How to Fight the End of Summer Blues
Oh my gosh, I cannot believe that it’s August 31! So many of us, especially entrepreneurs, start feeling end-of-summer blues around this point in the year.
You start to worry about the fall and all the craziness of what’s ahead, and perhaps you feel like you didn’t take full advantage of the summertime. Maybe there’s even a part of you that wishes that you just had a normal job.
I’d love to offer you some support on how to approach these end-of-summer blues. I could give you a ton of tips, but one of my most important reminders is that we love summertime so much because it gives us so much to look forward to.
Many of us plan family gatherings for the summer. We plan vacations for the summer. We plan parties in the summer. We plan fun, exciting activities, like swimming in lakes or going to concerts and festivals.
We’re also easier on ourselves in the summer. We allow ourselves to have shorter days. We allow the extra sunlight – and the fact that the kids are home – to give us a reason to, frankly, feel more joy and have more fun.
And then the fall comes, and as the weather gets colder and daylight dwindles, we tend to be much harder on ourselves. We have less things to look forward to, the days seem to drag on, and business somehow seems more difficult.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Instead, to manage the end-of-summer blues, make sure that you have something to look forward to in your calendar every single month, and maybe even every single week.
I’ve worked with a lot of my clients on scheduling fun things into their calendars.
For some of my clients, we’ve planned two- or three-day mini trips every 60 or 90 days. You might book a plane ticket or get in your car, leave your computer at home, travel, see something new, stay in an Airbnb, see a friend – really allow yourself to take your mind off of work and do something different. Shake things up.
You might also plan a special outing with a friend every two weeks or every month. Maybe you go on a hike together, go to a wine tasting or a chocolate tasting, or try a new restaurant. Give yourself something unusual to look forward to that is, most importantly, in your calendar.
Perhaps you schedule some form of self-care indulgence for yourself. Maybe you plan a massage, facial, healing treatment, or acupuncture session once a month.
I know that some of these examples cost money, but you could even plan something as simple as taking off the last Tuesday of every month and dedicating the day to walking, reading, and listening to music at a park.
Again, the key is to make sure that you’ve planned something ahead of time.
Another great example is planning a special meal. Maybe you and your partner decide that, on the third Thursday of every month, you’re going to pick a three-course meal to cook together. You go and get the groceries together, you make a new playlist, you set the table and light candles.
Way too many of us entrepreneurs spend the whole summer having fun, relaxing, and going on trips, and then we end up overworking ourselves in the fall, winter, and spring.
That cycle leads to burnout, and it’s not sustainable to only really enjoy your life for two or three months out of the year.
So my invitation to you this week is to look at that calendar now, and make sure you’ve got fun things planned in the months ahead – in September, October, November, and December, and especially in January and February, because those tend to be the heavier months.
The end-of-summer blues are never fun – but they’re a great reminder to find joy all year round, not just in the summer.
