Learning to Love Mondays
Mondays sucked for me, but not because of what you’d think…
BUT because I didn’t keep ANY body and food promises on the weekend. Promises? What promises?
Exactly.
In fact, I behaved as though Friday at 6pm until Sunday evening was my free time. Literally. And that meant being free from any of my promises. Free from my exercise promises. Free from my food promises. Free from my sleep promises.
Clearly, my board of advisors (my head!), with my inner-brat at its helm, thought “no promises = freedom,” but the truth is that those promises actually gave me the structure I needed to feel good in my body and about my body. My promises didn’t leave me feeling trapped, they left me feeling happy, proud, and inspired in my life.
Oh, that.
So, after seeing my mistake (with a little help from my coach) I decided to shut up my brat and I put in some good “kosher-style” weekend promises for myself.
Namely, I only allow one sugar treat, I exercise an hour a day on Saturday and Sunday, and I get seven hours of sleep a night, minimum. And I gave myself a consequence of 20 burpees for each promise that I broke.
Side note – If you don’t know, burpees are a supremely annoying exercise that involves squating and thrusting and jumping all in a sequence of horrific movements – which was exactly the right consequence in case I forgot the bigger consequence of how awful I felt on Monday mornings when I didn’t keep my promises.
And that was the magic formula for figuring out how to beat the Monday blues. My secret sauce to overcoming a perpetual “case of the Mondays.”
Once I started to take care of myself and keep my promises on the weekends, everything shifted. Lo and behold, I stopped hating Mondays! And the Sunday Scaries went away, too. Instead, I felt good about and proud of what I was doing to take care of myself. I was building a better relationship with my body!
AHHHH such a better use of my time and energy than hating on Mondays! They’re innocent.
Turns out, there was no such thing as the Monday blues, it was the Saturday and Sunday blew(off)s all along.