What Your Summer Actually Wants From You

RUCHI PAREKH - COACH/SPEAKER

Welcome to another issue of Rise & Thrive. Each week, I send insights that help high-performers like you break through barriers, beat imposter syndrome, and build unshakeable confidence so you can live your best life while reaching your full potential.

Every July, I notice the same pattern in my sessions.

The accomplished people I work with arrive talking about their summer the way they talk about everything else. As a project. They have plans for it. Optimization goals. The holiday itinerary is meticulous. The “while things are quieter” list is long. They’ll finally read those books, do those workouts, get to those home projects - and somewhere in the middle of all that, take the family holiday they’ve been planning since January.

By the second week of August, many of them are more depleted than they were in June. And the ones who actually went away? Often the most depleted of all.

There’s nothing wrong with them. They’ve just done what successful people do with every season - turned it into something to manage. And summer, more than any other time of year, isn’t asking for that.

It’s asking for the opposite.

For most of human history, summer wasn’t the productive season. It was the slower one.

The hard agricultural work happened in spring and fall - planting and harvesting. Summer was the in-between. Long days, warm light, food growing on its own. It was the season the body associated with rest, gathering, ease. Not idleness. Just a different rhythm.

Your nervous system still carries this pattern, even if your calendar doesn’t. There’s a reason you feel the pull to slow down in July. A reason the heat makes ambition feel a little ridiculous. A reason summer evenings naturally invite lingering rather than checking things off. That isn’t laziness. That’s biology. Researchers have found that your body’s stress hormones and metabolic rhythms genuinely shift across seasons - the system that drives you hard in winter isn’t operating at the same intensity now.

Your modern life keeps pushing through this signal. Your body, if you’d listen, is asking for something different.

Here’s the cruelest version of this I see in my practice every year.

A successful person books a beautiful holiday. They earn it. They need it. They plan it carefully. They board the plane.

And within forty-eight hours of arriving, the guilt arrives. Quietly, then loudly.

Guilt about the emails piling up. Guilt about the colleagues “holding things down” while they’re away. Guilt about the money it’s costing. Guilt that their kids are on screens at the pool. Guilt that they’re not making the most of every moment of this expensive, hard-won time off. Guilt that they’re not feeling as restored as they’re supposed to be feeling.

So they “just quickly check” something on their phone. They handle one work thing. They post a careful photo. They mentally draft the back-from-holiday email. And the holiday they paid for and traveled for and waited for keeps not quite happening to them. They’re in the location. They’re not actually on the holiday.

This isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a nervous system in a state it doesn’t recognize, scrambling to find its way back to the familiar.

The science underneath this is more useful than it sounds.

For years - maybe decades - your system has been calibrated to a particular state: alert, switched-on, available, productive. That state has become your baseline. It doesn’t feel like high alert anymore. It just feels like you.

When you finally land somewhere beautiful and slow, your nervous system doesn’t recognize the calm as restoration. It registers the unfamiliar quiet as something wrong. Something missing. Something that needs correcting. That’s where the restlessness comes from. The itch to check the phone. The strange, low guilt with no obvious source.

You’re not failing at rest. Your system is doing what it was trained to do - pulling you back toward the activation that it’s learned to associate with safety.

The cruel part is that the very people who need a holiday most are the ones whose systems will resist it hardest. The more switched-on your normal life is, the more your body will treat a true holiday as a deviation. And the more guilt will arrive to push you back into work mode, even from a beach lounger.

When clients let themselves slow down enough to notice, what surfaces isn’t dramatic. It’s surprisingly simple.

Summer wants you to be a little bored. To have an unstructured afternoon. To eat a long dinner outside without checking your phone. To swim in something. To read a book that has nothing to do with your goals. To sit with someone you love and not be working on the relationship, just enjoying it.

It wants you to do something with no outcome attached. To linger in a moment instead of efficiently moving through it. To let a day unfold rather than execute it.

None of this sounds like much, which is exactly why it gets dismissed. The brain that’s trained on productivity hears “go sit by the water for two hours” and immediately wants to make it useful. Could you listen to a podcast? Bring a journal? Use the time to think through the strategic question? That’s the trained brain trying to optimize the very thing that was meant to give it a break.

The genius of summer - and especially of a real holiday - is that it’s not asking for much. The trouble is that “not much” is the hardest thing for accomplished people to give themselves.

If you go away this summer, the guilt will probably arrive. It almost always does. Knowing this in advance is half the work.

When it shows up - usually somewhere around day two or three, often poolside, often unprovoked - it isn’t telling you to check email. It’s telling you that your nervous system is recalibrating. That’s all. It’s not a sign you’ve been irresponsible. It’s not a sign you should be working. It’s the discomfort of an over-revved system finally beginning to settle.

If you can resist the reflex - the “just five minutes” of work, the quick scroll, the urge to make the rest more productive - the guilt tends to pass faster than you’d expect. And what arrives on the other side is the thing you booked the holiday for in the first place. The real exhale. The slowing of the inner pace. The actual sense of being away.

You didn’t pay for the location. You paid for that state. The location was just supposed to make it easier to find it.

What I notice with the people I work with at this time of year is that they don’t actually need more rest tactics. They need permission.

Permission to do less, openly. Permission to be on holiday and not perform it. Permission to let the inbox sit. Permission to be unimpressive for a few weeks. Permission to come back without a tan-and-tidy story about how rejuvenated they are, just to make the time off feel worth it.

That permission almost never comes from outside. Nobody is going to tell you to slow down. The culture certainly won’t. Your inbox won’t. Your own ambition, very much, will not.

It has to come from you - the version of you willing to admit that “I’m fine, just busy” has been a hiding place for a long time, and that the holiday won’t actually be a holiday unless you let it.

The most successful summers I see aren’t the ones with the best itineraries. They’re the ones where the person finally let the season do what it does best. Soften them a little. Loosen something. Restore something not because they earned it but because they finally stopped negotiating for it.

You don’t need to do summer perfectly. You don’t need to take a transformational trip. You don’t need to come back a different person.

You just need to let one ordinary summer afternoon - or one ordinary day of your holiday - be what these days used to be, before you became someone who optimized them.

A bit boring. A bit aimless. A bit longer than necessary. A bit warmer than you’d choose if you were in charge of the temperature. Your phone left in a drawer for a few hours, not as a wellness exercise but because you genuinely forgot about it.

That kind of afternoon won’t show up in your achievements. It won’t generate content. It won’t make you more productive when Monday returns.

What it will do is remind your nervous system, in language deeper than words, that life isn’t actually the emergency you’ve been treating it as.

That’s the gift the season has been offering you. It’s been there every summer. This is the one where you might finally accept it.

What does your summer actually want from you - and what would it take to let it have that? Hit reply and tell me.

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