Megan's Monday Motivation
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Monday, 11/28/22: Talking about ways to think about time and notable books of 2022

Happy Monday!

It’s a new week, which means it’s time for your next Monday motivation newsletter.

Read on below for some steps to a happier Monday, a short story and a roundup of positive thoughts to get your week started.

Three Steps to a Happier Monday

Each newsletter starts with three prompts to inspire gratitude and simple intention setting. Take a moment and jot down answers to these three questions. To give an example, I share my answers below.  

Step 1: What are three things I appreciated from the weekend? 

Step 2: What is one thing I can be excited about today?

Step 3: What is my intention for this week? 

GRATITUDE: I’m thankful for downtime during the Thanksgiving break, time with family and being able to run and walk outside. 

TODAY: Today is my last day at home before I fly back to Chicago early tomorrow. I’m most excited to spend time after work with my parents. 

INTENTION: My intention this week is to plan out December. 

Okay, your turn! And if you want to share your three steps, I am all ears. 🙂

Meaningful Musings: The Downside of Getting Used to Things 

Happy Monday after Thanksgiving! I hope whatever you did, you had a lovely end of last week and weekend.

My family’s Thanksgiving is very low-key, with lots of relaxing, football watching and kicking off of the holiday season. I love it.  

When I come home to Florida, I really do ‘come home’ – to the same house I grew up in. Much has changed (my childhood bedroom is a guest room), but there is something really comforting about being in this house. Without fail, I always have the deepest sleep the first night I’m there. As my time at home goes on, I grow accustomed to the supreme sleeping experience, but nothing compares to that first-night-sleep.

It’s one of my favorite parts of coming home.

Last week I wrote about the idea of hedonic adaptation, or our propensity to get used to things after repeated exposure. There’s a good side to hedonic adaptation – as explored last week – because this tendency helps us be resilient and get used to, or less affected, by negative things.

But there’s a downside too. The same tendency also makes us less affected by the good things too, especially those simple, everyday joys.

I’m sure we can all think of examples of this in our own life: my experience mentioned above of growing accustomed to being home; the burst of joy we experience the first time we use something we purchase vs. not thinking twice about it when we use it for the 20th time; the meaning and feelings behind telling someone “I love you” for the first time vs. saying it on autopilot mode as you rush out the door years later.

Personally, the idea of hedonic adaption makes me feels less alone. Getting used to things is human nature. It’s not just me being unaware or ungrateful or unsatiable.

And it makes sense: our emotions have to stabilize. We have to come back to a setpoint, so that we are able to experience those bursts and lifts.

But I also think with an understanding of hedonic adaption, we can work to offset the effects of it, particularly so we do pay attention to those simple, everyday joys in our life.

In her book Happier Hour, professor and author Dr. Cassie Holmes writes about hedonic adaptation and offers four suggestions of offsetting the effects of it.
She suggests the following:

  1. Recognize time is limited 
  2. Turn a routine activity into a celebrated and scared ritual
  3. Take an occasional break from that it is you enjoy doing
  4. Incorporate a variety of activities across your days and weeks

 
All great suggestions, but the one that resonated with me most was the first one – recognizing time is limited.

To do recognize how much time is left, Dr. Holmes has an exercise she suggests doing. In her class at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, she asks students to select a regularly occurring experience that’s special to them (Sunday dinner with friends, holidays at home, time living in their current apartment) and estimate how many times they’ve done it and how many times are left.

She offers the example of doing this exercise with her weekly morning coffee date with her daughter, who is 6. She’s calculated they’ve had about 400 coffee dates together in life thus far, and that they (taking in account that her daughter will likely start going to the coffee shop with friends, will eventually be going off to college and will likely not live close to home forever), likely have 230 left. In other words, even though her daughter is only 6, they only have about 36% of their coffee dates left.

Yes, this exercise is a little sad and melancholy. But it also works. As Dr. Holmes writes, “By assuming that it [an experience] will happen every day, we stop paying attention, we stop treasuring it quite as much.”

With the awareness of time being limited, you prioritize and pay special attention to that experience, in ways you maybe wouldn’t have before. I see a lot of value in doing an exercise like this this time of year, re-prioritizing our holiday focus from the minor details to the more important big picture things.

A similar idea to this exercise is this “years are short” spreadsheet idea from blogger Kelsey Wharton. With three young kids, she made it to have an easy reference point of her kids’ ages and grades during the month of September for any given year. In it (you can view the spreadsheet on her post) she also includes major family milestones like retirement eligibility, anniversaries and big trips.  

For conceptualizing time with young kids, this makes so much sense (it’s aptly named – the years TRULY are so short). But even as someone in a very different life stage than her, this speaks to me.

I recently made a similar spreadsheet for myself and tracked the year, my age and various notes in columns. For notes, I added things such as family and friends’ milestones, personal and professional dreams, and fun things like potential travel.

There’s something about seeing the years displayed in this way that is enlightening. It snaps me out of my disposition of “getting used to things” and paints these same things – like my little apartment, an easy commute to work, runs along the lakefront – in a new light. I pay attention to these things more because I know time is limited.

There is a lot of good around the corner, but there is also a lot of good right now that I want to treasure.

On My Monday Radar

Sometimes we just aren’t ready to jump into our Monday to-do list right away. In case you want some content to procrastinate with, here is a roundup of a few positive things on my radar:  

 

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