It’s Saturday night and I’ve decided that I’m going to set my alarm for 7 on Sunday morning to make it to my 8 a.m. hot yoga class, leaving me the rest of Sunday to be the most productive person of life. My fiancé© comes home around 1:30 a.m., waking me up, so I decide to reset my alarm for 8:30 to go to the 10 a.m. yoga class instead (even though it’s a whopping 90 minutes long), leaving me plenty of time to still come home, throw a load of laundry in, start prepping some meals for the week and then settle in to work for the rest of the day. What actually happened: I turned off my alarm when it went off at 8:30 and stayed in bed until almost 10:30 (even though I went to bed 11 hours prior) and did not even come close to making it to yoga”this has been my pattern for the last few months of Sunday mornings (unless I’ve legitimately had plans or somewhere I need to be, which I try to avoid on Sundays anyway). It seems that no matter what I do or how good my intentions are, I will still always snooze my way through the morning, which just sets me on a path of stressing to get everything done. This is the eternal #lazySunday struggle.
The problem is that my body has taken a cue from Instagram (and the popular #lazySunday hashtag) and seems to think that no matter what grownup responsibilities await me, Sunday is a day of rest and goddammit we’re going to rest. Even if I jam my Friday and Saturday with plans, setting myself up for a free day of work (#freelancelife) and grownup things (like laundry and weekly meal prep), I won’t come anywhere close to doing either of those things until at least noon. My mind and body seem to think that my day is supposed to be filled snuggling on the couch Netflixing with the occasional midday nap and nary a task in sight. WRONG.
A few weeks back I decided to buy into this whole #lazySunday business. I said to myself okay, body, you want to max and relax all day? You got it. Let’s veg. And do you know what happened? Somewhere into my third consecutive hour of Gilmore Girls I got bored and antsy because I knew I should be doing something more productive with my Sunday afternoon. Don’t get me wrong, I could Netflix all day when I have nothing else to do, but something about allowing myself to be lazy when I knew I shouldn’t be kicked my butt into gear and I ended up having a very productive afternoon/evening (which subsequently made me feel pooped by the time I went to bed because I rushed to finish everything). I know that sometimes your body is crying for a break and we as the keyboard-crunching workaholics our generation kind of has to be don’t do it enough (at least not until burnout), but I don’t like mind games, especially with my own mind. If my body and mind need rest and I give myself a day of that, then for crying out loud I’d better enjoy it.
So what do I do? Do I give myself a lazy morning in hopes that it’ll spark a hella productive afternoon or do I just continue to set my alarm for an unattainable hour and then stay in bed for almost three hours longer than I had intended?
I guess we’ll see next Sunday.
