The Mondays after a long weekend or a vacation are the worst. You get into the office, and it’s like walking into the set of Night of the Living Dead. Everyone is a freakin’ zombie: blank eyes, slack mouth, and shuffling (not the LMFAO kind). This week started with one such Monday – we had a public holiday on Thursday, so most people took time off on Friday to enjoy an awesome 4-day weekend. The Monday hangover was especially severe.
I was feeling a little out of it myself on my way to work (totally losing control here – 2 glasses of wine is enough to destroy me… and I’m only 27). My Kindle had mysteriously stopped working which only served to annoy the hell out of me. So out of boredom, I turned to YouTube and scrolled to SNL’s classic Can I Have Yo Numba? video. Okay it’s not like the funniest video in the world, but it made all the difference:
It made me smile.
Everything changed after that. I got off the bus feeling considerably lighter than when I got on. That brought on another smile because I thought about the awesome things coming up in life: a stable salary, an upcoming holiday, and great-tasting coffee in the morning for 65 cents. Grinning, I stepped into the coffee line and breezed a cheerful “good morning!” to a colleague. She looked at me like I was crazy and exclaimed that she’d never seen anyone so cheerful on a Monday morning.
Behavior –> Motivation
It sounds clichéd, but smiling really does work, even if it’s forced. In 2002, researchers led by Robert Soussignan performed an experiment where participants were asked to grip a pencil horizontally between their teeth, naturally activating the muscles used for smiling. The participants had no idea that the experiment was about happiness, but reported considerably more positive reactions to several videos they were shown.
Say you attempt a fake smile. Just try it. Right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Does your brain know that you’re faking it? Of course it does. But that action tricks your body into producing chemicals that make you feel happy anyway. It’s a textbook case of how your actions can trigger internal motivations – not the other way round.
By the way, this applies to saving and investing too. Most people wait for years to get the “motivation” to save and invest, and end up never starting because “willpower” never works. The truth is, all they had to do was get started – to save and invest as little as $50 a month. Once you get started, your body adapts itself to towards the action you’re performing, developing an “investor mindset” that triggers further investing behavior.
A System To Destroy Monday Blues
So – back to Mondays. I know, it sucks to go to work on a Monday after you’ve partied all weekend (Or in my case, had TWO WHOLE GLASSES of wine. Yeah, you know party rock is in tha hoouuusseee toniiiiight). But if you’ve gotta be at work for the next 5 days anyway, you might as well try to enjoy it, right? So SMILE. You’ll feel happier. And it’s been proven that happier people do better work, are more effective, and are more likely to succeed.
One tip: Set up a system to remind yourself to smile. Yes, it’s corny, but it works. Simply set a daily reminder to SMILE on your phone’s calendar to go off at the same time every day – I set mine to coincide with the lowest point of motivation in the day: walking from the bus to the office. My phone buzzes, I let out a huge grin, and the day automatically becomes awesome after that.
Try it out
