Why does Monday get so much hate?
Unlike you commoners, I enjoy a nice job that I can do from home which allows me to not have to worry about Mondays anymore. But that’s mostly because you end up working every day when you can see your techy-work-station in some form from every piece of furniture in your house… and you like what you do.
However, I stand by the mentality I’ve always had since long before work was even a thing for me. It started back when I was going to school and carried on over into my attempts at dat nine to five life. And that’s the fact that Sunday night is so much worse than Monday morning. At least on Monday morning, there’s coffee mixed with the adrenalized momentum-fuel of worrying about traffic and what kind of douche-nozzlery you’ll encounter when you get into work. That fight or flight excitement is always way better than that period at the eve of the week, when Sunday’s sun sets and you’re dreading the actual thing that’s not half as bad in reality as the pre alarm-clock dreading of it. It’s kinda like when I used to hate working out – the part that always felt the most like muscle punishment somehow wasn’t the muscle pumping of my legs on a machine. It was using them to lift my ass off the couch and put on some gym gear. Everything after that was easy as the pie I would’ve eaten had I stayed at home instead.
But why’s that so hard? Whether it’s kickboxing or kicking off the week, why do we hate it?
In a word? Habituation.
We hate Mondays the same reason mice get anxious following a two-day reprieve after acclimating to a stressful environment (that sounds like a cruel experiment, no? Mmmkay. Moving on.) A recent study looking at this fact demonstrated that maybe people like me who work every day might have it right – and that relaxing can backfire after 48 hours when you come back to reality. Sure, there are workarounds if you’re the type who can work from home (i.e. “do at least a bit each day with yoga in between to de-stress”). But if the water cooler crew and their The View sounding gossip is the dreaded energy vampire lurking in the shadows of your Monday morning alarm clock, that takes a bit more internal work to tune out. If you’re not the type willing to change your outlook on externals enough to emotionally divorce the drama, then you stay in that abusive relationship with it voluntarily. Mostly because it’s at the base of your neural staircase, shrieking for eight hours, five days a week.
But if you can take the weekend not to just escape – but to do a bit o’ inner reflection, you realize how hilarious your coworkers are – acting like teenage girls – then Monday’ll seem a lot more like an entertaining sitcom going on inside of your head. I’ve tried that before. It’s as magical as it is simple. Annoying people start to STFU when you don’t feed their annoyance fire and it also makes the day go by faster and more smoothly – like a nice trot on a well set treadmill.
Which brings me to my point:
End-week emotional tail chasing should be a bit more like my gym seshes.
Mayhaps less race-rat and more more treadmill-mouse with varying courses of our choosing.
