Have You Started Pretending to Enjoy Spring Yet?

Late May has arrived and everyone you know has switched into spring mode.

The lighter colours are out. The friends who were hibernating are texting again. The first warm-enough afternoons are showing up, and people are starting to say things like "I just feel so much better in the sun" and "this is finally my time of year," and they mean it, and that’s the part that’s hard.

You don’t feel better. You’re not in spring mode. The same heaviness that you’ve been carrying since February is still inside you, and the only thing that has changed is the social expectation around it.

So you’ve started doing the small things. The light comment about the weather. The "feeling great, you?" answer. The slight upward adjustment in your facial expression when someone mentions how good this stretch of days has been.

You’ve started pretending to enjoy spring. And the performance, it turns out, is its own kind of load.

What the Performance Costs

The performance is not nothing. It’s daily, low-grade emotional labour, run in front of people who would mostly understand if you didn’t.

Each interaction costs a small thing. You read the room. You match the energy. You decide whether this is a person you can be honest with (mostly no, because honesty in May about being heavy comes out wrong, somehow, and you don’t want to be the one bringing down the patio).

You do this dozens of times a week. Spring’s social load is, in its own way, higher than winter’s, because winter at least gives you permission to be a bit subdued. Spring doesn’t. Spring is when the cultural script says you should be lifted, and if you’re not lifted, you’re off-script.

The off-script person ends up doing the work of performance. The performance costs energy you don’t have. The missing energy makes the original heaviness worse.

It’s a quiet, recursive loop. And it’s worth naming, because once you can see it, you can stop running it.

Why "Just Be Honest With People" Doesn’t Reach It

The conventional advice for this is to be more honest with the people in your life. Tell them you’re struggling. Ask for support. Stop performing.

That works sometimes. It also has limits.

The honest conversation goes well with a few people. It’s genuinely useful. But you don’t have it every time someone mentions the weather, and you can’t. So you keep going through the small performance in dozens of low-stakes interactions, and the cumulative cost keeps accruing.

The conscious mind — the part deciding to be more honest, picking the conversations — accounts for about 5% of your total mental activity. The other 95% is the subconscious, and it’s the part actually running the performance in real time.

For people who find themselves pretending to enjoy spring, that 95% is usually running something like: Don’t be the off-season person. Match the room. Don’t burden the patio. Honour the script. Spring is when you’re supposed to be light. If you’re not, hide that until you are.

That isn’t a thought you walk around with. It runs quietly, like background processing. And every conscious resolution to be more honest gets overridden, in the moment, by the automatic match-the-room response.

The conversation with the close friend is honest. The next 47 interactions of the week are performance. The original heaviness, plus the performance load, equals the weight you arrive home with at the end of the day.

What Reaches the Pretending Itself

Clients often come to Inner Influencing after they’ve been performing through enough seasons of life to know that the performance costs more than the heaviness itself. They know, intellectually, that they could stop. They can’t actually stop. The match-the-room response is faster than the conscious choice every time.

What Inner Influencing reaches is the performance itself. It operates on completely different logic from willpower and honest conversations — which is why it’s now the foundation of the work I do with clients.

Inner Influencing is an established methodology for communicating directly with the subconscious mind. A direct instruction, structured in a specific way the subconscious can receive without resistance. The pattern doesn’t have to be analyzed or understood to be updated. It just needs the right signal.

That signal comes through a carefully worded statement using a trigger phrase - "Purple Cow" - that’s deliberately unusual. The oddness is functional: it cuts through habitual mental processing and tells the subconscious that what’s coming is a direct instruction, not another thought to file away. One statement. Said once. No repetition required.

Try It for Yourself

Read each statement below slowly - out loud if you can. Say it once, then stop. Let a moment of quiet follow before moving to the next.

Notice whatever comes, even something small. A small relief at being seen accurately. A breath that lands. A sense, even faint, that the room you’re sitting in just got safer to be in honestly.

What Just Happened

Whatever you noticed, even something faint, even just a small permission to not have to be lifted right now — that was your subconscious receiving an instruction at the layer where the performance is held.

It doesn’t usually arrive with drama. Sometimes it’s quiet. A breath. A sense that the next patio you sit at, you might not have to perform.

What you just experienced is just the beginning of how Inner Influencing works. The deeper practice reaches the older layers - the early instructions about matching the room, the inherited beliefs about being a burden, the patterns that have been training you to manage other people’s expectations of your weather.

The free Inner Influencing Discovery Kit takes you further into the practice, explains the science behind why it works, and opens the door to that deeper clearing.

The pretending isn’t free. Naming it is the first place to stop paying for it.

The next patio you sit at doesn’t have to be a performance.