"Monday is bad for everyone"

Monday has a reputation, and some of it is earned. It's the day the emails have piled up, the day the week's problems are all still ahead, and the day after two days off in which you remembered what you're like when you're not working. Nobody would claim that fixing the lie-in makes Monday a delight.

But separate two things. There's the Monday you'd have anyway, which is a workday after a rest, and there's the Monday you have, which is a workday after a rest with a body clock forty minutes out and a short night behind you. The first is a mood. The second is a physical state, and it looks like the first from the inside, which is how it hides. Thick head, slow thinking, a faint nausea, the third coffee by ten, irritability with people who've done nothing. That's not the emails. Those symptoms are what a shifted clock feels like, and you can check the claim by thinking about how Wednesday feels, which is a workday with the same emails and no drift.

Here's a test you can run this week without changing anything. Rate how you feel at nine on Monday, out of ten, and again at nine on Wednesday. Then do it the week after. If Wednesday beats Monday by more than a point or two, week after week, the difference isn't the work, because the work is the same. It's the schedule you kept on Saturday and Sunday.

There's a second thing hidden in the reputation. Because everyone has a bad Monday, the badness reads as normal and shared, and there's a kind of comfort in that, the office joke, the mug. It's the same comfort that lets any common habit go unexamined. Lots of people have it, so it must be the weather. In fact lots of people have it because lots of people sleep late at the weekend, and the ones who don't, the ones with dogs and small children and early trains, don't tend to get the joke.

I'll say the interpretation plainly, since it's mine. The Monday is partly made on Saturday morning. Not all of it. But the part that's a physical state rather than a mood, and that's the part that makes the mood worse.