It seems that no sooner than you have finished thanking god it’s Friday, it is time to wake up, smell the coffee, and usher in those good ol’ fashioned Monday morning blues.

With most unfortunate worker bees in the city slogging six-day weeks, TGIS (Saturday) is actually closer to our reality, and 24 hours out of office is hardly worth disturbing any heavenly spirits about.

So, we curse our unlucky stars instead that we partied too hard on Saturday, slept too late on Sunday, spent too much time running errands, and bang! Before you know it, it is back to business.

But in the unfortunate love-it-or-look-for-alternative-employment scenario, we are forced to make the most of a bad deal. Here is a closer look at weekly workplace depression, and what you can do to avoid it (without upsetting your boss too much).

Soup sympathy

First a real-life strategy. Get your company to take a leaf out of Prahlad Kakkar’s book. The adman’s company (Genesis) believes that Mondays are “dark and dismal days”. So, they have come up with an easy office-upper.

“We serve chicken soup through Monday, to fortify us through the week,” says Kakkar. Called either Shankar Chicken Soup (after the man who stirs it up) or Vegetarian Chicken Soup for the Soul (it only uses chicken broth; the rest is dal, potatoes and so on. “What the vegetarians don’t know won’t hurt them!” laughs Kakkar).

The ritual started two to three years ago. “Everyone would come in mopey and hungover after the weekend of partying,” explains the man who believes the blues are a “withdrawal symptom” from a body that craves more fun.

SOUL FOOD

Chicken soup on Monday could fortify an office for a week, suggests adman Prahlad Kakkar

Sleep cycle

The body is craving something, but according to the doctors, more fun is not the best medicine. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Sleep is all the body needs, or at least a return to the normal sleep cycle. “When your sleeping pattern is out of sync with your internal biological clock, Monday morning blues is the common result,” explains Milan Chetri, consultant physician, Apollo Gleneagles.

“One study found that mood is affected not necessarily by the amount of sleep you get, but whether your sleep is ‘in tune’ with your biological clock,” he adds. Leaving your night-owl days behind may be the only real — though ultimately unacceptable — solution to banishing the blues forever. Our internal clock is, apparently, reset when exposed to light, both natural and artificial.

The body clock is synchronised with a certain amount of light during the week. This drastically changes when weekends call for late nights. “You get more artificial light at night and less bright light during the morning,” explains Chetri.

So when Monday morning rolls around, your body still thinks you should be in bed, not at the desk.

And if you thought it was just a matter of being grumpy for a day, here is a wake-up call. “The majority of heart attacks also occur between 8 and 9 am on Monday mornings. Playing around with your Circadian rhythms is a major factor in egging on Monday-morning heart attacks,” warns Chetri.

At the very least, you are messing around your “core body temperature, hormonal release and cognitive ability”, which could, over time, lead to “sleep disorders, severe fatigue, major digestive problems and the inability to react or concentrate”.

Coffee or comics

But imagine getting through the week without the hope of some revelry at the end of the tunnel? If self-discipline is not likely to be your life-choice just yet, try simpler things instead:

• Get a little more sleep on a Sunday night, and try to restrict your heavy drinking to Saturday.

• While avoiding caffeine addiction is best, a cup of coffee could be the easiest Monday-morning pick-up.

• Keep some simple tasks to do. Completing them quickly could inspire you into productivity.

Finally, a highly-recommended option for the cynics among us (bless their souls): Set aside some quality time with a secret Dilbert stash. If you can’t beat the blues, might as well join the man who has mastered the fine art of bashing the management.