Summer is here. The sun is out, the group chats are full of flight confirmations, and your weekends are booked solid through August. A wedding, a date, a barbecue, a trip you said yes to back in February and are now scrambling to pack for. On paper, this is supposed to be the good part. So why does all that “fun” feel less like joy and more like a second job, even as everyone around you seems to be effortlessly having the time of their life?

I’m going to let you off the hook, so you can stop saying “What’s wrong with me?” You are not failing to enjoy your life, you are not broken. It’s simply what happens when a season built entirely on yang energy, all motion, heat, and expansion, is never balanced by anything slow and quiet.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, every season carries its own emotion. Early Summer belongs to the heart and the element of fire, and its emotion is joy. But sometimes joy is actually the feeling that can be hardest to cultivate this time of year, exactly when we feel we should be swimming in it.

It’s Summer. I’m happy. Right?

In a lot of our minds, the logic goes: Early Summer coincides with being happy, so I’ll obviously be happy this summer. What often ensues is quite the opposite.

There are actually a lot of social pressures that befall us as soon as the weather heats up. In summer there’s this mounting pressure to do everything and be everywhere all at once, Frankenstein stitched with a persistent fear of disappointing others or missing out.

Be aware, FOMO is on steroids. Scrolling social media in the summer is sharply more comparative, watching friends, acquaintances and strangers hiking emerald mountains with their new puppy or enjoying lavish trips to the Maldives while you quietly rot next to the AC.

There’s this quiet, constant expectation to be blissfully happy, effortlessly active, and endlessly outgoing.

As a collective we tend to constrain this season’s sense of expansion with more stimulus, more things, more events that take us further from the balance that brings summer joy.

Please Do Not Ration Joy

Under close inspection of my lived life, I’ve found my many yang tendencies. They happen throughout the seasons but get amplified in early summer, where maximum external stimulus and maximum motion spill over, and the natural pull is toward big, loud, singular sources of joy. I work hard in all seasons, but in summer the imbalance can grow without much thought, just like the grass this time of year. Today it’s short and before you know it, it’s to your knees if you’re not careful.

When summer starts, I find my joy for work diminishing. I feel a bit more like a detached, ghostly entity in the waiting room to get into heaven, which is the weekend, the plan, the highlight, a trip to the hot springs, the perceived peak of joy.

By the time I’ve arrived at this event, the one I’ve deprived and rationed joy for, my expectations are sky high. So I’ve basically been negative-yin all week, only to hit the weekend, yang-ing myself into expectation exhaustion, and like a sugar rush, the crash awaits. My body does not do well with this, and I’d posit most bodies, including yours, don’t either.

There is nothing wrong with getting excited for an event. Anticipation really does juice up the dopamine. Planning something can boost your mood even more than the thing itself does. The risk is when we deprive ourselves of joy until the thing we’ve planned finally happens.

If you look at your life, I mean really look at it, I’m sure you’ll find areas where you’re doing this exact same thing, going negative-yin to save your joy for later. Early summer is an ideal time to investigate this, since the pattern is particularly heightened right now.

Could I Get a Little Yin With That Yang?

So how did my yang peak play out? Pretty crappy, actually. I trudged through my work week, days passing in robot mode, got to the event I’d rationed all week for, ready to release the joy in a two-day blast, expectations skyscraper high.

It started out great, driving to Oregon on a beautiful Washington day, and then, on the second leg of the trip: car crash. Noooo. I’m safe and healthy, everything is fine, and I was at no fault, but my high came hurtling down.

Why had I rationed all week for this? I could have enjoyed my work, all the little things along the way, sitting down at my desk with an amazing cup of coffee, watching the sunrise out my window as the giant evergreens sway in the PNW breeze as I’m writing a draft. That’s good stuff, just as good as a hot spring trip, both are joy. They balance one another.

Resist summer’s yang impulse to withhold joy for a specific future moment. Right now we should be more generous with the places, people, and things we’re finding joy in. Linger is key: in corpse pose after a challenging yoga practice, in the sense of connection felt after an hour-long conversation with a dear friend, in a good night’s sleep that was so restorative you woke before the alarm, in the scratchy sandpaper kiss from your cat. Stretch your joy and whimsy.

I want to leave you with this: Stop staying stuck on hold, waiting to express your joy for the next big thing. Slow down just enough to balance your yang with yin, to expand your experience of the joy already happening in the here and now.

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