An American health and nutrition coach has explained why Mondays are so tough. It’s because you’ve gotten “jet lag” from not sleeping properly on the weekend…
Let us paint you a familiar scenario: Friday arrives, so you go out and socialise with mates on both Friday and Saturday night. But when your alarm goes off on Monday morning, you feel like absolute sh*t; even though you slept in on Sunday to make up for your late-night partying.
First of all, you’re not alone. And second of all, there’s an explanation. According to American nutrition coach Max Lugavere. In a recent Instagram post, the author of The Genius Life claims we should be “consistent with our sleep,” and adds that the way we feel on a Monday morning can be likened to jet lag.
“If you go to bed every weeknight at 11pm but stay up until 3am every Friday and Saturday (not to mention late night eating), you’ve essentially crossed time zones for the weekend, causing you to feel literal jet lag every Monday. And you wonder why Monday’s are difficult!” he captioned his post.
“Emerging research points to a rhythmic flow for nearly every one of our biological functions. This includes metabolism, immunity, and cognitive abilities that are important for feeling sharp and energized!”
Max Lugavere
There’s certainly some weight to his argument, as we’ve previously discussed the importance of keeping a healthy circadian rhythm – or body clock, if you will – which refers to the natural biological process your body goes through on a 24-hour basis.
It has been claimed that one of the factors that has the biggest impact on your circadian rhythm is light, as when your eyes are exposed to it when you wake up, your body suppresses melatonin – the hormone responsible for our sleep-wake cycle – and releases it after the sun goes down. If, for example, you normally wake up at around 6 a.m., roughly around the time the sun rises, your body literally interprets this as the start of a new day. And so, when the sun goes down, melatonin is released, telling your body it’s time to start shutting down.
So if you stay out partying until the early hours of the morning at the weekends, you may be lucky enough to see the sunrise. But, this can essentially reset your body clock, since you pushed through the period of time when your body has expected to be sleeping. Put simply, it’s literally a lack of sleep that then causes you to hate Mondays, because your body is a little confused, and needs to get back into the (circadian) rhythm of things.
This lack of sleep can then have a significant impact on your ability to work, as a previous study conducted in Finland found night owls – someone who stays up late – are “twice as likely to underperform at work.” Although it’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily equate to being a bad thing, as many businesses can benefit from having multiple ‘types’ of people: some people who are productive in the morning, and some who are productive in the evening, meaning they can finish work in order to meet a deadline, for example.
Of course, another reason why we all agree that Mondays suck is because it tends to signal an end to a few days of fun, and we now have to get serious and knuckle down before we can do it all again. If only the whole world could adopt a similar approach to Iceland and introduce a four-day working week.
Wishful thinking.