13 Reasons Why Your Monday Mornings Suck and Mine Don’t.
A deluge of blog posts has appeared all over the internet by lifestyle bloggers who are extolling the virtues of their morning routines and how they get ready for the day. A lot of these posts are harping on about the cutesy ways they make sure they’re prim and perky for their return to the office on Monday morning.
I’ve read a few of them and felt that quite frankly, they’re largely vacuous, light hearted efforts at inspiring others by vainly (I’ll let you decide which meaning of that word to use) attempting to show how inspiring their choice of herbal tea and facial scrub is.
All of these posts are missing some fundamental facts, which is that Monday mornings suck for the majority of the population for some very good and highly prolific reasons. I’m hoping to lay it all bare in this post with a bit of honesty, to speak the unspoken truth about how to have the perfect Monday morning and not feel like one of the many levels of hell.
As someone who suffered for many years under the bitter depression that it’s possible to experience on a Monday morning, I know exactly what it means to hate Mondays. But today, after some radical changes in my life I can sit here and both genuinely and smugly tell you how to have the perfect Monday morning, and what the secrets to this halcyon experience are.
1. Don’t take drugs.
This might seem obvious, but if you consume a bucket load of MDMA at the weekend or spent the whole weekend blazin’ huge reefers then no amount of bright and fresh, floral print fabrics will raise your game come 7am Monday. You’re screwed, stop moaning, just face it and get on with your life until you decide to stop taking drugs.
2. Don’t drink alcohol.
“But that’s what weekends are for” I hear you cry. Well, tough luck buddy, because drinking alocohol goes hand in hand with feelings of negativity and depression afterwards. Surely you knew that though? No-one could be so naive as to think it didn’t. Could they? Could they?
3. Get up at the same time on the weekend as during the week.
“Errr… Huh?”
Yep, I’m deadly serious. Screwed up sleep patterns are a very good reason to feel crap. If you get up at 10am on the weekend, then by the time you get to 7am Monday, you’ve effectively just given yourself jet lag. What does jet lag do? It makes you feel crappy. My maximum permitted fluctuation is 30 minutes +/- my normal get up time. I know it sounds anal, but it’s tried and tested and it works. I’m sure you’re wondering what happens if I go to bed late? I don’t worry, because I know I’ll get over it, as long as it’s not every single day.
4. Get up earlier.
I get up earlier than I ever have done in my life and I feel great for it. My alarm goes off at 5.40am each day and Ileap out of bed with sheer, unalloyed joy at the world. Not really, that would be a lie, but waking up doesn’t bother me these days, I just get up and start moving, at some point over the coming minutes conscious thought starts to appear as well. I’m always at my desk working by 7.30am at the latest, however I’ve not caught any worms yet.
5. Get a wake up light clock thingy.
I bought one of those wake up light alarm clocks because I have awful hearing and often slept through my alarm, and I can report that it’s brilliant. The reason is because you wake up with your eyes already adjusted to a bright, light room and therefore you have one less barrier to rising and enjoying the morning, I highly reccomend it.
6. Mondays are the most productive day of the week.
When you get over the first bunch of hurdles to face a new dawn of Mondays, you will discover that Monday can be the best day of the week. I often do some of my best work on a Monday, because my brain is fresh, I’ve just had a restful weekend, and my work flows beautifully. By Friday afternoon, I’m running out of ideas and mental energy and hence desperate for some down time.
7. Get a dog.
Every Monday morning I go for a half hour run immediately after getting up with my miniature poodle, Bernard. Watching his fluffy ears bounce around as he leaps around the park is enough to put a smile on anyone’s face. On days I don’t run, I walk him around the park, which is also pretty cool.
8. Eat a healthy breakfast.
My breakfasts are fruit and oats in some combination. Either bananas and cinnamon porridge or Bananas and muesli along with a grapefruit juice. Oats are great at sustaining you and bananas are just great.
9. Get a job you like
If you don’t like your job then Monday’s are going to suck unless you work really hard at it. Either get a better job, or learn to enjoy the job you have. I recently read about someone who had an awful job but loved doing it every day, because they strove to always be the absolute best at what they did, regardless of how tedious or uninspiring the work was.
10. Say no to people
If you run around making yourself busier at the weekend than you are during the week then expect to feel awful on Monday. Block out one day of your weekend for yourself. Mine’s Saturday. I only do things that are good for me on a Saturday (note the use of the word ‘me’, so not ‘good for other people’, not ‘good for my friends’, not ‘good for my family’, but good for ‘me’.). That often means I have to plan in advance to make sure I don’t need to do any shopping or errands on a Saturday. I might need to run around like a lunatic on a Friday getting ready, but it’s sooo worth it when I can just sit down with a book, a pizza, a film or just go for an epic dog walk.
11. Good coffee
A good coffee is like a drug. Oh, wait, it is a drug. Ooops. But like so many things in life, I try to buy the nicest that I can, as I genuinely enjoy it. As they say on the Pantene shampoo adverts “Because I’m worth it”.
12. Do some morning pages.
“My morning whats?”
Morning pages. Three sides of A4 handwritten with any words that you can fill them with, as made popular by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. The point is to fill the pages, not to create a diary, story or work of great historic merit, so don’t worry about how legible or well crafted it is. Just get words onto the page. Every. Single. Day. It clears out your mind, it also pulls things out of you that you probably weren’t quite expecting, so expect to be surprised.
13. Meditiate.
Uh, c’mon. Seriously? Yep. On top of everything else I also meditate each morning. Just 11 minutes, no more, no less. Also, if I want a good night’s sleep, I do the same just before bed.
It’s That Easy.
I’m joking, of course. It took me several years to realise and implement all of the above and even then, it took me some time to realise that I actually enjoy mornings, a lot. More than evenings and more than afternoons.
Now if you’d told me all of the 13 above points ten years ago when I didn’t believe in breakfast and could make it from my bed to the car via the shower in under 10 minutes, I would have laughed in your face for being a new age hippy and promptly opened another can of Stella or called my dealer. However, I also utterly hated Monday mornings with every single fibre of my soul, I hated the effort of them, I hated the work, I hated myself. So it’s only through the concept of beginning to love myself a bit more that I’ve been able to make the changes in my life that allow me to actually enjoy Monday mornings.
All of this stuff also has one very peculiar by-product. It stopped me from desperately longing for the weekend. I no longer feel a sense of desperate freedom come Friday, because I’m pretty damn happy and free all week long. It’s a bit like life and death, with your working week being the equivalent of death so the weekend embodies your only attempt at having a life. All the time you’re denying that death exists, trying to desperately get past it as quickly as possible, you’ll always be living in some form of denial. So embrace the week like you do the weekend, embrace death as you do life and you’ll find that, you can actually be happy in your world, regardless of whether it’s Monday morning or Friday night.
My name is Gavin, I’m a professional food photographer, writer, food blogger and a MSc student. I like to write about things that annoy me on the internet.
