137: Create a Summer Bucket List for Better Mental Health

Summer doesn't have to disappear in a blur of work, errands, and obligations.

In this episode, I'm sharing why creating a Summer Bucket List isn't just fun it's actually good for your mental health. 

Research shows that intentionally planning enjoyable experiences can reduce stress, increase happiness, strengthen relationships, and help prevent burnout.

Whether you're feeling overwhelmed, emotionally drained, or simply want to enjoy this season more, this episode will help you create a realistic summer filled with joy instead of pressure.

You'll learn:

·         Why anticipation improves mental health

·         How enjoyable experiences reduce stress

·         The science behind planning fun activities

·         How to create a Summer Bucket List you'll complete

·         Ideas for self-care, connection, adventure, and rest

If you're ready to make this your happiest and healthiest summer yet, this episode is for you.

Please note this podcast is not a substitute for mental health therapy or seeing your physician. Please see a qualified professional if you think you have mental health struggles. 

Get your Downloadable copy of Summer Bucket List

https://go.feedyoursoulunlimited.com/summerbucketlist-8179

Get your Downloadable copy of How to Choose Your Right Therapist

https://go.feedyoursoulunlimited.com/choosetherapist-completeguide

Here are some links we discussed:

https://feedyoursoultherapy.com/self-care-is-not-selfish/

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/108-self-care-is-not-selfish/id1473042304?i=1000670998359

 https://youtu.be/Zou35_IYl2c

 Connect with Kim

Therapy: https://feedyoursoultherapy.com/

Coaching: https://feedyoursoulunlimited.com/

You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTuSnNrSDhLvbhxoTMXZgog

Kim McLaughlin, MA

Kim McLaughlin is a psychotherapist. coach, speaker, and author. She helps people who feel frustrated, overwhelmed, and overloaded, and it shows up in feeling unsatisfied in your life. She has a Master of Arts Degree in Clinical Psychology. Kim is a certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, helping people to gain peace with food. 

We would love to get your feedback on this show and let us know what you would like to hear about in upcoming shows. Email us at info@FeedYourSoulUnlimited.com

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Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the Feed Your Soul with Kim podcast. If you're looking to feel better in your life and want to feed your soul, you are in the right place. Here, we believe life just doesn't have to be so hard. I'm Kim McLaughlin, and I'm your host. I am a psychotherapist, speaker, coach, and bestselling author. We're talking today about the summer bucket list. I love talking about this every summer, and this summer is no exception. Whether you're feeling overwhelmed, emotionally drained, or simply want to enjoy this season more, this episode will help you create a realistic summer filled with joy and pleasure. You'll learn why anticipation improves mental health, how enjoyable experiences reduce stress, the science behind planning fun activities, how to create a summer bucket list you will want to complete, and I will give you plenty of ideas for self-care, connection, adventure, and rest. If you're ready to make this your happiest and most enjoyable summer yet, this episode is for you Thank you for joining us on the podcast. I am talking to you, it is June, and what I find is that if we don't talk about our summer bucket list, it never happens. So summer often disappears before we notice. I know people are telling me, "It's the end of June. Oh my gosh, summer's half gone." It's not. There's plenty of time, and there's plenty that we can do to get on track to have this summer being super fun, pleasurable, and restful. We spend months planning vacations. You probably already have done that, and you rarely plan your everyday experiences over the summer except for that one week or two weeks where you plan the vacation and everything else just goes by the wayside, and there's a lot of other days in the summer besides that time that you go on vacation. I think a summer bucket list is a perfect thing to have for your mental health practice because you're engaging the tools that we talk about all the time on this podcast that can help you feel better. Also, I know from personal experience that creating a summer bucket list helps calm my nervous system because I have something fun and realistic to do over the summer, and I don't get all stressed out I first wanna talk about the psychology of looking forward. And as I've been thinking about this episode and the summer bucket list, really, the summer bucket list does help you look forward to things in the future. And there is this psychological increase in your, wellbeing when you're anticipating the reward of something fun over the summer. I was thinking about it, and it's really this dopamine hit that helps your body feel more energized. And we look to increase these good feelings in your body, mind, and spirit. That really what- is what this summer bucket list is all about. I know that having something enjoyable on my calendar really increases my mood, and it helps me have that anticipatory wellness, that anticipatory pleasure of something that I am looking forward to have. Because I'll talk about it, I'll, look it up, and start really anticipating what I'm gonna do. And this is gonna be part of that summer bucket list to do is getting something on your schedule that you know you can do that will just be super fun. So we have it where you're anticipating the fun, so you're thinking about it in advance. You do the fun thing. You have the experience yourself. And then also there is what I call the remember when's. And it's that looking back point of going, "Oh, I remember when I did this thing. It was so much fun." So this really has a long-lasting effect that really can serve you throughout the year When we talk about having our summer bucket list, I think a lot of times people put it off. I know I did too. I- actually I have been known to put it off and I love having this podcast and having this time of remembering to do my summer bucket list because I forget. And I wanted to talk about why we might forget to have this plan of what we're gonna do that's fun over the summertime. I think we lean into this idea that joy is selfish. Doing something pleasurable is selfish. And a lot of times, sorry guys, but this happens a lot to women, and it can be part of that cultural conditioning that women have to put their needs last on the list. I know that women often wait until everyone else is taken care of before they'll even consider having something positive for themselves. And this leads to that burnout that women experience a lot. Women who are caregivers at home, women who are on the board of directors, women who run a business, women who take care of children every day. There is this burnout that happens because we put ourselves last on the list, and that is the cultural conditioning that I really would like us to move through and move beyond because I have talked before on this podcast and in my blog I call it self-care is not selfish. And I'll link that for you because I think it's important to start recognizing when we're putting our own needs on the back, back burner, so to speak, and not thinking about what we want to do. This is where the summit buck- summer bucket list really plays out well for us because we can start getting things on the list, getting things on the calendar. So I wanna encourage you. I'm gonna give you this as your encouragement. You don't have to make plans for the kids, for your spouse, for your coworkers, for your friends. You don't have to do them first. You don't have to take care of them first. I want you to start putting yourself first on the list. I want you to stop waiting for the fun to begin and start organizing it for yourself When we have things that are fun that we do over the summer, it increases this joy, which really increases our emotional resilience. And I think that is a huge win for us when we really feel depleted and lack that kind of opportunity to take care of ourselves. So let's engage in this emotional resilience and make this summer bucket list be the thing we do for ourselves. Last podcast, we talked about the six pillars of mental health And this bucket list ties in well to your overall mental and emotional wellbeing. When I talked previously about the six pillars of mental health, then I wanted to combine that with what we're talking about with our summer bucket list because we can think of the summer bucket list of, oh, this is just things that we're gonna do. This is just things that we get to do over the summer. I'm saying let's be planful about what's going to give you pleasure and how it can increase your mental health. So let's talk about what that might look like. So when we look at different kinds of activities that we might engage in, we can increase our mental and emotional wellbeing. We talked last time, and I'll put a link to it in the notes, about the six pillars. I call them six pillars. It is the physical pillar, which is about your food, your body, your movement, how take, you take care of your body. The second pillar is the emotions, how we have our emotions, how we honor our emotions, how we name our emotions, how we work through our emotions. The third pillar is our mental wellness. This is the thoughts that you think, how our thoughts can get off track, and how they can take us down a path that really makes life hard because we make a lot of things up in our head that is really not true and makes us feel really sad and angry and overwhelmed. The fourth pillar is a big one. It's the lifestyle pillar. It's about your family, your friends, your work, what you do on vacation, your family of origin, your spouse. It's all of those things that you do for fun. That's part of that lifestyle pillar. There's the fifth pillar, which is the mindfulness pillar, and that is how you get connected back in with your body, your sense of wellbeing, your spiritual self, your higher order, what might be religious aspects for yourself. That's all in that mindfulness component. And the sixth component is Self-love. And that is how we start looking at ourselves and loving on ourselves no matter what. No matter what's going on, you are a lovable human being that might be having a rough day, but in your core, there needs to be love for yourself and love for who you are and what you've experienced and what you're going through and what you're gonna experience in the future. So let's just see how they all combine together and start thinking about it. So when we think about those six pillars, there is... First, I wanna talk about how we engage over the summer in our summer bucket list. We might engage in some kind of movement. For me, that's paddleboarding. I've already started doing that this summer. I love it. It's swimming, it's hiking, it's evening walks to watch the sunset, it's dancing, it's biking. It's all the things you might love to do physically through movement. And those pillars, there are lots of pillars connected to this. There's the pillar on physical movement, on being present in your body. There's also the emotions, those feel-good dopamine hits when you're doing these activities. It could be lifestyle is also increased because you're out with somebody else when you're dancing or when you might be hiking with somebody else. So you have those feelings that are working along with somebody else. Also self-love. You're engaging in something that is taking care of your body, mind, and spirit. So that movement can really engage a lot of those mental health pillars Also, we can have the connections. We can have a picnic with friends. We can have a time with our spiritual family. You can have a family barbecue, a girls' night out. Tonight, I'm going out to... My book c- club is meeting tonight, so I'm going out to, to meet with them and talk about the book that we just read. That connection is c- is the one of the pillars that's connected to lifestyle, where we're connecting to other people, our family, our friends. It's also about nutrition. It could be about picnics with fun foods that are over the over the holidays or the, the summertime, those special summer foods that we have that are so delicious. It's also about connecting with our family and being in that mode. So you can see how that, when we're connected, we engage in lots of different pillars in for our mental health. Another area that we do over the summer is we might engage in some of kind of purposeful activity. We might volunteer. We might learn a new hobby, and we might start a creative project. All kinds of things that we can do, and those can be connected to our mental pillar where we engage in something that activates our mind in a different way, where we learn something new that engages our brain in a new way. It's connected to that lifestyle component where we're connecting with other people, where we're doing something for others and we're being giving of our time as we volunteer. Another area that we focus on in our summertime can be a time of rest. It can be where we take naps, where we sleep in a little bit later, where we read outside in a comfy chair. We go to the beach and walk on the sand. We might engage in some kind of digital detox where we leave our phone and the internet off for a day. Those are lots of ways to get rest, and those are connected to lots of pillars. One would be your mental pillar, number, pillar number three around your mental learn- wellness, where you're not getting into that social media kind of frenzy with your brain. You're focused on more calming activities, which also is connected to mindfulness, and that is about being connected mind, body, spirit inside of yourself to your own wellness and your own sense of purpose Also, you could be engaging in something that's around nutrition. You could be going to farmer's markets doing a new recipe, a seasonal recipe, eating foods that are just available at the summertime. You might be cooking outdoors. You might be barbecuing. We just barbecued last night, and it's part of our summer experience here at my household. And these are connected to your physical pillar where you- it's about the food that you eat, the amount of activities that you have. It's also the mental c- pillar where you're engaging your mind in new recipes or how am I gonna cook this food outdoors? What kind of recipes am I gonna use? You can see also nutrition is attached to our self-self-love pillar about how we feed our body and fuel our body and help our f- body feel really well. We also can engage in mindfulness and spirituality. You might decide to get up with the sun and have sunrise coffee. You might be journaling more. You might be having nature walks or meditation. You might be doing yoga outside on the grass with other people. These are connected to the mindfulness pillar, where you're taking care of your mental emotional and physical well-being, your inner self. It also connects to your self-love and how you act in that really loving way towards yourself Hi, this is Kim. If something in today's episode brought up emotions or made you realize you'd like more support, you don't have to go through this alone. I work with people who are ready to feel more grounded, confident, and at peace in their lives. You can schedule a free 15 minute consultation and learn more about therapy and me at Feed Your Soul therapy.com. So now that I've gotten you all encouraged to do your summer bucket list, let's start figuring out the strategies for how you're going to make that happen. It takes a little bit of time, I think 15 to 30 minutes, that you contemplate some questions, and I'll put these in the show notes. Also, you can get my version of the summer bucket list. It's very colorful, it's very fun, and I'll have the link to that in the show notes also where you can get this, the attachment to the summer bucket list. But let's go through some of the questions that you can ask yourself to get you on track with your summer bucket list First question is, what do you like to do and have not done in a while? What do you like to do? For me, over the summer that is stand-up paddleboard and swimming. I love to be in the water. During the wintertime, even though I'm in California, it's often a little cold to get in the water, and I like to do stand-up paddleboard and swimming over the summer. So what do you like to do and have not done in a while? That's a really good question to know for you to start asking yourself ongoing over the summer. Another really great question is, what do you like to do as a child during the summer? What do you remember doing when you were a kid? What was fun for you? What gave you pleasure as a child? That is a great question to help you recreate the things that you used to do and love. And I know sometimes it's hard to do those things as an adult, but it could be that you went on a swing set. That used to be one of the things I would put on my summer bucket list, is p- get on the swing set. I loved doing that as a child. And when I am at the park, that is something that I do, is I will get on the swings. So that's one thing that could be done that's very simple over the summer. What other things did you like to do as a child over the summer? It could have been playing baseball. It could have been playing soccer, watching a movie outside. It could have been going to the beach and watching the sunset. All kinds of fun things. I can come up with so many different ideas. Third question is: what have you never done but really want to do? What have you never done that you really want to do? That is a good question that I think deserves an opportunity for you to contemplate what that might be. For me, I went to Mexico a month ago, and they were teaching... At this beach, they were teaching people how to surf. I want to learn how to surf. And I was watching them, and I thought, "If I was here longer, I would take a surfing lesson." So that's one of the things I've never done, but I really wanna try and do. I need to schedule that in. Might not be this summer, but I want to schedule that in order to make that happen, because I've never done it, and I really wanna try. The fourth question is, what have you been afraid to do but really want to do? What's been fearful for you and you want to try it out? It could be bike riding again. It could be swimming. It could be taking a little harder hike that's a little longer than what you're used to. But what have you been afraid to do that you really want to do? I encourage you to contemplate that and see maybe if it's on your heart to do it this year. My favorite question is, what would give you pleasure? I have had various points in my life where I wasn't doing so well mentally and emotionally, and I would take a break from life for a little bit, and every day I would ask myself, "What would give me pleasure today? What would give me pleasure today?" And it was some of the best times I remember because I didn't have much money. I didn't have the resources I have now, and I had a really great time coming up with different things I could do that would give me pleasure, and they would... What ended up happening is it really increased my mental health. It made me feel good. So waking up on a Saturday morning, what would give me pleasure? Waking up on a Satur- Sunday morning, what would give me pleasure today? That is a great question to ask to start getting in alignment with that more joyful feeling rather than feeling overloaded or burdened or overwhelmed This leads us into, to making a summer bucket list to keep track of what you plan to do. I think the first step is after you've contemplated those questions, is write down what you plan to do this summer. What is on your bucket list? What are the things you want to do this summer that you wanna make sure happens? The first way is you write it down. The second is put it in your calendar. Set a date to do them. I actually have a friend that I wanna go back and do standup, more standup paddleboard. I am going to get a date on the calendar with her. That's something I'm gonna start committing to. I wanna commit to doing that because we had so much fun. We did that a couple weeks ago, and I wanna get it back on the calendar 'cause I really enjoyed it. So set up the dates in the calendar. If it's with other people, set up the dates with them. If it's by yourself, set up the date and put it on the calendar. And what I like to do is once I've done them, I like to cross them off. It makes me feel good. It makes me good knowing that I've done it. It's boom, I cross it off. I did it. I feel good about myself. I also wanna go back to that setting the date in the calendar. Writing it down and setting the date in the calendar also gives you that anticipatory pleasure w- that we talked about earlier in, in our podcast today. We talked about that anticipatory joy of leaning into what you're going to do. When you write it down, when you put it on the calendar, it gives you that boost of cortisol that says, "Yeah I've got this. I'm gonna do this." And then when you do it, you can cross it off and say, "Yeah, I did that." And then you then have the opportunity to reflect back and go later on, "Ah, that was so much fun." I also encourage you to keep some extra spaces on your bucket list for extra things that you come up with later throughout the summer that you go I actually would like to do that," and you wanna add it in. So keep extra space in your calendar, on your list for things that just show up that you just didn't expect to show up. This could feel overwhelming, and I wanna encourage you to keep it simple and keep it really easy. Don't make this hard on yourself. I'm not talking of making a two-week trip to Europe. That takes a lot of work. I'm talking about the easy things. I'm talking about things that are inexpensive. I think the best bucket list items are things that are easy. They're inexpensive. They're easy to do. You can put them on the list, and you can get it done right when you're done listening to this podcast. I find some of the most restorative- ideas, these restorative moments are those that are really simple and don't cost money. So something like go to the end of the street and watch the sunset. Watch the sunset. We love doing that. We ride just down the street, and there's this open field, and we love to watch the sunset. Go do that tonight. Go out and pick peaches or tomatoes, or go in your backyard and s- and see. You might have some there. We actually have... Our neighbors have peaches that we get to pick, and we just love them. So go pick some fresh fruit or fresh vegetables. Read outside. That's not expensive. That's easy. Go sit in a place that feels really comfortable. I have some seats out in the back that I love to sit in, and I turn on the waterfall, and I love reading outside. I did that just last night. Make some homemade popsicles Seriously, get some juice, put it in a popsicle container, put it in the freezer, make some homemade popsicles. Oh, go barefoot on the grass. That costs no money at all, and take your shoes off and walk barefoot. It's one of... It is one great pleasure that I have, is doing that. I love also going barefoot on the sand. Takes me a little longer to get to the beach where there's sand. The grass is just around the corner. Also, make a summer playlist. Go on Spotify, make a playlist of what you wanna listen to, and have a fun summer playlist. There's some sounds of summer that I really enjoy, and I love listening to my summer playlist. I want you to embrace fun of this challenge. Embrace it, and make it a daily practice. Make it a weekly practice. What am I gonna use from my bucket list? What am I gonna have that's gonna be fun? And start getting it on the list and doing it. I want you to write down 20 things. I think a big list is a good list. I want some 20 things that you're gonna do before the summer ends, and schedule one for this week. Heck, I have one scheduled for tonight. I'm going to go meet some girlfriends for dinner, and we're gonna talk about our books that we read. So schedule something. Get it on the list. It doesn't have to be expensive. It could be something fun and easy. Put it on the list. Schedule it in. I encourage you to do this for your mental health, for your mental wellness, and I really would love for you to tell me what it is you're doing. Leave me a note in the show notes or in the comments about what you do or contact me on social media and let me know what you've done. I really would love to hear. This is Kim McLaughlin from Feed Your Soul with Kim podcast. I look forward to hearing about your summer bucket list, and I look forward to talking with you soon. Bye.