Summertime and the livin’ is easy? Not so for many American workers.
That’s according to a new study by Headway, a self-improvement and learning app.
Headway surveyed 2,000 full-time professionals across the U.S. to understand how the summer season affects work patterns, mental health, and workplace culture.
Its findings paint a stark picture of overworked employees struggling to justify even the briefest breaks in a system that continues to prioritise performance over people.
The data also suggests that “summer slowdown” is more of a myth than a reality, with burnout spiking, productivity plummeting and guilt becoming a central feature of the modern workplace.
While some companies offer summer Fridays whereby employees are entitled to take afternoons off during the summer months, only a third of those surveyed said they experience any kind of slowdown during the summer months.
In fact, 10 percent said their workload increased during the period, despite schools being closed, meaning more pressure is put on working parents.
Rising temperatures which cause fatigue and make simple commutes intolerable are also a factor, with nearly 130 million people being under extreme heat warnings as of July 2025.
More than half of respondents to the survey said that the heat and disrupted routines negatively impacted their work habits. One in ten reported full-blown burnout, and a third described themselves as persistently exhausted.
But what does this mean in real terms? For those who are working full time during the summer months, less than half (43 percent) said they were productive for more than 30 hours a week, while 10 percent admitted they were managing less than 10 hours of productive work.
Almost half of those surveyed said they often abandon work, mid-task, to look up cheap getaways or weekend breaks.
Additionally, two in three workers say they feel left out while others are busy enjoying summer. One in three have posted pictures of beaches, drinks or “living my best life” photos to social media while at work, and 22 percent said they experience jealousy when they email someone and an OOO pings back into their inbox.
Doom scrolling, but make it vacation-related.
And yet, it’s safe to say that corporate America is making its feelings around workplace flexibility known and instead of adapting the structure of work to accommodate more flexibility around workplace location or even working hours, remote work has become the new employer versus employee battleground.
In many companies, RTO (return to office) mandates are increasingly becoming the norm and leaders are taking a hard and unrelenting stance on getting everyone back into the office five days per week.
Major companies including Amazon, JP Morgan and TikTok have significantly rowed back on their remote working policies, listing productivity concerns as their main motivation and making working from home a distant pandemic-related memory in the process.
However, allowing remote work for all or part of the week isn’t necessarily the solution either.
One in three survey respondents said they’d trade their bonus for two additional weeks off in the summer, highlighting that PTO (paid time off) is a benefit many American workers would pay money for—literally.
Another third admitted that summer made them think more seriously about quitting their jobs altogether, indicating that work-life balance is coming more sharply into focus in place of professional clout.
Two-thirds shared that companies should offer summer leave simply because the weather is nice, no mental-health framing required and one in three admitting to faking a sick day just so they could enjoy the sun.
Ultimately, it’s clear that it’s not just the sun that is making Americans feel tired. It’s the system.
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