How to Create a Summer That Doesn’t Burn You Out

If summer feels anything less than carefree, it’s not because you’re doing it wrong. It’s because no one ever taught you how to set it up for your specific nervous system. In this episode, I’m going to show you how to actually figure out what you need and how to structure your summer so that it supports you instead of draining you. This is how you create a summer you can genuinely enjoy, even with all the moving parts.

This show is for women who’ve been labeled, misdiagnosed, or misunderstood. Whether you have a diagnosis or just know deep down that you experience life differently, this is your space to stop fixing yourself and start trusting who you already are. My name is Amanda Hess. Let’s go.

Hey my friend, welcome back to the podcast. The last two episodes of this podcast, we’ve been discussing the sensory overwhelm of summer and how to move from overwhelm back into engagement, how to move from frustration into connection, how to start putting together pieces of summer and yourself in a way that works for you, that works for your brain, that works for your nervous system.

I just got back from a summer vacation. I guess you could call it that. I was in Washington with my son for basketball and I had driven a few of his teammates down there and then come back up and spent a week with my brother and his son and my kids and my husband. And it was truly a wonderful experience, but I also recognized that I was really craving my routine and coming back into the normalcy of being home. I think that for many of us, we like the idea of the escape of summer, but we don’t really understand that we are asking a lot of ourselves at the same time. That there is a part of that especially if you’re sensitive, neurodivergent, ADHD, autistic, whatever is kind of your particular makeup, that you will unwittingly have these circumstantial things that come through your nervous system and it requires just more work.

And I just don’t know that there is a space for pretending that isn’t true. When we do, what we end up doing is masking, we end up shutting down, we end up freaking out, we end up being in this position of feeling really out of emotional control. And one of the things that I really like to create for my clients and for you as my listener and for really anyone who’s interested in this work, is how to create more emotional control.

And when I say emotional control, I’m not saying, oh, we control your emotions, but more so an awareness and an ability to control our experience of our emotions so that we can ultimately enjoy our lives, right? Not be going on really high highs and really low lows and bouncing back and forth because that type of dysregulation is just not sustainable for anyone and it ends up throwing us into that stress response, that trauma response, that fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and getting trapped in a cycle of that where we’re so reactive that we’re just triggering that again and again and again and again. And that’s what I don’t want for you, right?

And most definitely, while I was away this last couple of weeks traveling, not being home, doing the family things, being in the boat, being in the sun, doing all the fun family, friend things, I definitely felt my nervous system reaching the edge more than one time. And so I don’t want to have you believe that there’s any part of this where we are just the perfect person and we’re just robotic with the way that we experience our lives. I actually think that being a really sensitive person gives you the opportunity to experience positive emotions in a very rich way.

And I do think it’s our secret sauce. I do think it’s the thing that makes our lives so enjoyable. We live our lives in living color. There is no vanilla. There is no gray. It is bright, vibrant, exciting, amazing. But at the same time, that excitement amazing can dip into the other side of that, which is stressed out and freaking out. So we’re just really looking at being able to even that out, right? Just make it more even so that we feel more in control of the experience of that and we know what to do when that’s coming up for us so that we don’t find ourselves creating a family fight or just completely being unable to enjoy a family event or something that we’re doing in the summer that’s just for us. We just want to be really at a place where we know exactly what we can and cannot handle and we have the ability to direct that and direct ourselves and direct our experience in a way that supports that, right?

So we already know that sensory overwhelm is happening in the summer from the noise, from the heat, from the constant activity, right? Also, trying to juggle unstructured time, kids at home, no school routines, no work routines, no family routines, no dog routines, no cat routines, and just feeling chaotic. I know that you might be blaming yourself for being behind or unmotivated or maybe dysregulated. I know that we can get very judgmental of our dysregulation, especially as that plays out over the course of a day or a week or whatever’s going on.

You are probably struggling with energy swings, being very, very energetic, and then very, very low, having overstimulation, experiencing guilt because you haven’t done enough or people don’t appreciate you enough or whatever combination of that is going on. And then also just the idea that other people are thriving, seeing other people as being thriving while you are barely coping, which is something that I see a lot. You know, this time of year, I believe, brings a lot of comparison. And I will say that I’m not immune to that. So I just want to offer that I see the comparison. I see my brain reaching for comparison.

You know, I have been slalom skiing this past week. It’s something that I’m really passionate about. It’s something that I really enjoy. But ultimately, this year, I gained some weight, had to buy a bigger ski, and you know, it took me a little while to figure that ski out and be able to ski well. And I’ve seen other people post their skiing photos and noticing the jealousy that I felt when I saw their skiing photo, but reminding myself that’s a snapshot. I take the best version of my ski and my video and I crop it and I put that in there. That’s not my whole ski.

And whether or not you ski, that’s totally irrelevant. It’s just noticing that whatever people are posting online is a snapshot of the best version of the thing, right? We’re not snapping the version of, oh, that was really terrible or I didn’t get up when we’re skiing and we’re not posting the family fight or feeling really pissed off or just your energy being zero and just barely making it through the experience. We’re not posting that. Nobody’s posting that.

So I think that’s just having a general sense of awareness of what’s happening. That there are a lot of just emotions, as we’ve discussed before on previous episodes, that are popping up because we are just processing more information. So we have that lack of predictable routine which causes that nervous system chaos. We have noise, heat, travel, social plans, it’s sensory and emotional overload. We have what other people expect of us, but also what I think is quite interesting is not even so much what other people expect or what we assume they expect because we don’t actually know what they expect. So there’s a version of people pleasing that comes in here and just even noticing that even fun stuff drains you faster than you expect. It takes a lot of your energy. For instance, you know, we just got home this evening. I’m exhausted. I can’t wait to crawl into bed. So we just look at that and just notice it and we want to have a general understanding of this is harder. This is just harder.

And so one thing that I want you to know is that if summer feels like too much and not enough all at once, you’re not alone and it’s not a mindset issue. It’s a capacity issue. And what we tend to do is we tend to jam pack our schedule without really thinking about our energy dips, without really thinking about overstimulation, without really thinking about forcing consistency, trying to dip into productivity hacks, and just really reaching for things to make ourselves perform is what I see, especially, you know, in the summer, really all the time, but I see this in summer in this way. It’s a performance.

So I have to show up and be a certain way with my family, a certain way with my kids, a certain way with other people that are in my realm. I have to show up in, you know, my fun activity for me, like getting in the boat in a certain way. And you know, if you’re a mom, which not everybody who listens to this podcast is, but even if you’re just one of those people that’s a caregiver, making sure everybody has the drinks they want and the food they want and making sure everyone has a towel and just that the speaker’s there, that it’s charged, that it’s connected to your phone. Like these are so random, but also create an emotional load.

And I’ve heard a lot of things said about emotional load and I think that, you know, the Barbie movie was one that really brought that to a head and there was just that speech that I think America Ferrera made in that where she talks about the emotional load. And what I find is that awareness can be good, but it also can be poisonous because we can start blaming other people for that. And it’s not to say that other people like your family, your husband, your wife, your kids, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your extended family, your friends, that they don’t contribute to that because they absolutely do. But we want to get into a more empowered state and that’s what I really want to try and help you with here today, is how do we get you into a more empowered state so that you have that emotional control, as I said, you know, not controlling your emotions per se, but more so having the capacity for knowing what I need to do next. How do we get that in hand? And the way that we get that in hand is by creating emotional ownership of ourselves, okay?

So when we take emotional ownership, I don’t want you dipping into this place where I’m going to blame and shame myself because I wasn’t emotionally managed. That’s not the type of emotional management that I’m talking about. When I’m talking about emotional management, I actually would really love to start with compassion and just really looking at it through that compassionate lens. We must have compassion for ourselves. One thing that I’ve learned in my own life is that when I try to go after myself, when I try to be really negative and judgmental and mean to myself, my capacity shrinks and yours will too, because that is just the way that it works.

I’ve coached so many of you on this and I coach myself daily and I just need to reiterate that fact that compassion is the lens that we need to look at this through. There’s things that we want to look at that just don’t work. When we’re looking at traditional schedules for the things that we’re doing, they don’t account for energy dips or overstimulation. They just they don’t.

And when you look at the day and if you’re like, we’re going to get up and then this I’ll give you an example like we would get up, I’d go walk the dog, we would go water skiing, then we would come back in, I’d put all the stuff away, I would eat something and then we would all walk to the coffee shop and we’d have coffee and then we’d walk back and then I would get the beach bag ready to go because we’re going out in the other boat. I know that sounds super bougie. They’re both my dad’s boats though, but at any rate, we would go out in the other boat, the bigger boat and we would go and we would sit in the sun and enjoy the experience with music and maybe it’s music you don’t like and we’re all stuck on a boat together and then we’d come back in and somebody would have to cover the boat and we’d have to start prepping dinner and we’d make dinner and then everybody eat dinner and then we do the dishes and then we’d have a campfire and then you go to bed and then you start the next day.

And that is fun, but also there’s not a lot of space in there for regulation, right? There’s not a lot of space in there for what do I need? Am I resting? Does my brain need a rest? Does my nervous system need a rest? Do I need an emotional rest? And so we want to really just notice if that’s how things are looking. Yours might look really different, right? You in summer may be working the whole time. You may have really, really small children that require more effort from a physical standpoint. You may not have kids or maybe you aren’t working and so you’re in the process of trying to find a job. Like whatever’s going on for you, we just want to notice that we can plan the shit out of ourselves without really considering I need more care.

The other thing I’ll say is that when we force consistency, you know, when it’s like, I must do it like this every day. When we are in that stage, when we’re in that zone, that will create burnout and that will create self-blame because it won’t be sustainable. I find that when we’re looking at things like productivity hacks, that it often ignores regulation needs. We’re really not in tune with ourselves. And reset plans, you know, these crazy diets and all the things that can come about in the summer, they often just end up in these crash cycles, right?

So what I want to offer to you is what actually works. And I want to give you a softer structure approach. What we want to do is we want to create anchors, not rigid routines. And what I mean by anchors is there are things that you do for you that you know are going to move the needle, that are going to either give you rest or grow capacity, right? That are going to give you the emotional release that you might need to have in any given moment. That doesn’t mean necessarily that we’re yelling, crying, or whatever, but just more being able to put the emotions down for even 10 seconds can have such a big impact.

When I think about creating anchors, it is really looking at, I’ll give you a personal example. You know, when I get up, I get up extra early. I just do that because for me, it’s an anchor. When I get up early, I can leisurely enjoy my coffee. I can do some word puzzle games. I can get my brain into a more elastic state. It allows my brain to just slowly wake up the way that it likes to wake up. And therefore, I like to get up extra early to make sure that can happen.

When it comes to my day, I need to have some movement in there. On my own would be ideal, not always possible, but moving my body makes a huge impact for me. Just going for a walk can be enough, but really just ensuring that movement is a part of what I’m doing, especially if I feel lethargic or if I’m feeling really triggered or just irritable or maybe even just very, very low energy, going for a walk is something that is very, very effective for me. So that’s one of my anchors is, you know, am I going to go for a walk today and where and do I need some time alone? Do I need to go for a walk by myself? Can I just slip out and go for a walk by myself or take the dog or whatever I want to do, right? Those are anchors.

Giving yourself permission to put your hand on your chest and take a deep breath and blow it out and just noticing our energy ground a little bit. We just want to build these anchors so that we know that we have places where we can rest and reset and recover and grow capacity. We want to build our plan around our capacity and not despite it. And what I mean by this is you don’t want to be starting to talk about yourself from the standpoint of, ugh, I have to grow some more capacity again, like I’m just not good enough or I’m just not right enough or there’s something wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with you.

Everybody actually needs to grow capacity. Most people would never think about it like that and most people wouldn’t talk about it like that. And many people just ignore it all together and then you can see by their reactivity that they’re not really able to handle the things that are coming up for them, right? So we want to plan around our capacity. Be really just such a steward of ourselves and our energy and us, just making yourself the asset.

You know, I had a business coach once or I still have this business coach actually and she talks about treating yourself like you are the asset. And I think it’s such a beautiful thing to consider. You are the asset. So imagine you’re like Taylor Swift. What do we do with Taylor Swift if she’s the asset? We make sure she’s sleeping, that she has time to do her hair, that she’s eating, that she’s taking care of her voice, that she has some downtime. Are you doing this for yourself? Right? The next thing is really expecting your rhythm to shift.

So you don’t want to walk into whatever’s going on for you this summer and expect nothing to change. Of course things are going to change, right? We don’t know. We’re going to have to shift. We’re going to have to see. How do I feel after day one? How do I feel after day two? How do I feel after day three? We want to expect that we might have to move some stuff around. We might have to find things that work. We might have adopted a plan and realized, my God, that plan is not the plan. And then move on to a different plan.

There’s kind of a three-part framework that you could use. And what I like to think about is what’s your baseline? What is your baseline for self-care, for nervous system regulation, for your unintentional mind, for the negative thinking, for the doubt, for the frustration? What is your baseline for yourself? And you know, I’ve already offered you mine, which are always movement, nature, and using your senses. And I use that tool many times this past week, just 5-4-3-2-1, right? Five things you see, four things you feel, three things you hear, two things you smell, one thing you taste. It’s so effective.

And then once you have your baseline, like these are the things that I do all the time, no matter what, then we want to have where’s the buffer? And by the buffer, I mean, hey, Amanda, we’re going to go out on the boat in 15 minutes. Does that work for you? Actually, I need 30 minutes. Because I’m going to take 15 minutes and sit down and just relax before I move into the next activity. You see what I’m saying? Build in a buffer. And then lastly, bonus. And the bonus for me is the stuff you do if you have the capacity. So if you have the capacity, you will do the other things. But you’re not going to make that decision until go time. So there are days when you will have so much capacity and people will ask you, hey, do you want to go do this thing and you’ll be like, yes. I sure do. I want to sit by that fire. That’s fun. I want to stay up late. I want to do this fun thing. I want to go on that hike. I want to do whatever. I want to do this new business adventure. That’s your bonus time.

It’s one of these things where we set up a plan once we know that we need a plan, right? So you’ve got your baseline, you’ve got your buffer, you’ve got your bonus. And I think that the reason why we don’t do this is because you’ve probably never been taught that you’re allowed to need more space or that burnout isn’t a personal failure. It’s a signal, right? It’s a signal. So if we need more space, if burnout is happening, instead of internalizing that, we want to start having a different conversation with ourselves.

Here are some things that you could ask yourself that might be really good journaling activities for you. Number one, where are you forcing yourself to push through even when your body is begging you to stop? Number two, what rhythms naturally feel good to you in summer? And which ones don’t? Number three, what would shift if you believed that softness is a strategy and not a weakness?

These are beautiful prompts because they allow you to look inwards. And one of the beauties of coaching is that it gives us the opportunity to look inwards. So often, I see my clients, I see people coming to discovery calls, I see friends and colleagues and they’re reading these self-help books and I think it’s it’s wonderful. Self-help books can be really beautiful, but the way that they use them is kind of like driving themselves into it. I have to do it this way because this person said that’s what I do versus what would it look like to look inward and notice that, hey, I’m pushing myself to do this thing that I don’t even like. You know?

Imagine if you noticed in the summertime what rhythms feel good. Do you like having slow mornings? I do, so I make them happen. Which ones don’t? I do not want to get up and start moving and get on the boat or go for a run or go for a hike. Nope. Not good for me. In the summertime, I don’t like going on really, really fast, hard hikes when it’s really, really hot. That’s not good for me. I like to walk slowly. Enjoy the view. Enjoy the feeling of the sun on my face. I enjoy that. And what would shift if you believe that softness is a strategy and not a weakness? I will tell you right now, every time you soften, you get to know yourself a little better. You get to be with yourself a little bit more compassionately.

You get to be you and I know so many of you are just craving that feeling of being yourself and having that be enough. But that will never be enough if we don’t take the time to sit with ourselves and to soften and to feel and to be and to just experience. The only way that we can do that is when we build in some rest. The only way that we can do that is when we build in some capacity and we have the compassionate lens on ourselves. You know, what does this poor human need right now?

That’s what I’ve got for you for this episode. I’ve really given you the outline, right? About how to structure your summer. But if you would like to go deeper, that is exactly what we’re doing inside Take Back Your Summer. And day five of that challenge is actually all about creating a custom strategy that fits your life. So this coachathon, as I’m calling it, is five days of me giving you these pieces of training inside that container, right? Where you come to the call and I teach it to you, but then I coach you for free. And the reason why we want the coaching is we want to see the things that we can’t see. And too often, what’s happening with us is that we are just believing the story that our brain is telling again and again and again. And so when you come to this call, I’m going to help you discover what you can’t see so that we can shift it, soften it, release it. When we do this, this is when we start creating a summer that we absolutely love.

So if that is something that you feel called to do, I’d like to invite you to go register. amandahess.ca/summer is where you go sign up. I can’t wait to see you there, my friend. Until next time, bye for now.

Thanks so much for listening today. If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review. It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you. I’m excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode. Until then, take care, friend.