I’m sorry to bring this up on a Saturday, but the data confirms what we’ve all suspected since there was anything resembling a calendar: that Mondays are hateful. On that fateful day, anxiety skyrockets, stress becomes more acute, and the likelihood of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events increases by almost 20%. Let’s not even talk about suicides. Thank goodness this year Christmas falls on a Thursday.
All this naturally explains why there is nothing more worrying than a Sunday afternoon. I remember it with dread since I was a child, when I would return with my parents from the Casa de Campo – a large green space in Madrid – and my father would put football on the car radio, because in those days we not only drove to the Casa de Campo, but we took the car to the deepest holm oak forests and the tallest pine forests, for fear that we, the subjects of the dictatorship, would breathe so much of oxygen that we feel dizzy. Leaving the Casa de Campo, there was always a traffic jam of Seat 600s and Renault Dauphines and the basca was playing football on the dashboard radio. This sound meant that the next day was Monday and generated in my childish soul, or whatever it was, a lasting aversion to the beautiful game which has not left me sixty years later.
Certainly, this Sunday afternoon despondency persisted even in periods of my life when I didn’t have to work on Monday, as if there was something inherently evil about Sunday afternoons, a dark premonition that something is about to go wrong, even if nothing is. I am now learning that Monday anxiety episodes create a persistent activation of the body’s stress system that lasts for months, and that this occurs even in retirees. So, if you hate Mondays, prepare to live the rest of your life with that bad feeling between your eyebrows, or wherever the bad feeling is geolocated on your body’s tired map.
Tarani Chandola, professor of medical sociology at the University of Hong Kong, investigated this surprising persistence of the effect on Monday. When we experience something stressful, the brain triggers the secretion of cortisol, a hormone that sharpens concentration and mobilizes muscular energy. If a flowerpot is about to fall on your head, this cortisol boost is a big help in avoiding the blow, but if the hormone remains chronically elevated, things start to get complicated with anxiety, depression, cardiovascular damage, diabetes, being overweight and immune system imbalances. A chrome one.
According to their results, middle-aged people who report feeling anxious on a Monday have 23% more cortisol than others – the hormone can be measured in a hair sample – and this lasts for two months after the hateful Monday in question. Interestingly, this doesn’t happen to those who feel anxious on a Tuesday or any other day. It’s Monday anxiety that causes cortisol to rise sustainably. And even more curiously, the persistent increase in cortisol continues to occur among Monday-hating retirees, who are a special breed of retirees.
So much for the data. Regarding possible causes, Chandola speculates that Mondays involve a greater degree of uncertainty than other days. After a weekend of trying to get away from the drudgery of work, you see that Monday is coming and your life will continue to be the same as before. Chandola is expected to measure the cortisol of those listening to football on the radio on Sunday afternoon. Merry Christmas.
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