How to Deal With the Late Summer Blues
Many of you will be Instagramming your latest summer beach selfies on the beach this weekend. You are bittersweet. Or maybe just bitter. Summer is over and we all know what that means: the fun time is over and winter is coming. From now on, daylight will dwindle to near zero as we battle the icy wind every day on our way to and from work. Can you hear the wolves howling outside the door?
Okay, this time of year I’m getting a little dramatic. It’s just that the end of summer hit some of us so hard. So what should we do? We can’t just squat under bearskin with a canteen of whiskey until June. There must be a way to get through this transition with our dignity and intelligence.
So we asked for advice from Dr.Einat Metzl , art therapist, resilience expert and head of family therapy at Loyola Marymount University. After all, this is really what we talk about when we look for ways to deal with our late summer sadness: resilience.
Contrary to what most of us think, resilience is not a quality that you either have or you don’t have, Metzl tells us. “It’s actually a process,” she says, and it is available to all of us. “So the question is when and how it manifests itself.” There are three things you can do to make this happen.
Remember, this is just another transition
Metzl tells us that the most important thing is to remember how you have experienced other changes in your life. “Even at best, if you’ve led a protected lifestyle, the truth is that we have a lot of change going on all the time, so we have resilience built in, some coping skills to deal with it.” So think about other changes you have been good at and what you did that helped.
These coping tactics will be different for each of us. Maybe you plan and find comfort in looking ahead and managing what you can control. For others, Metzl says, it may be more about relationships. You will want to connect with other people who feel the same way as you. And many more of us may want to focus more on how we regulate our emotions during the transition. I’m talking about self-care, not self-medication with a rose drink. Make sure you sleep a lot, do some exercise, do yoga, see a therapist, update your recipes, and the like.
Express yourself creatively
This is where Metzl brings his expertise as an art therapist. “It helps most of us to find a way to intuitively express what we feel and think,” she says. It can be music, drama, dance, craft, even going out for a run. “Everything that affects our body, mind, soul.”
Don’t you think you are creative? “It’s just a story that you tell yourself,” says Metzl. Set aside other people’s judgments and your own judgment about yourself. Close the curtains, turn on the music and dance alone. Draw a drawing in which you say goodbye to summer. Put on a shadow puppet show. Hey, don’t make me come up with ideas for you. You know how you want to express yourself, so just do it on your own terms, in private, if that’s more convenient for you.
“Everyone has the ability to think creatively, flexibly, original,” says Metzl. And she will know; she helped the survivors of Hurricane Katrina get more creative and saw how effective it is in helping people move forward in their lives.
Respect your concern
Anyway, who said that late summer blues are necessarily bad? Maybe it really means that you really pay attention to your life, and not just experience it like a robot. Metzl says this thinking again boils down to our misconceptions about sustainability. “Change and growth are often not linear,” she says. The very idea of resilience, the ability to be flexible and adapt to change implies that you are bouncing back from something. “The idea is that you weren’t doing so well and there is something inside of you that allows you to return to or transcend your previous form of functioning.”
Well, that means you have to accept that there will be times in your life when you will feel overwhelmed. Something has influenced you in your environment, and that’s good. “Cheerful [t. F. Unchanged] people may not be aware of what is happening around them, ”says Metzl. “If you feel a loss, then you were attached to what happened before, and it will take you a minute to disconnect and reconnect for resharpening.” So this sense of loss is a testament to how connected you have been to the summer. “Honor it to yourself,” says Metzl. Don’t get hung up on what you are fighting. Instead, pay attention to your feelings and acknowledge that it will take you time and perhaps some rituals to make the transition and get yourself back. “It’s a much more effective way to keep yourself going along the way.”
Okay, my sensitive flowers, we will go through this transition together. I may or may not spend the weekend preparing all summer foods. And if everything tastes a little salty, then it’s definitely not because I’m crying straight into blueberry crumbs.