Summer sadness is a real thing

Digest opened free editor

Rola Khaleda, FT editor, chooses her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

As an idea, aesthetic, painting, I love summer. I love its morale, juices, neighborhoods, long days and fake nights, the way it brings us to the water and foreign places, nostalgia and the foggy memories of the childhood it provokes. I love a passing idea – there is a kind of urgency inherent in it, and feeling the need to “live in now”.

However, it can be more complicated. Amid all the doctrine of pleasure, heat and holidays, summer can also bring a deep sense of sadness and sadness, and for many of us, anxiety increased. We are worried that everyone else is more enjoyable than we are; We feel that we should be out of social media instead of interior in front of the TV to pass on our phones; We look at the bodies of others ready for the beach and feel bad towards us; We are concerned that everything ends very quickly.

At a wedding in Greece at the end of last week with a group of Americans, I was surprised by the discovery of this last anxiety. It turns out that not only the pessimistic British who start finishing the end of the summer as soon as possible – even before – it started. A woman said to me: “I hate the day of independence, it seems that the summer has already ended.” A man said he always started to feel it in May.

Despite the presence of the summer coup, from an astronomical point of view, the official beginning of the summer in the northern hemisphere and not in the middle of it, the fact that the days begin to obtain a shorter than that point leads to a feeling that it slides away from us very quickly. We look forward to the summer throughout the year, and then when it comes to, we often feel very anxious from its end – or very preoccupied with what will happen next – so that we can enjoy it properly. When we are finally on the holiday that we booked for months, you may feel the first 24 hours of creativity, but then we often start the countdown to the number of days until it ends. A metaphor for the same life, perhaps.

Then there are among us who cannot tolerate heat, or the idea of summer, who also depend on days, but for various reasons. People who hate the sun, social communication, tight and long clothes for cold and wonderful weather. A friend is constantly feeling depressed in July and August, then a feeling of great comfort when September comes, when all the pressure ends as if one has ended.

After all, there is nothing just like feeling dissatisfied when we aim to feel satisfied. In the winter, we have an excuse to feel blue, comfort itself: it is dark, gray and “miserable” outside, so we are of course sad. We get to whom with others as well. It is uncomfortable emotionally and isolated from feeling upset on a sunny day. However, it is also more common than we imagine.

In every January, my in -containing box is filled with press data on “Blue Monday”, usually on the third Monday of the month, is supposed to be the most frustrated day of the year. I have always assumed that this is the day when suicide rates and societal depression levels are at their highest levels. But it turned out that this was the day it was compensated – a surprise – a travel company two decades ago. There is no evidence that this is a particularly sad day, and there is no evidence of increasing suicides at this time of the year.

Quite the opposite, in fact: I suggest the search constantly Suicide rates in countries with moderate-non-tropical climates that have distinct seasons-rise in late spring or early summer, tend to be at their lowest levels in the winter. A 2019 Method analysis 19 studies in various countries found that the 1c increase in the average temperature was associated with an increase of 1.7 percent in suicide.

In our climate of warming, the summer brings with it more than just factors and social expectations to make us feel anxious – the physiological effect that the very hot weather causes on our bodies produced by high levels of tension and anxiety: high heart rate, rapid breathing, high levels of cortisol, vortex and allegiance. No wonder the heat waves can lead Panic, insomnia and mental illness.

You may know someone with seasonal emotional disorder, or sad; You may even have yourself. But we should not imagine that the coldest days, darker, are the ones that can make us feel blue, and we should not imagine that summer is a kind of bliss for months. Summer sadness is not just the song Lana Del Rey.

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