fluid and flowing. Neither is more correct than the other. The point is not the specific activity, it is finding your thing.

This connects to something bigger, which is that most of us were never actually taught how to look after ourselves. We know, roughly, what a tree needs. Water, light, some soil, a few nutrients. That is more or less it. We are considerably more complicated than a tree, and yet there is sometimes an assumption that shelter and food covers it for us too. Once you start properly mapping out what a person actually needs to function well, there is a lot more to it than that.

The thing summer is trying to tell you

If there is something useful buried in all of this, it is the reminder that we need to stop. Properly stop, not just relocate to somewhere warmer while still checking email.

For anyone doing work that lives mostly in their head, the body does not always send a clear signal that enough is enough. It is easy to talk yourself into a little bit more. Just checking emails. Just staying on top of things so there are no surprises on Monday. And before long, that is six days of work disguised as staying organised, repeated for months without an actual break.

There is a familiar version of this that plays out around holidays specifically. You do a huge amount of work beforehand so that nothing falls apart while you are away. Then you go away. Then you come back to find everything that did not get done while you were gone, on top of everything new, and the inbox has somehow multiplied. So the question creeps in: what was the point of going away at all, if this is what is waiting?

And yet, underneath that completely understandable cynicism, almost everyone knows the same thing. We do need a break. We do need to pause. We do need to stop, even when stopping is the hardest part.

If any of this has struck a chord, or you have noticed yourself in any of it, we are here. Get in touch and our team will take it from there.