The days are already getting shorter. The start of the school year is inching closer. You haven’t even had time to make a bucket list yet, let alone check things off. Though the summer has just officially begun, you may be prematurely mourning its departure.
For people who live in a climate where warm weather only makes itself known a few months a year, summer means late sunsets, leisure, and outdoor recreation. Maybe even a vacation. Knowing how few blissful moments you actually have may inspire an ironic anticipatory anxiety: suddenly, you’re dreading winter while sitting at the beach.
If summer is particularly meaningful to you or you have a tendency to downplay positive moments in order to stave off future disappointment, you might be more inclined to mourn summer’s decline. But you can savor the season — and beyond — by keeping your calendar populated with events.
All of the hallmarks we’ve come to associate with summer — no school, a slowdown at work, family trips — are relatively modern. Prior to the 19th century, kids attended school during most of the summer and only the wealthy took vacations during the warmer months. While labor unions fought for shorter work hours during the early 1900s, they largely ignored the issue of paid vacation time, Cindy S. Aron writes in Working At Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. However, by 1930, many industrial workers were offered paid vacations by their employers. In the years following World War II, even more Americans had vacation time and were hungry for summer travel. Now hordes of Americans flock to beaches, lakes, national parks, and public pools, send kids to camp, and road-trip across the country from June through August. Workers, unofficially and officially, slack off on Fridays, or even the season on the whole.
Given all of summer’s relative pluses (though there are some minuses, namely the heat and humidity, made worse by climate change), the thought of the inevitable conclusion can incite preemptive sorrow. Research has found that when people come to the end of a meaningful period of life — college, a job, your lease at your favorite apartment, and, yes, even summer — they experience feelings of both happiness and sadness. The melancholy stems from the fact that a chapter is closing, researchers found. Because summer can be a meaningful time for a lot of people, you might see its impending termination as a reminder of the fleetingness of those uniquely summery events. “In the context of an ending, it makes us sad because we’re looking back at those good times and we’re saying those good times are gone,” Jeff Larsen, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, tells Vox.
The fear of enjoying something too much
The problem is that mourning the end of abundant sunshine well before Labor Day rolls around may hamper your ability to savor it in the first place. Downplaying positive moments by thinking they won’t last or that we’re undeserving of them, known as dampening, has been shown to reduce happiness and could distract you from making the most of summer while it’s here. Dampening is “a very human tendency,” Filip Raes, a professor of clinical psychology at KU Leuven in Belgium, tells Vox. “We don’t do this because we don’t want to enjoy positive experiences; more often we do it because we’re trying to protect ourselves.”
People tend to believe dampening will soften the blow of disappointment; if we enjoy something too much, we’ll feel even worse when it’s over, the thinking goes. “It’s a protective strategy in many cases, but it backfires,” Raes says. “Rather than shielding us from future disappointment, it reduces the enjoyment in the moment. We’re sacrificing today’s happiness just to feel less bad in the end.”
Rather than focus on what’s on the horizon, Larsen and Raes say you should make an effort to savor the season. “Maybe the people who are thinking about summer and its ending throughout the summer, they’re going to do a better job of sucking the marrow out of it,” Larsen says. Part of that is recognizing summer is indeed fleeting, trying not to feel guilty if you dampen during the warmer months, and actually enjoying the season by making meaningful plans: day trips to the lake, weekly walks at dusk with a friend, catching fireflies with all the neighborhood kids.
Research has shown that anticipating positive events — in other words, having things to look forward to — bolsters positive mood and minimizes stress. On the other hand, “savoring summer” doesn’t necessarily mean saying yes to every invitation and packing your downtime. In fact, overscheduling can make leisure feel like work, research suggests. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of possibilities, but try to make just one solid plan per weekend — say, going to the public pool on a Saturday — and leave one day free for spontaneous afternoon ice cream hangs. You can also mimic summer travel at home by replicating travel experiences: booking tours, exploring new neighborhoods, and asking for recommendations from locals. (You can also use these tactics in the fall and winter; anticipation isn’t reserved for summer.)
When fall rolls around, and you look back on these memories with fondness, you can say you savored summer, even if you’re bummed you have to pack the shorts and flip-flops away.
“If you find yourself feeling sad about time being limited, it tells you something,” Larsen says. “It tells you that this time that you’re in the middle of, or maybe you’re in the end of, you’ve enjoyed it, and it tells you that it’s meaningful to you.”
