Thank god it's Friday! Right? What's so wrong with working hard all week and wanting to go out and let loose Friday night? Nothing really — except that when you look at the work week through this lens, you are more likely to set yourself up for unhappiness.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about why it's important to approach each day anew, instead of grinding through your work week to enjoy a couple days of fun.
As Dr. Markman points out, when you take it out Friday and Saturday night and recover on Sunday, your body suffers from symptoms similar to those you would have if you were jet-lagged. This is really hard on us because we didn't evolve to flip back and forth like this. The weekend is a relatively new phenomenon.
Most things about our calendar are connected to the natural world, but the week is a little different. We can also manipulate our environment to sleep during the day and stay awake at night. All these aspects contribute to how we experience our days.
So does our attitude. If we approach our Mondays with dread, they, most likely, will be pretty terrible. Our experiences are colored a lot by our expectations.
In next week's episode we'll continue this thought, with ideas on how, by changing the way we look at our work and our weeks, we can live a happier and more fulfilled life.
