The Meaning of Monday
by Paul Pearsall, Ph.D.
The lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent
and full import our age has not as yet begun to comprehend.
— C. G. Jung
If you feel relatively successful
but not totally pleased with your job and the life you have because of
it, your chances of dying on Monday morning are high. Research shows
that you are more likely to die from a heart attack or stroke between 9
A.M. and 11 A.M. on Monday morning than any other time of the week. Of
course, it's not Monday that kills us but the meaning we attach to this
artificial walling off of the time of our life.
Wolves and robins don't know it's Monday. There may be successful
and not so successful raccoons, but they don't seem to know it or, if
they do, they don't seem to care much about it. They don't take
weekends off and divide their time into quality and not-quality time.
For them, there is no yesterday or tomorrow. We humans are the species
that builds boundaries. We create artificial beginnings and endings in
our minds and then allow them to govern our life. We
are aware of an immense array of information, but awareness becomes
attention when we decide to assign meaning to the information coming
into our brain. We can be aware that it's Monday, but Monday gets its
meaning when we focus our attention on that day and make it a black day.
The science of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) shows that the meaning we
assign to events in our life can influence our physiology: It can
either enhance or diminish our immune response. How we attend to our
life and the meaning of our living that results from that attention can
even lead to unintentional "success suicide," the serious health risk
of going to work on Monday with the "bad" attitude associated with TSS (Toxic Success Syndrome).
If we consciously or unconsciously divide our lives into longing for
Friday's relief from the rat race and anxiously anticipating our return
to it, we have toxified the time of our life.
TSS suffers have created a code for the days of their lives. "TGIF"
is the cheer of those who feel they have struggled past "hump day"
(Wednesday) and are ready to thank God it's Friday. Except perhaps for
TSS sufferers who consider the weekend a frustrating delay in their
unending pursuit of their success or a few parents who have lost their
ability to enjoy their children's demands on their attention, TGIM
(Thank God It's Monday) is not yet part of the time vocabulary of the
toxically successful.
The Dying Day
If heart attacks and strokes are purely physical in nature,
how is it possible that Monday sticks out as a dying day? If these and
other disease processes are purely biophysical events, they should be
equal-opportunity killers that wreak their havoc at random. Research
conducted over more than three decades shows, however, that how we
attend to our life directly affects our heart, immune system, and
entire body system.
Toxic success results from the meaning we attach
to our work, our loving, and the days of our lives. The New Testament
teaches, "As a man thinketh, so is he," but the issue is not so much
"mind over matter" as "mind is matter." PNI shows that we literally
"are what we think" and what, where, and how we focus our attention. The toxicity of success is not due to working
hard and long hours, failure to put in enough so-called quality time,
or being a type A workaholic. It is caused by a frantic mind, not a
hectic world. If Monday kills us, it is because — even if we are not
consciously aware of it — we have given Monday its lethal power. Pointing
out this immense power of our attention, author Norman Cousins, who
reported that the power of his beliefs contributed to his recovery from
a life-threatening illness, wrote, "Belief becomes biology. The head
comes first."
The tendency of the toxically successful to be "outsightful," to
interpret the world from an external locus of control, has led to
several attempts to attribute outside physical reasons to what
researchers call the "Black Monday effect." Delayed effects of
overeating and drinking on the weekend, the physical stress of moving
from the Sunday afternoon couch to the Monday morning desk or
automotive assembly line, and exposure to job-related chemicals or
other workplace toxins are among some of the "look what is happening to
us" explanations offered, but none of these reasons have been proven to
account for our Monday morality.
The key factor seems to be that we begin on Monday to turn ourselves
"outside in," literally "embodying" or making a part of our body the
stresses of the outside world. We make our Mondays toxic because the
stressful meaning we give them is physically internalized. Our body
becomes what we think of our Mondays.
Along with our uniquely human gift of attention and our capacity to
assign meaning to our life comes an awesome responsibility and serious
risk. We can kill ourselves by the toxic ways we choose to think about
our life, but we can also enhance our health and emotional well being
by harnessing the power of our attention and using it to make Monday
just another day on planet paradise.
The Risk Factor
Despite the current health terrorism and dire warnings about
diet and exercise, most persons who have their first heart attack under
age fifty have none of the major physical risk factors for coronary
artery disease. It is only good common sense to avoid known health
risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, junk food, and
elevated cholesterol, but the TSS constellation of deficiency, doubt,
detachment, disappointment, and eventually depression may be the health
risk we are neglecting the most. The most predictive factor for heart
disease may not be the so-called physical risk factors but the mental
ones -- the chronic delight deficiency that results from toxic success.
What is killing us is not just what we eat or weigh or how little we
exercise. It is our nagging sense of discontentment and the toxic ways
we are attempting to compensate for it that renders us vulnerable to
the diseases of civilization.
I suggest that the risk factor to our overall well being is our
distracted state of mind. When we aren't paying enough attention to
what matters most in our life, we begin to compensate for what feels
like an unhappy life. We mistake society's definition of success for a
possible source of the contentment that eludes us. We focus our
attention on living and working in the ways we are promised will lead
to sure success, but we are in for trouble: Society's version of
success is toxic and prescriptions for its attainment can have deadly
side effects.
Perhaps the first question our doctor should ask us at our next
physical exam should be "How do you feel about Mondays?" Maybe he or
she should ask what is on our minds when we awaken on Monday morning
and what we are thinking Friday night. Are our thoughts characterized
by contentedness, calmness, and loving connection with our family and
friends? Is Monday just another great day in a series of great days, or
does it represent a return to pressure, obligation, and frustration?
Perhaps the doctor should ask not just how we are feeling but, more
importantly, "What's on our mind most of the time?" Instead of counting
cholesterol points, perhaps he or she should ask how many times on
Mondays or any day we think delightful thoughts about how contented we
feel with our work, how calm we feel in our daily living, and how truly
connected we feel with the people and things that matter most in our
life.
This
article was excerpted from:
 Toxic Success
by Paul Pearsall,
Ph.D.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Inner Ocean Publishing, Inc. ©2002.
www.innerocean.com
Info/Order this book.
More books by this author.
About the Author
Paul
Pearsall, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychoneuroimmunologist, a specialist in
the study of the healing mind. He holds a Ph.D. in both clinical and educational
psychology. Dr. Pearsall has published more than two hundred professional
articles, written fifteen best-selling books, and has appeared on The Oprah
Winfrey Show, The Monte/ Williams Show, CNN, 20/20, Dateline, and Good Morning
America. Visit his website at www.paulpearsall.com.
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