Stay Cool, Stay Balanced: Your Guide to Summer Wellness

Summer time is a very exciting time of year. We are conditioned from our school days to embrace summer as a time of play and adventuring. It’s a season for socializing, expanding, and doing. With all of the summer action and summer heat it’s important to take steps to maintain your balance. It can be easy to over exert, over do it, over heat, and deplete yourself. Which comes with consequences to your health.  Navigating this hot wet season we call summer can be a challenge and if we don’t learn to counteract the seasonal heat and hoorah, we can be left susceptible. 

This hot time of year can lead to increased rates of ailments such as:

• Acidity
• General Tiredness
• Sluggishness
• Fatigue
• Diarrhea
• Rashes
• Hives
• Itchy Eyes
• Sunburn
• Tropical Fever And more!

So to avoid some summer burnout, we’re going to dive into some holistic ways to stay cool, and maintain your balance. Remembering health is about the long game, it’s about learning to ebb with the flows of life and do the things that not just bring us pleasure and joy in the moment, but sustainable healing in the future. which is why we’re taking the time to ensure summer doesn’t burn you up leaving you depleted!

As we dive in today, I’m going to challenge you to take a holistic approach to summer care. One rooted in viewing everything as interconnected and relevant. Health means achieving balance, and achieving that balance involves not just our physical bodies, but our minds as well. 

Have you heard the statistic that crime rises while it’s hot out? Have you ever thought about why that is? People literally can’t keep their cool, and this manifests in many different ways, from inflammatory rashes, to outburst of anger, and fiery fits of passion. Keep in mind how the heat fuels what goes on in our body as you let this cocoling conversation wash over you. 

Counteracting The Heat – Finding The Balance

It may be very obvious, or it may not be, but the best way to counteract the summer heat is to COOL. We can use opposites to find balance in many aspects of life. If it’s too hot, we cool. If it’s too cold, we warm. If it’s too dry, we moisten, if it’s too moist, we dry. These are core concepts of the way I practice herbalism, but they’re also super applicable in helping you find the balance in your daily life and our navigation of the seasons. 

Here are a handful of approaches to keep you cool and collect during all your summer fun: 

Eat Cooling Foods (and avoid heating foods) 

Eating cooling foods in the summer is something we all know how to do. I think if I said name a summer food, most people would name the notorious watermelon, a fruit offering us some moist heat-quenching coolness with every slice. There are many more foods we can look to incorporate (and avoid) in order to navigate the summer heat. Some examples of cooling foods include:

• Raw Fruits
• Raw Veggies
• Coconut
• Ghee
• Cucumber Especially!
• Mung Bean
• Watermelon
• Salad
• Legumes
• White Meats
• Cooling Herbal Teas (mint, lemon balm, chrysanthemum, hibiscus, red clover, rose hips, honeysuckle, green tea!)

Avoid/Minimize

Part of balancing out the summer heat means avoiding foods that are aggravating or increase the heat within us. These foods can include but are not limited to:

• Red Meats
• Alcohol
• Hot & Spicy Foods
• Caffeine
• Greasy or Fried Foods

Engage in Cooling Exercise (While minimizing overly depleting ones) 

Finding the right amount and type of exercise in the summer is also a great way to maintain the balance and optimal health during these scorching summer months. Summer is such an expansive time; we have to work not to overexert ourselves. This is especially true in the exercise department.

Use summer as a time to connect with some cooling exercises like:

• Yoga!
• Moonlit walks
• Swimming

Avoid/Minimize

The same rings true for not just the sports/exercises we engage in but how we engage in them. If we are doing ultra-competitive sports, we are going to increase the heat in our body as we’re using all the fiery emotions to win. Be aware of not just sports/exercise that lead to overexertion, but those that lead to an overuse of our mental energy.

Invite Some Cooling Scents

Consider including some scents to help cool you down during this time of year. These scents can be cooling to your nervous system and emotions. You can incorporate scents like:

• Jasmine
• Sandalwood
• Rose

Keep The Conversations Cool (Sorry Politics!) 

This is a big one! Another thing that really adds to the heat and throws us further out of balance leading to excessive heat and the depletion that comes with it is the type of conversations and activities we are engaging in. Like we touched on when discussing competitive sports.

When we engage in conversations that stir us up and cause a lot of passion, anger, or frustration, we’re cranking up the heat on our bodies and minds. Making it even harder to cool down from.

So when choosing your company and your topics of conversation, aim for calmer and cooling conversation!

In Summ(er)ation:

It’s a bit wild to consider things like conversation choice, and what scents you surround yourself with when talking about big health topics, but

at its core… health is built in the little things. In the nuance of our daily life. When we start getting down to it, it’s these little engagements we have, the food we eat, the company we keep, the exercise we do or don’t do that create health.

Whether you’re just looking to optimize your summer vibes or you’re navigating a serious health condition, don’t be afraid to get micro. Everything is connected, and cooling down your conversations could lead to some downstream effects of cooling down other parts of your body as well.

Concepts like this date back thousands and thousands of years from Ancient Eastern Medicine. They recognized the nuance that existed when it came to not just health but your health as an individual.

Finding ways to maintain the balance is relevant for every single one of us no matter where we are on our health journey, so get curious and get playful as you look to incorporate some suggestions on our list!