CAN SUMMER MAKE YOU SAD?
Yes, Ellen Himelfarb explains, if your friends head out of town and you have no plans.
Gabrielle Moss has a thriving career as a writer and thousands of social-media followers. Summer, when the streets come alive and parks transform into festival grounds, should mark the high point of her year. Instead, she feels wretched.
“Everyone seems to be having a carefree time,” she says. “But for me the idea of relaxation becomes a different kind of work — I’m forcing myself to have an unnatural amount of fun and making myself totally miserable.”
Moss, 34, suffers from “summerphobia” — a rare but potent form of anxiety that intensifies when social lives heat up and work conversations revolve around holiday plans or the “amazing” barbecue last weekend.
I suffer from summerphobia, too. As school ended when I was a child, I braced myself for an exodus of certainty, routine and friends. This time of year, I yearn for September.
Novelist Douglas Coupland also gets it. In 2010, he coined the term “dimanchophobia” to express the discomfort people feel when the days of the week blend into one perpetual Sunday.
Researchers believe summerphobia contributes to the high incidence of suicide in summer.
Yet you wouldn’t catch me letting on how low I feel when everyone around me is on a high.
Therese Borchard, a mental health activist from Maryland, calls it “Frisbee syndrome when everyone is outside smiling and throwing a Frisbee and I know I should be happy because it’s nice outside.”
As a child, Borchard says she spent 12 hours a day swimming and sunbathing in bliss.
Like other summerphobes, she still loves sunny, warm weather.
“But I really need structure to my day, and when that loosens in summer, I flounder.”
Dr. Rita Santos, a London-based therapist specializing in anxiety, says: “The days are longer, you have more time, it’s less socially acceptable to stay in and watch TV ... that creates uncertainty in terms of how you live your life.”
If there’s one thing I can count on, it’s that my friends and colleagues will make themselves scarce.
Hearing yet another neighbour plot her escape from daily life feels like a sucker-punch to the gut. I don’t fear missing out; I simply miss them.
“Not even (emotionally) healthy people react well to fuzzy ambiguous frameworks — they like to have clarity and security,” says Sam Vaknin, an expert in personality disorders. “The issue is abandonment anxiety, the sense that people aren’t constant. And summer is about absence — of structure, schedule, people and direction.”
Vaknin says he abhors holidays, birthdays and especially summer.
In Sydney, Jonathan Seidler discovered around age 12 that he’d experience malaise during the less structured holiday season.
Summer’s abrupt end to his regular schedule of activities developed into “terror of not being busy.”
“Summer here is less about the seasons completely changing than, ‘Oh my god, everything has shut down,’ ” he says. “In the midst of trying to act like it’s any other day, I’ll find myself lying in bed at 3 p.m. thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this. I can’t keep forcing myself to come up with things to do.’ ”
That’s precisely the trap some summerphobes fall into, says Santos. Setting a busy schedule won’t address your loneliness or control issues.
“It’ll help you endure, but it’s not going to make summer any better,” she says. “I imagine you’d get to September quite exhausted.”
She suggests finding an activity that feels good at other times of year and partaking during the summer.
With summerphobia, there’s no cure-all coping strategy, but my plan is to face it head on. If work slows down, enjoy the freedom. If friends disappear, embrace the quiet.