September Has Its Own Season

Have you noticed that something changes in September before anything on the calendar does? The heat is still here and the leaves have not turned, and yet the light has shifted and the air has shifted with it.

September is my birthday month and my favorite month of the year. I have always loved this stretch and for a long time could not have told you what I was responding to, until I found that Traditional Chinese Medicine had already named it. There are five seasons in that system rather than four, and the fifth one is Late Summer.

The Chinese term is chángxià, long summer, and it runs from roughly the back half of August through the autumn equinox, which this year falls on Tuesday, September 22. It is a gentle turning point in the cycle of the year, where the vibrant outward energy of summer softens into a quieter, grounding pause. A transition season, in other words, and I am paying closer attention to it this year than I usually would, because I am in a transition of my own and a season built out of being between two things has more to say to me than it did a year ago.

Yang Gives Way to Yin

Late Summer is the moment when the outward, bright, active Yang energy of summer gives way to the grounding, restorative Yin of autumn, and each of the five seasons carries an element that describes its character. This one belongs to Earth, which governs the spleen and the stomach, the organs this tradition treats as the body’s center.

The five elements move in a generative cycle where each one produces the next. Wood feeds Fire, Fire burns down to ash and becomes Earth, Earth yields Metal, Metal collects Water, and Water grows Wood again. Earth follows Fire directly, which is why Late Summer follows Summer directly, and what burned brightest becomes the thing there is now to take in.

The direction assigned to it is the part I love most. Spring is east, summer is south, autumn is west and winter is north, and Earth alone is given no compass point at all. It is center, the still place the others turn around. Its work is transformation, neither the growing that summer already did nor the storing that winter will do, but the conversion of what has arrived into something the body can use. Digestion, in the widest sense, of food and of everything else.

Our four season calendar never had room for any of this, and the reason is structural. Each of our seasons is anchored to an astronomical event, a solstice or an equinox, a measurable day when the light demonstrably turns, and Late Summer has no such day. It can only be noticed and never scheduled, so the Western calendar let it go and left six weeks of the year with no name and no instructions attached to it.

Acting in tune with Late Summer can profoundly improve your digestion, immunity, mental clarity, energy and overall wellbeing. Aligning your food, your movement and your self care with the rhythm of the fifth season creates:

• A noticeable increase in daily energy and stamina
• Better digestion, less bloating, and feeling lighter
• Stronger immunity for the colder months ahead
• Improved mental clarity and emotional resilience
• A stable foundation for the life and health changes you want to make

What It Looks Like When You Are Out of Step

When the Earth element is supported, digestion is efficient, the mind is clear and the emotions hold steady. When it is depleted, the signature is heaviness, and it arrives in the body and the mind at the same time.

In the body: heaviness after eating, bloating with no obvious cause, puffiness in the hands and ankles on humid days, digestion that is unsettled in a way that does not track with what you ate, and a fog that is not quite fatigue.

In the mind: worry that circles without resolving, overthinking a decision you have already made, scattered focus with four things started and none finished, and a hard craving for something sweet in the late afternoon.

The emotion assigned to the Earth element is worry and its distortion is rumination, the same thought going around without ever breaking down into anything useful. A season whose subject is digestion assigns itself the mental state of being unable to digest something.

Food is the Medicine of This Season

Digestion is the assignment, so the guidance gets specific here. I am a Certified Nutrition Coach and I think the tradition has this right, and my own body has agreed every time I have tested it.

Favor warm and cooked over raw

Cooking performs half of your digestion before the food ever reaches you, which matters in the season already working hardest at it. Soups, stews, steamed vegetables, congee and slow cooked grains all lighten the load on the spleen and stomach.

Eat the sweet, grounding foods of the season

Sweet potatoes, winter squash, pumpkin, carrots, yams, corn, millet, and the last of the peaches and figs. The orange and yellow foods the season is producing are the ones the tradition points to, and warm porridge or congee with cinnamon in the morning is close to the perfect food for this window.

Sweet here means the natural sweetness of a roasted root vegetable and not sugar. The taste of the Earth element is sweet, and the theory holds that a body denied the gentle version goes hunting for the extreme one, which is the most persuasive explanation I have encountered for the four o’clock cookie.

Let the summer register recede

Raw salad at every meal, iced drinks, heavy dairy, rich and greasy food and cold fruit by the bowlful are all called damp producing, and they are held to burden the spleen and stomach directly. The predicted result is the heaviness described above, which is worth sitting with if your September default looks anything like mine used to.

Keep mealtimes regular and eat without a screen

Consistency anchors digestion and in this framework it anchors the mind along with it. Chewing thoroughly and eating unhurried are the two most reliably useful things on this page, and both are free.

Move to Ground Yourself, Not to Empty Yourself

Late Summer favors moderate and grounding movement, which means walking, yoga, tai chi, qigong, easy swimming and light to moderate strength work, ideally in the morning when digestive energy is considered strongest. Intense depleting sessions in this window are held to exhaust rather than energize, though that does not mean nothing hard for six weeks. It means hard is deliberate and occasional, with a steady baseline underneath it. I believe in training hard and wrote about why in Exercise is the Key to a Healthy Brain and Butt, and this season is asking about timing, not intensity.

The most on season thing you can do in September is a long unhurried walk after dinner, which happens to be one of the better documented interventions for post meal blood glucose.

The most specific practice of the fifth season involves nothing but your own hands. Warm palm, slow clockwise circles around the navel, several minutes of it with deep steady breathing, or acupressure at the middle jiao, the digestive center of the torso. It stimulates digestion, eases bloating and settles the nervous system at once. Marking the turn of the day does similar work, whether that is breath or gratitude or five minutes of stretching, and when the mind starts spinning the way it does in these weeks, the route back is through the body.

All of it feeds the parasympathetic state that produces deep sleep and not merely long sleep, and a strong Earth element in September is what carries immune function through the cold months. I wrote about that recovery window in Why Rest and Recovery is Essential.

The Science Agrees More Than You Would Expect

In 2015 a Cambridge team led by Xaquin Castro Dopico published a study in Nature Communications of 22,822 human genes across cohorts on four continents, and found that close to a quarter of the protein coding genome changes expression according to the time of year. The pattern ran inverted between Europe and Oceania, flipping when the researchers crossed the equator, and the Icelandic cohort did not follow it at all, most plausibly because summer there has almost no darkness in it. The driver is light and not temperature, which means a quarter of your genome is running a different program in September than it ran in June.

The moon does something comparable to sleep, which I covered in Exhausted Before a Full Moon, and environment is one of the eight things I count in Health Is More Than Diet and Exercise.

The gut and the mind have been paired the same way. The enteric nervous system lining the gut holds roughly five hundred million neurons and produces most of the body’s serotonin, and John Cryan and Timothy Dinan at APC Microbiome Ireland have spent two decades publishing in Nature Reviews Neuroscience and elsewhere on the two way signaling between gut and mood. A system working without microscopes built a season around that relationship two thousand years earlier.

The In Between is a Real Place

Nothing visible happens in Late Summer, and without it none of the growing amounts to anything. My own transition is the unglamorous kind, transitional work and transitional housing and a body running on an instrument that stopped being dependable a while ago, not young and not old, with no name for any of it.

Before the equinox, take a moment with this. What have the last six months meant for you? Where will you be in the next six? What is still sitting there unconverted, waiting for you to take it in, and what would change if you stopped treating this stretch as a delay? What would happen if you got comfortable being uncomfortable, and let the in between be worth something on its own?

Eat something warm this week. Walk after dinner.