WTF*... it’s only Tuesday!

It’s the moment you dread: waking up to realise you still have *Wednesday, Thursday and Friday until the weekend, says Phoebe Luckhurst

No one likes Mondays. Following the soft focus of Sunday, it’s a sharp re-entry into the week; by the time you navigate missed alarms and signal failures, the prospect of a day of work can be devastating. By 5pm you’re staring down the barrel of a commute home. No one suggests drinks; no one buys tickets to anything.

But like a low-key headache, once it’s passed, the pain of Monday is hard to recall; the misery is curiously ephemeral. Tuesdays, on the other hand, are another quantity altogether.

For Tuesday is the start of a misery that ends in a drunk, weepy and exhausted Friday evening. It starts mid-morning, when you’ve been asked to add an umpteenth thing to your to-do list. By the afternoon, you’re in the grip of a malaise that’s knocked your concentration sideways. There are recurrent themes to the Tuesday posts on cult blog London Grumblr (the city’s psychological barometer) — exhaustion, aggression, drinking, and anything that starts with “F” and ends with “uck”.

And that’s when you have your WTF moment — ie when you realise you still have to get through Wednesday, Thursday and Friday before the weekend. WTF indeed.

“Mondays are bad, that’s a given,” comments a friend who works in publishing. “But Tuesdays… Every Tuesday I feel like I deserve a medal for endurance, not another three bloody days of work. It is devastating to realise that after dragging yourself to the end of the day you still have Wed, Thurs and Fri to go. I imagine it’s a similar feeling to the one marathon runners get around mile 11.”

Hitting the wall is an apt analogy: while the unimaginative extend weekends with Monday or Friday sickies, canny Londoners choose Tuesdays. You’ll still have the WTF moment — but it’s less piquant when you’re on the sofa with a duvet eating toast.

But opting out is unsustainable. You have to find a WTF coping strategy. In PR Michelle Cato’s office, the day is termed “Turmoil Tuesdays” — “the day of the week when you reassess your life, question everything and generally end up a depressed mess crying in the corner.” She remedies it by eating “lots of chocolate” and blasting “old school Nineties tunes”.

Others embrace plans: while only the dangerous or deluded go out on a Monday night, going straight home after a terrible Tuesday is too bleak to consider. Diaries fill up the previous week; some offices prefigure Friday nights with after-work drinks or pub quizzes. One friend goes to a yoga class every Tuesday — to diffuse the petulance that develops over the day so she won’t go home and fight with her boyfriend.

“It helps when you remember that soon it will be over for another week,” comments a colleague who admits she’s often too tired to plan things but tries to in order to prevent being swallowed by the week before it’s started. Indeed, a convincing part of the battle is simply resisting the rut: self-delusion goes further than you’d expect.

Don’t add needless pressure: avoid letting your Monday to-do list slide into Tuesday, don’t schedule meetings for Tuesday afternoons, and if you’re on the 5:2 don’t fast on a Tuesday. Hungry soon becomes angry — make sure you see other people, even if it’s just a housemate: a Tuesday is no time to play lone wolf. WTF? C U L8R — it’s time to take your Tuesdays back.

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