After 5 p.m. it's Friday
Adopt a more relaxed mindset
Several years ago, Prof. Cassie Holmes and her colleagues published what has become one of my favorite studies ever. When people were told to treat their upcoming weekends like a vacation, they generally enjoyed themselves more than if they thought of their weekends as regular old weekends.
After all, a vacation feels more fun and expansive. You try to relax and enjoy yourself. And given that a weekend really is a two-day vacation of sorts…why not treat it this way? I thought this was a very practical way for people to adopt a new mindset and make life better.
Extending the concept
So today I’m proposing an extension. If treating weekends like a vacation makes them feel better, why not treat any evening like a weekend? In other words, after 5 p.m. it’s Friday. I think this mindset shift might make any day’s “Golden Hours” feel more enjoyable.
After all, even if it’s 5 p.m. on Tuesday, there’s no reason not to feel like you are off, and relaxed, and looking forward to some restorative time. You can linger over dinner, even if it’s Tuesday, and you can enjoy your downtime at night, after your chores or after your kids go to bed. People are more likely to think about doing something fun on Friday night than on a Tuesday, so this might nudge you to choose a Golden Hour intention. Instead of focusing on the next day, you can enjoy feeling like you have a lot of time until then.
Not so different
Now, of course, the obvious difference between Tuesday and Friday is you generally have to go to work on Wednesday. But my guess is that you aren’t staying up that late on Friday night if you’ve been working all week. And my guess is that if you have kids you wouldn’t sleep in that much on Saturday anyway. Your kid’s 9:00 a.m. Saturday soccer game is not that different from getting up and getting people off to school and such. So we’re not even upsetting sleep schedules with this mindset shift.
Instead, it’s just about not approaching the next day as some battle to be prepared for. It will come eventually anyway, but in the meantime, it might be possible to relax and enjoy any time a lot more.
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I read the report you linked to Laura. Understood about 50%! I noted this comment at the end - "Limitations and Directions for Future Research - It remains unclear how this manipulation would affect happiness if people treated every weekend like a vacation. Would neglected housework pile up and become a stress? Furthermore, we theorized that applying a vacation mindset to a regular weekend makes people treat it like a true break—nudging them out of their routine so that they are more mentally engaged and derive more enjoyment from their time off. If this intervention itself became a routine, we may not continue to observe the positive effects." Maybe we need to think about 1 weekend a month as a true vacation to get the best out of the approach, normal weekends the rest of the time, and similarly with not every evening during the week. Hedonic adaptation always seems to apply!
I need to do this. Sometimes it is the simplest that is the most impactful and profound.