TGIM: Blue Mondays

Welcome back to Thank God It’s Monday! I found out a new not-so-fun fact last week when I was talking about our beloved TGIM with one of the ICU doctors I work with. He told me about the phenomenon called “blue Mondays” which refers to the highest incidence of deadly heart attacks occurring on Mondays. Forget about Sunday scaries! Blue Mondays are here to steal your heart.

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tl;dr If you spend your entire life dreading Mondays, you’ll waste 14% of your life stressed over nothing more than an arbitrarily named chunk of time. If you can define your values and priorities regardless of what day of the week it is, you can decrease your stress and increase your happiness.

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Of course, after hearing about this tidbit of information I headed straight to Google. I read up on some of the research done to further investigate the phenomenon of blue Mondays and although the data in the meta-analysis wasn’t super robust, there is a small correlation between fatal heart attacks and the first oh so dreaded day of the week.

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Now I don’t mean to give all of you hypochondriacs the sudden sensation of crushing chest pain. But as you would expect, this correlation has a couple of factors at play.
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One hypothesis about why there is an increase in heart attacks is the increase in stress at the start of the work week for most people. The emails and projects that you were able to ignore all weekend come back with a sense of dreaded urgency when you head back to the office. The horrible bosses who you were able to forget about with blissful ignorance suddenly occupy a majority of your mental capacity. The sudden increase in stress can have physiological repercussions and be contributing to the rise in Monday heart attacks.

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Another component that may contribute to this terrible reputation is, as you may guess, the increase of alcohol consumption over the weekends. You may have experienced the feeling of your heart racing or palpitations after a night out and that’s because drinking increases the incidence of arrythmias (or an abnormal heartbeat). These arrhythmias can cause the heart to form a clot which can get thrown out and get lodged in a vessel supplying blood to the heart (downstream resulting in a heart attack). Another ingredient in the recipe for Monday disasters.

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The studies recognize that there are many confounding factors that may result in this correlation. But one factor that is within our control when it comes to these blue Mondays is how we approach our weekends.

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Most people working Monday through Friday have a vastly different schedule on their workdays than their weekends. There is a culture of living for the weekends that pervades all generations (even the boomers who gripe about Gen Z’s work ethic). People spend the entirety of their working years looking forward to Friday and half of their weekends dreading the coming week. So much dread built up and for what?
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I feel fortunate to have work that allows me to experience weekdays and weekends all with the same enthusiasm (or dread, somedays). Sometimes my work week is Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, sometimes it’s Monday night, Thursday night, and Sunday night. It prevents that stigma of Sunday scaries and allows me to take each workday simply a day at a time.

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If you do work Monday through Friday, there are some ways to help prevent that existential dread each week and deter those blue Mondays. Creating some time on Sundays to prepare yourself for the work week can help decrease some of that Monday anxiety. Making sure to get to bed early, not spend the entire day procrastinating on social media, and not checking your email first thing in the morning may all help. Adding some things to look forward to on Mondays may also help with the dread. Maybe you plan to go to a workout class you enjoy or make dinner with your partner on Mondays. Or maybe you have a newsletter on Mondays you look forward to reading that helps set a good tone for you for the week.

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Spending time over your weekends building a life you enjoy also helps make it an easier transition into the week. Instead of being on social media all weekend or spending zero time working on your goals, maybe you can incorporate one small time period to working on a goal of yours (working on your side hustle, learning something new, taking time to journal, or simply getting a workout it). Procrastinating your goals all weekend only adds to the stress.

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You don’t want to dread 14% of your life. That’s 14% more joy and happiness you could be adding to your life. And you certainly don’t want to become the study group for blue Mondays. So make a plan for this weekend that will work towards 1% less dread on Monday for you. Maybe that means prepping lunch for yourself or going to bed a little earlier on Saturday so you’re not exhausted on Sunday. Or maybe that’s taking care of that one item at the bottom of your to-do list that has been living there rent free. We are on a mission here to be able to truly appreciate Mondays because life is too short to be bullying an entire day of the week for nothing it has done wrong. Mondays are a fresh start no matter what last week brought. It’s a chance at new opportunities, to start working on your goals all over again, and to challenge yourself to embrace the whole week, not just the weekends.
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If you found some value in this, please share it with a friend you think would enjoy it! And let me know if you’d like to be added to get TGIM. Or visit https://walshwellness.weebly.com/ for older editions and if you’d like to subscribe.

This week, my podcast recommendation this week is from Paul Levitin’s Change Made Easy, “The Secret Millionaire’s Use to Be So Lucky.” I love this concept because it is a tremendous pet peeve when people attribute success and hard work to luck. Most people are successful from putting themselves in a situation repeatedly enough to get lucky. When you’re consistent and put in intentional practice, you become lucky.
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With that, really try to consider what you can do this coming weekend to make next Monday exciting, or at least a little less dreadful. Let me know what you find!
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Until next time,

Shannon