For Years, I Assumed Summer Was
Supposed To Be The Easy Season
Why High Achievers Crash In July
by Giacomo Kyle Hatanaka, LAc, MAcOM | Hidden Summit Acupuncture
For years, I assumed summer was the season when everyone finally relaxed.
The weather was nicer. The days were longer. Vacations happened. Life was supposed to feel… easier. Right?
Then I started practicing acupuncture.
Running an acupuncture clinic has given me a strange front-row seat to patterns most people never get to see. Every year, sometime around July, it starts. People come in exhausted. Not just “I need a vacation” tired. The kind of tired where sleep isn’t fixing it anymore.
Headaches increase. Neck and shoulder tension ramps up. Digestion gets more unpredictable. People feel anxious, scattered, irritable, or strangely emotional. And the interesting part? Almost every one of them thinks it’s just them.
It almost never is.
What I want to tell every single one of them, right there in the intake, is: those aren’t three problems. That’s one problem wearing three different outfits.
The strange thing about
summer
I’ve noticed something else. It’s a little like working in a restaurant. Every server knows there are moments when twenty people suddenly walk through the door at once. Not during lunch. Not during dinner. Just… all at once. Nobody planned it. But somehow it happens.
Humans seem to have these strange rhythms too. Every summer, people independently arrive at the exact same place:
“I’m exhausted.”
Why does this
happen?
Summer isn’t just sunshine and vacations. For most adults, it’s actually one of the busiest seasons of the year. Kids are out of school. Travel ramps up. Weekends fill with weddings, barbecues, birthdays, and family gatherings.
Work doesn’t usually slow down, but life outside of work speeds up. Longer daylight often means later bedtimes. Hotter weather increases dehydration. People exercise more. They stay out later. They recover less.
And because it’s summer, many people feel guilty admitting they’re struggling.
After all, this is supposed to be the fun season. So they push harder. Until the body eventually pushes back.
Traditional Chinese Medicine has
a different way of looking at this
One of my favorite ideas from Traditional Chinese Medicine is that every season asks something different of us.
Winter isn’t simply something to survive. It’s a season of conservation. Think about a perennial plant. During winter, it isn’t dead. It’s investing below the surface. Its energy retreats into the roots. It rests. It stores. The blooms you admire in spring weren’t created in April. They were made possible by everything the plant conserved during winter.
TCM suggests people aren’t much different.
Winter is when we restore. Summer is when we spend that energy. If we spend winter running at full speed—working late, sleeping less, never slowing down—we often arrive at summer already living on borrowed energy.
Then summer asks us to spend even more.
Eventually the bill comes due.
High achievers are
especially vulnerable
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that the people hit hardest by this are often the ones who appear to have everything together.
They’re dependable. They’re productive. They’re the people everyone else leans on. When summer gets busy, they don’t usually cancel plans. They add more.
They tell themselves they’ll rest later. But then later eventually becomes September.
What do you do
about it?
Not move to Alaska.
Not cancel summer.
And definitely not feel guilty that you’re tired.
Instead, try giving your nervous system small opportunities to recover before it demands them. Go to bed a little earlier. Leave one evening unscheduled. Hydrate more than you think you need to. Eat nourishing meals instead of grabbing whatever’s convenient between events. Let yourself have a slow morning once in a while.
They’re simple things.
But they’re also the things we tend to abandon first when life gets busy.
One thing I've
learned
For years, I thought summer exposed weakness. Now I think it exposes depletion. That’s a very different thing.
And if you’ve been wondering why your body suddenly feels like it’s running on fumes while everyone else seems to be enjoying the season…
There’s a good chance you’re not alone.
You’re probably just seeing the same pattern we see every year.
If this sounds
familiar
If you’re in Boise, Meridian, Eagle, or Nampa and you’ve noticed that every summer your body feels more tense, more tired, or more overwhelmed than it should, we’d love to help.
At Hidden Summit Acupuncture, we don’t just look at where your symptoms are happening; we look at why your body may be struggling to keep up in the first place.
Sometimes a little support is all it takes to make the season feel like summer again. Schedule a visit with us.
Giacomo Hatanaka is a licensed acupuncturist and co-owner of Hidden Summit Acupuncture in Boise, Idaho, where he focuses on pain, nervous system regulation, stress physiology, and helping overwhelmed high-functioning people feel like themselves again. He’s especially interested in why so many intelligent, capable people can function at a high level while feeling terrible almost all the time.