Marisa Jo Mayes is a TikTok content creator and founder of a startup. In the United States, she has gone viral for promoting what she calls “Minimum Mondays” at work, a trend that seeks to balance work and personal life.
In the words of the creator herself “it’s a way to start the week prioritizing yourself as a person rather than as an employee”. She fights against a thought that many of us have internalized, the “culture of haste”. Perfectionism, self-demand and excessive responsibility that can end in call burnout labor.
This culture of rushing causes a cycle of stress and exhaustion that we start on Monday when we arrive at the office, and ends up leaving us without energy from the beginning of the week, without the strength to do anything else until the weekend when we just want to rest. and we are attacked by what the experts call “the anguish of sunday“.
And although she proposes applying those “minimum Mondays” or “Mondays of the essential minimum” in the workplace, is something that we can include in our relationships and that positively affects our lives. Or not, because it has a trick.
What are the “Monday minimums”
If we talk about minimum Mondays at work, we do so a form of self-care like the JOMO. According to Theresa E. DiDonato Ph.D. from Psychology Today, “it’s a way to fight against feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, or stressed by all that work entails. At the heart of it is a self-care philosophy that suggests that prioritizing the self and avoiding stressors will yield better results. Your job is just your job, so prioritize yourself at the expense of your job.” That is to say, that on Mondays we do what is essential at work and nothing more.
That philosophy of “survival” is adjustable to relationships, although, as with everything, it may not be for us.
How to apply minimum Mondays to relationships
We have already told you on more than one occasion that the key to the happiness of a couple is not love and if we want it to last, it has more to do with daily communication and with a joint “work” to maintain the relationship.
That’s why when I read about minimum Mondays I thought that he meant just the opposite, doing more in the relationship, forcing ourselves to do things as a couple. I thought you were talking about demanding an extra effort from us, a planning, as we could do with sex. Well no. Let’s land those low Mondays in relationships.
According to brian ogolsky, “in order to maintain healthy relationships, couples must mitigate the threats to their relationship so that it doesn’t get worse and improve the relationship so that it is better than it currently is”, something that inserted between all the daily tasks can be absolutely overwhelming. Work, children, parents, family, friends, home and the relationship itself. Finding the energy to get things done is not only stressful, but seems like an impossible task..
Minimum Mondays talk about self-care, but if we talk about healthy relationships we cannot maintain a relationship with minimal effort, but rather invest in the relationship. But it is true that, according to experts, investing in yourself is also investing in our relationship. Practicing self-love is the first step to loving others well in the words of the psychologist and editor-in-chief of Trendencias Iria Reguera.
So, Reducing our level of demand as a couple could be the key to improving our relationship if it has become one more task from day to day, in an obligation. Although at that point it seems the time to ask ourselves if it is there, if we want to continue with a relationship that seems more like a job.
That is why we repeat: it is not applicable to everyone. Especially if we heed Dr. DiDonato’s statement that “for many people in satisfying relationships, self care is relationship care: leisure time with a partner, humor, sexual intimacy and affectionate gestures.” And for that there is no minimum.
Photos | Marco Duarte, Toa Heftiba and Tanya Trofymchuk in Unsplash
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