Monday Morning Blahs

Have trouble getting started this week? Here's a couple of tricks that might help. The first is a simple solution that I didn’t discover until I was recovering from carotid artery surgery. I found it, of all places, in an old Harvard Business Review. “Get on a regular sleep schedule.” What a crazy idea. As far as I was concerned, staying up late and sleeping late was what made weekends special.

I paid the piper on Mondays. For years, I fought my way through it until I learned that a dragging ass was not the worst consequence of my weekend sleep routine. My carotid artery surgery – a 95% blockage had been fortuitously discovered, an incidental finding – may have saved my life. Without surgery, I would have stroked within six months. Leafing through an old HBR, after my surgery, I heard the trumpets. Irregular sleeping is bad for your heart. I made the change, wake-up at 6:15, lights out at 10:30. No more Monday morning blahs. And four years into retirement, I’m still on my post-surgery sleep routine. The only difference now is that I don’t set the alarm anymore. It’s my inner clock that’s ringing.

Could I have made this change when I was younger, when I was dating? Who would have gone out with me on Saturday night? I have another trick which I think could work at any age. I call in my monastic morning routine. The seed was planted years ago by a friend who suffered from severe, recurring depression. When the blahs strike – if you’re at all like me, you sometimes wake to worries, and not always on Mondays – you don’t want to face the day. Lying in bed worrying seldom gets me anywhere other than deeper anxiety.

The trick, I learned, was to get vertical.

That’s the starting point of my monastic morning, a trick I learned on my first sesshin, the weeklong Zen retreat which mimics monastic life. In sesshin, your day is structured. You have very few decisions to make. You get up when a bell rings. You get on your meditation cushion when another bell rings. Another bell signals walking meditation, another meals, another lights out. There may be some free time, but that too is structured by the rules which tell you what you can’t do. The surprise was that freed from all this decision making creates an enormous spaciousness.

My morning monastic routine takes the decision making out of getting started. Mine goes like this: Up; into the bathroom, washing with cold water; dressing; morning meds – if you’re young enough, you may be skipping this step; tidy, make the bed; on my meditate cushion.  Every morning. Of course, there are exceptions. If we have a 6 AM flight to Europe, I’ll skip the meditation. I’ll have plenty of time of meditate in the air.

Everyone’s morning ritual is different, and it will change. I’ve changed mine several times over the years. You can too. It’s your ritual. Just don’t change it every day. If you change it too often, it loses its power. Try it. It works, and it helps not only with Monday morning blahs, but with the Tuesday blahs and the Saturday blahs as well.