The Reason Why You Hate Mondays Doesn’t Mean It’s That Day of the Week That Sucks
It’s probably your life.
In many countries on the planet, people will work between 22 and 65, which means they will work 2,236 weeks of their life. Do you really want to spend 2,236 Mondays complaining about how shitty that day is?
I think about it when I walk through the city of Berlin on Monday mornings too. When you start observing, it’s quite amazing to see how gloomy the mood is. It feels like everyone out there had made a silent agreement with each other: The main thing is not to smile, and if you’re grumpy, you’ve won the bad mood price.
I love Mondays. To me, Mondays are synonym with a new week, a new beginning, new goals. It’s the probability that anything extraordinary can happen, a unique opportunity, new encounters, or achievements. It’s a chance to start again in case we missed something the week before.
It was not always like this. I use to hate Mondays too, until 2013 while I was working at a big fitness company. Every day, mostly Mondays, some colleagues (*think 99% of them) came to work spitting their stream of negativity all over the place. They would try to grasp any kind of attention and complain about how shitty each Monday can be. Pretty exhausting, highly annoying.
Now, I can totally go nuts and complain all the time, but I decided enough was enough one day. Why chose to be filled with negativity when you can be all positive, rainbows and unicorns? I made a shift. And you can do it too! Because as Ricky Gervais says about Monday, it might not be a day of the week the problem, but you.
Mondays are fine. It’s your life that sucks.
The positive thing about this amazing discovery? You are in power to change that! Follow the 4 steps I used to feel better about any day of the week. But especially Mondays.
Take an honest look at your life
Mondays do not suck. But maybe your current situation does. What motivates you to go out of bed on Monday morning and every other morning of a working week? If it’s the ability to caption your Friday’s Instagram post with “TGIF,” maybe it’s time to reassess where you’re at in life.
Identify your pain points. When I know a job is not good for me, my main symptoms are that I have to drag myself out of bed, I’m always in a bad mood, and worst case, I start having tinnitus. I used to ignore the signs, which cost me 2 burnouts in my career. It’s the same when my relationships are broken or when I don’t find enough time for myself. Believe me, they are signs I don’t want to miss anymore.
Don’t wait for a burnout to hit your pretty face.
Your feel-good To-Do
- Define the areas in life that are important for you. The essential things for me are family, health, career, personal finance, self-love, me-time, intellect (the ability to learn something new), and social contacts. Don’t pick an area because it sounds good. Pick one because it’s important to you.
- Assess the areas from 1 (dissatisfied) to 11 (very satisfied). How do you feel about all these important things in life? What is draining you down, and what pumps you up? Be honest here; there is no bad answer.
- Now take a look at the areas that bring you down. In theory, what can you change to make you feel better? What can you not? What are the things that are worth putting energy into, and what should you just forget about?
The power of visualization — what does your ideal life look like?
One reason why something in our life doesn’t feel right is simple: it is not aligned with how we envision our life.
A method I regularly use to counter that is the visualization technique. Visualization is a method used in sport and business that consists of picturing in as many details as possible what you want to achieve. It goes beyond just seeing it. You have to feel it. Many peak performers or elite athletes have praised the benefits of these techniques. And no, it’s no mumbo jumbo.
It works!
One station in my career really hit me hard. I left a job that drained me for multiple reasons. One being harassment. After a year of this nightmare, I had no energy to find another job right away. I was burned out. And when I started applying again, I couldn’t find anything. I felt like a total failure.
At some point, I wondered why I was not getting any job. I have a good education, had some good experiences on paper, and brought some value to the table — so I thought in my good days.
I stopped applying for anything. Before sending back a single CV, I had to first define what I really wanted. How did my perfect day at the office look like? What were my colleagues like, what was a typical day? How did it feel to be there? How much would I earn? And so on.
I basically started visualizing my ideal job. And guess what? I finally found it.
Not because I dreamed about it. When you visualize something every day as a ritual, your brain starts moving in the direction you want to go, and so do you. It’s like everything falls into place.
I realized I wanted to go back into consulting. Suddenly, I was training case studies, shaping my application documentation for this specific type of job. I was just focusing my energy on the things that would take me closer to what I visualized.
In an ideal world, every aspect of our lives is aligned with our life vision. But when it’s not, then it’s time to take a quiet moment to think about what you want.
Your feel-good To-Do
Take half an hour or an hour without being bothered by anyone. Now try to think about your ideal life and the person you want to be every single day when you wake up and go to bed.
You can start by asking yourself some questions. Taking the broad area of your life, for example. How does your life feel like? Who are you as a person? What do you do for work? How do you spend time? Where do you live? Who are the people you like spending time with? How much money are you making? Etc.
Take the time to answer your question with many details, taking into account how everything makes you feel. Then go for a walk and come back to it later to see if it’s still fit.
Reset your intentions every morning
If you want to enhance your visualization game, apply the technique of Rachel Hollis. At some point in this video, she talks about how powerful resetting her intentions every morning has shaped the life she wanted.
Rachel practiced that every morning for years — and probably still does — resetting her intentions and telling her brain the way she wanted to go.
I had this habit for years where just as part of my to do list, every day I would write down the dreams that I had for my life and I would write them down as if they had already happened […] And so every day for years, and years and years, I did this practice and it is insane. If you go read my notebooks from five years ago: it’s the life I have today. It’s absolutely crazy insane. And that’s not like “oh I wrote it down so it happened” — it’s “I wrote it down every single morning and so every single morning I reset my intentions: “this is where we’re going, this is where we’re going.”
Rachel explains that she tricked her brain by setting intentions formulated in the present term rather than in the future.
Every day she wrote down her intentions as if they had already happened. What kind of person she wanted to be, what kind of life she wanted to have: everything was written in the present tense. Even when her life was nowhere near that.
Before you dismiss this technique under the assumptions, it is a woo-woo practice know it’s backed by science.
Being intentional about the person you want to be and reaffirming it on a regular basis will have a powerful impact on your brain.
It’s called Neuroplasticity. S. C. Cramer et al. say it’s our brain’s ability to be redesigned or reshaped as a response to stimulation from outside (or inside). Your intentions are a kind of stimulation that can, with time, reshape your brain.
Neuroplasticity can be broadly defined as the ability of the nervous system to respond to intrinsic and extrinsic stimuli by reorganizing its structure, function and connections; can be described at many levels, from molecular to cellular to systems to behaviour; and can occur during development, in response to the environment, in support of learning, in response to disease, or in relation to therapy.
Imagine your intentions as small luminous dust. Each of them can grow. Each time you repeat your intentions, these little luminous dust make a path in your brain that becomes deeper and stronger. After a while, the light will be so bright that your intentions will be your life and the person you always wanted to be.
After we got our son, my partner and I went through a hell of a first year. It was so bad I thought I would leave and do my life on my own with my little baby. At some point, I started meditating and set my intentions every day. Every morning I would write that I am a loving partner, or I am my boyfriend’s biggest cheerleader, and so on.
By writing these sentences in the morning, I wire my brain for the day and make the necessary things happen to be the partner I want to be because my brain saved it somewhere. And repeating this day after day rewires my brain long-term.
Your feel-good To-Do
I am a big fan of a good old (black) notebook and a pen. I think it’s best to put your intentions down to paper. I won’t recommend your phone or iPad for this exercise because you really need to be into it and not catch yourself scrolling down your feeds after 5 minutes. Notifications are a deal-breaker!
When you get out of bed every morning, have a glass of water (or a cup of coffee if you’re that kind of person) and take 5 to 20 minutes on your own to set and reset your intention:
- Write down your intention in the present term, in short, simple sentences.
- Who are you? Who is the person you want to be? How do you want to show up? What is your life?
- Repeat every day.
Make small changes with big impacts
Questioning yourself and practicing visualization is good, but it won’t help if you don’t take action. I don’t know who needs to read this, but: nothing’s gonna change if you don’t start doing it yourself. Some people will never take action because their fear of the unknown outgrows this need for change.
The pain of staying in something that sucks is more bearable than this fear of not knowing what’s next.
I believe that we always have the choice in life, even if that means going down a painful path for a while. Chose what you want to change first, and commit to it.
If you don’t feel well, what is the point of continuing like this if changing gives you the perspective of a better life? At least try. You can always go back to hating Mondays and your life, after all.
One other reason why people won’t change is that they see this as climbing Everest: Nearly impossible and reserved for a fortunate minority.
But change doesn’t always have to be something big. Small changes can have significant impacts too!
Imagine you’re someone whose life vision calls for more time for yourself and your family. Your job has a good salary, you love your colleagues, but you work way too many hours. One drastic change could be quitting and finding a real 9 to 5, taking the risk of losing other benefits such as your good income and the friendly atmosphere.
What if, for a small change, you’d ask your boss to skip one Friday every two weeks? You would have one more day in the week to spend time as you wish.
Your feel-good To-Do
Take the areas you wrote down in our first exercise, and list all the actions you could take (in theory) to change what’s wrong. Small or big actions, list everything. Repeat this exercise for each of the areas that need changes.
Sometimes when we write down the necessary steps for change, it seemed less impressive than just keeping them inside our heads. It gives it a touch of grasping reality.
Once you’re done writing, and if you don’t have any more ideas, look at your list and choose for each area a first change to make.
Choose the simplest one you can because once you’ve done it, you’ll have a small win to build momentum on.
Final thoughts
According to this website, I’m on week 1,629 of 4,732 of my life. I think it’s funny to see my life at a glance, but it also motivates me. Do I want to spend all the 2,236 Mondays of my career complaining? I don’t think so. And if you’re here, I think you don’t either.
Putting the blame on Mondays is a way to escape the reality that we alone are responsible for our happiness. And being in charge of our own happiness means, in other words, that we’re solely responsible if we are not happy.
Which is challenging to take in for some people.
But not for you! Today is the day where you stop hating your life & Mondays and start loving them.
Here are your steps to remember for a better life:
- Define the areas in life that are important for you
- Assess the areas from 1 (dissatisfied) to 11 (very satisfied)
- Identify which areas you can change to make you feel better and which ones you can not
- Visualize your life and the person you want to be every single day when you wake up and go to bed
- Write down your intentions aligned with your vision in the present term with short, simple sentences. Do that every morning in a notebook
- For each area identified, make a list of small, medium, and big actions you can take to change your situation for the better
- Start with a small action, celebrate the small wins, and keep the momentum going!
