For those of us who work 9–5 from Monday to Friday, the temptation to ‘live for the weekend’ is a strong one. After all, evening plans that follow a long day in the office don’t always sound like the most appealing thing in the world, but it feels important to embrace a work-life balance and maintain a healthy social life.

Naturally, we try to jam-pack our weekends full of plans: staycations, big Saturday nights out, day trips on sun-drenched Sundays. We treat going out and doing as much as we can as the ‘reward’ for working hard during the week, pressuring ourselves to ‘make the most’ of two days off rather than using it for something less exciting but much more important: resting.

While we always suspected that a balanced, calm and easy-going weekend will always leave us feeling better in the long term, new research has now confirmed it. 

A recent study of employees in Germany found that higher sleep quality during weekends was associated with slightly lower levels of exhaustion during the working week.

The study aimed to explore the role of sleep quality in mental reattachment to work after leisure days (aka that ‘Monday feeling’, where we have to mentally reconnect with work) and its links to exhaustion at work and work task performance. Researchers hypothesised that employees would report better reattachment to work on Mondays following weekends when they experienced higher-quality sleep. 

By contrast, weekends with catch-up sleep (sleep that compensates for previous lack of sleep) or disrupted natural sleep times due to social obligations and activities (social sleep lag) would be followed by lower levels of reattachment to work on Monday. Further, employees with higher-than-usual reattachment on Monday would experience lower levels of exhaustion and higher task performance during the working week.

For five weeks, study participants answered surveys on Mondays and Fridays. On Mondays, they self-reported their sleep during the weekend and mental reattachment to work, and on Fridays, the surveys were about workweek exhaustion and task performance.

Unsurprisingly, the results showed that weekends when participants slept better were indeed followed by better reattachment on Monday. Not only were these employees better able to refocus on their work on Mondays, but taking it slower at the weekend set a positive tone for the entire week. 

“Our findings suggest that high-quality sleep during the weekend can be beneficial, but catching up on sleep during the weekend can be detrimental to Monday reattachment and, in turn, indirectly to workweek exhaustion,” the study authors concluded. “Accordingly, we demonstrate that Monday reattachment can set the tone for the entire workweek, but the capability to reattach depends on weekend sleep as a core recovery process.”

So next time you find yourself exhausted by just looking at your weekend calendar, it may be time to rethink – and make R&R a real priority. 

Images: Getty