3 Ways to Have the Best Weekend EVERY Weekend

Hi everyone! How was your weekend? Have you ever dreaded that question? Have you ever felt you have to perform and come up with an exciting answer to avoid judgment?

Today I want to share with you some tips I have about making the most out of every weekend, without pressure or guilt. Especially as we move into warmer weather in this part of the world, there’s this pressure to get out and enjoy the weather as much as we can.

For some of you, maybe this is not an issue, and has never been. For me, however, the weekends were often tough. You work all week so you feel the pressure to have your weekends be action-packed in order to justify them. There was this one really friendly guy in my old workplace, but I cringed whenever I saw him on Monday mornings because he would always ask: “What did you get up to this weekend?” and I felt the need to have this laundry list of fun activities that I had done to report to him. Ridiculous, and this stress was completely self-imposed, but still, it was there.

Come Monday morning I was either completely exhausted because I had spent all my time go-go-going instead of resting and relaxing, OR I ended up not making any plans and feeling like I had failed to make the most of those precious couple of days off. Do you see how this cycle doesn’t work? Do you see how we set ourselves up constantly to endure a never-ending cycle of self-fulfilling failure?

At some point, I decided it had to stop. I needed to enjoy weekends for what they were designed for – rest, relaxation, fun, family and friends. So here’s what I’m going to share with you today – how to make the most out of the weekend so you feel you had fun, yet still got some downtime in. Here we go…

1. Be spontaneous (and, if you have to, use FUN scheduling). This is hard, I know. I’m from a very small island and growing up, everyone hung out together, so a couple of people would decide to hit the beach on a Saturday morning and the texts were soon circulating so that we’d all end up there by midday. Part of this spontaneity vanishing is growing up, but also when I moved away to a big city I realized that the distance people live from each other coupled with busy city living and the extra responsibilities that adulthood brought meant that planning social events was a requirement. However, we spend our whole week rushing around to a schedule of meetings, waking up to an alarm, and hitting deadlines at work, so it’s good to give that a break at the weekend.

Here’s my suggestion: schedule ONE thing on the weekend (or one each day if you feel like getting out more that particular week). But use FUN scheduling. What’s that? Well, I had somewhere to be at 1:08 pm yesterday – that was the time the golf course had available for my friends and I to tee off. So yes, it was scheduled, but fun! If your cinema is showing a movie or you’re seeing a play that starts at 7:30pm – this is also fun scheduling. Otherwise, try and wing it a bit. Take some of the rush and panic out of scheduled start times by arranging to meet at a common place or a friend’s house 30-60 minutes before the scheduled event, at a more flexible time. It takes the focus off of that one booked and non-negotiable time.

2. Balance fun with rest. Unless you still have the energy of your college days of hard partying, give yourself one night on the weekend for relaxation – whether this is solo or with company. One of my girlfriends and I had a movie night in Friday night (we watched The Impossible btw – great film, check it out!). Friday nights I am always wiped after a long week of work so I prefer to leave my ‘going out’ nights for Saturdays, personally. Make it work for you!

3. Give yourself an afternoon of unplanned time to allow for creativity to blossom. Our creativity gets smothered when we are too busy to stop and give our creative juices a chance to marinate and flow. This is an issue I talk about with my coaching clients all the time, because I honestly believe that losing touch with this part of ourselves is what lets boredom take over and stress creep in – and we all know what THAT does to our eating. For me, on Saturday afternoon I watched some of the IIN Live Conference online (Alicia Silverstone was awesome!), then took myself off to Starbucks, where I enjoyed an iced herbal tea and let creative inspiration strike. I worked on some of my coaching materials – yeah, technically work, but I love it and it 100% requires me to draw on my creative stores. You could head to a pottery studio, take a walk in nature to clear your thoughts, turn up the music and belt out your favourite tunes – anything counts!

Bonus tip: Schedule a maximum of one event on the weekend around food. Very few of my activities this weekend were based around food – in fact, this week none were, but I do like to go out for breakfast sometimes on the weekend. However, this weekend I had my movie night in with a friend, hung out with my niece and sister and brother-in-law, spent time fostering my creativity, played a round of golf and took a bubble bath, painted my nails and did my hair – ie, relaxed and pampered myself. None of that involved food. Sometimes we get ‘lazy’ with our free time and go to the easiest option – going out for dinner, ice cream, brunch, coffee…it’s fine to do this every once in a while but that’s how we foster emotional eating habits – we base our whole lives around food. Trying new experiences that aren’t to do with food will make our lives so much more fun and exciting! So if you challenge yourself to ONE thing in the coming weeks, it’s this: make a maximum of one weekend activity be based around food.

QUESTION:

• Tell me, have you ever felt weekend pressure?