How to Beat the Summer Bummers: Loneliness Edition
Summer break
You spend all year waiting for it (sometimes starting from the first day you go back to school). Visions of sunshine and vacations and water parks and pool parties dance in your head as you sit in cold, sterile classrooms, the hours dragging on and on.
And then, suddenly, it’s here.
FREEDOM!!
So why, after about two weeks, does lose all of its glamour? What once was an all-consuming fantasy of joy and adventure now feels like boredom and hours of nothing to do. What happened? Where is the fun that you spent all year promising yourself you would have?
As much as we may hate to admit it, summer break may not always be as exciting as we want it to be. Here are a few reasons why your summer is a bummer, and what to do about it:
Bummer #1: Loneliness
You aren’t seeing your friends as often as you thought you would
This one hits hard right off the bat. With social media showing us the most appealing and curated versions of our friends’ lives, it is so easy to fall into the comparison trap and believe that everyone else is spending all of their free time surrounded by friends and having a grand ol’ time.
The truth is, feeling lonely over summer break is way more common than you might think.
If people posted loneliness reels every time they were feeling that way, Instagram and TikTok would probably crash from post overload. It’s hard to stay in touch with friends to the same degree that you did when you were at school because, well, you aren’t in class together for 8 hours a day, five days a week. Of course you’re going to feel more distant from your friends! Give yourself some compassion and do yourself a favor: don’t buy into the lie that you are the only one feeling more isolated and wishing you saw your friends more. Summer break always sounds amazing until you realize that it means you actually see your friends LESS.
Blues Busters:
#1 - Be intentional about reaching out to your friends on a regular basis
But also give them grace if they aren’t responding as quickly as they normally do. They may be spending time with family, or busy at cheer camp, or they honestly might just be feeling just as bummed as you are and are withdrawing socially. It doesn’t mean they suddenly don’t love you.
#2 - Be flexible in what time spent together looks like.
More often than not, our free time doesn’t line up over the summer, so when you’re home and bored, they’re away at camp, and when they get back, they may only have one or two days before you leave for your family trip to Disney. Practice patience, and remind yourself that your friendship is still alive, even if you are having a harder time connecting than normal.
Again, summer break often seems like it will be wide open and full of nothing but time spent with friends, but the reality is that our time is often chopped up between trips, camps, summer jobs, and even just wanting to have time at home to relax and recover from all those things.
Being flexible with finding time to connect with friends will take a lot of the pressure off of both of you, and allow you to reconnect in a positive way, which is what we wanted to begin with.
#3 - Try to shift your attention to filling your time with activities you can do on your own
That way, not only will you spend less time ruminating on feeling lonely (which only makes that feeling get bigger), but when you do reconnect with your friends, you’ll have fun things to talk about and stories to tell them. The reunion will be full of fun updates and new hobbies and positivity, instead of the aching need for closeness (which may be true, but isn’t exactly a fun conversation topic).
#4 - Reconnect with old friends, or work to build up newer friendships
When we are overly-dependent on our top 1-3 friends, it puts a lot of pressure on them to be available when they may not be in control of their time and availability. Instead of hinging all our hopes on our primary besties, try viewing summer break as an opportunity to build up all-new friendships, or to reconnect with old ones. What better way to come out of summer break than to have started the summer with 3 besties and returned to school with 5!
The take home point: you are not alone in feeling alone. As much as we wish summer break looked like it does in movies where we spend every free moment with our closest friends, that is not reality. But what we can do is to be intentional about reaching out to our friends (even if they’re busy), being flexible with our expectations, filling our time with hobbies and making our own fun memories, and building up new or old friendships. Rewrite your summer and make it fun!
