Were you a bit sluggish getting out of bed yesterday morning — you know, on account of it being the beginning of the week and all? Did you chalk it up to a case of the Mondays? Newly published research suggests you should re-evaluate your terminology.
If you want to be more precise, findings published by a team of psychologists at Stony Brook University suggest a better turn of phrase might be “a case of the weekdays”:
“There are many beliefs about the patterning of positive and negative mood over the course of the week,” writes Arthur Stone, first author of the paper recounting his team’s results in the latest issue of the excellently named Journal of Positive Psychology. He continues:
Support has been found for ‘Blue Monday’, ‘Thank God it’s Friday’ and Weekdays versus Weekend effects, although in relatively small studies and often with student samples. Using telephone questionnaire data from a large national survey (N = 340,000), we examined day-of-week (DOW) effects on positive and negative moods.
In the end, the researchers found that people tended to report feeling more happy and less stressed on weekends, but that moods were no worse on Mondays than any other weekday, with the exception of Friday — according to the BBC, people tended to cheer up on Fridays (presumably in anticipation of the weekend), “lending support for the concept of ‘that Friday feeling’.”
So what’s the upshot of all this? “Despite our global beliefs about lousy Mondays,” says Stone, “we conclude that this belief should be abandoned.”
