Weather anxiety is a real thing, and you're not soft for feeling it

You ever wake up at three in the morning and pull out your phone to check the radar? We have.

There's a particular kind of stress that comes with tying your week to the weather. Regular-job stress is bad enough, but at least the thing you're worried about doesn't change on you between dinner and breakfast. Farm stress does. You go to bed with a plan, wake up with a different forecast, and now the hay's wet or the peach blossoms are fine or the chickens are stuck in a draft you didn't notice last night.

People who don't farm — even people who love you — don't always get it. "You knew what you signed up for" is a thing they'll say, usually kindly, and they're not wrong exactly. But knowing what you signed up for doesn't make the three-a.m. radar check feel any better.

So here's the truth, plain: weather anxiety is a real thing. It has a name in the medical literature, even. People who run their lives off conditions outside their control — farmers, fishermen, pilots, construction crews — carry a weight that other work doesn't put on you. It's not soft to feel it. It's the cost of doing the work.

A few things that help, in our experience:

1. Name it when it's happening. Not to make a big deal of it, just to know what's going on. "I'm weather-anxious right now" is a different thing than "I'm a bad farmer" — and the first one's closer to true.
2. Know the line between what you can change and what you can't. Covering the tomatoes is in your control. Whether the forecast was right isn't. The days you feel worst are usually days you blurred the line.
3. Build in one weather-independent thing you do every day. Coffee on the porch before you check anything. Ten minutes with the dog. A phone call to a person, not a radar. Farms are weather-driven; your whole self doesn't have to be.
4. When it's actually bad, talk to somebody. Not your spouse, not the neighbor at the feed store — someone who does this for a living. Farm Aid's hotline is free, confidential, and answered by people who know what this work is like. 1-800-FARM-AID. Twenty-four hours a day. Put it in your phone now — you won't regret having it if the day comes.

You didn't choose this work because it was easy. But you didn't sign up to suffer either. The farmers who last the longest are the ones who let themselves be tired, let themselves be wrong sometimes, and still get up in the morning.

Take it easy.