The savasana at the end of the week
On the small forty-five minute closing practice I do on Friday evenings — and what an extended deliberate rest at the end of a working week does to the weekend that follows.
Friday evenings, for most of the years I have been a working adult, were a small zone of slightly exhausted celebration. The week was over. The weekend was beginning. The temptation was to mark the transition with something stimulating — a drink, a meal out, a film, a small social gathering. The marking was sincere. The cost of the marking, however, was usually that the weekend started from a slightly depleted starting point, and the recovery that the weekend was supposed to provide never quite happened.
About two years ago I started doing a small Friday evening practice that has, more or less, replaced the small celebration. The practice is simple. Forty-five minutes of restorative yoga and savasana, done in the small empty room I have written about elsewhere, with the lights off and the door closed. The practice begins around seven, ends around seven forty-five, and the rest of the evening proceeds at a different pace than it would have without it.
What the forty-five minutes contains
Ten minutes of legs-up-the-wall to drain the legs and start the parasympathetic shift. Fifteen minutes of supported bridge over the bolster to release the lower back. Ten minutes of supine twist on each side to soften the spine. The remaining time, however much is left, in savasana with the eye pillow and the blanket.
The sequence is not interesting. The total time in deeply restorative shapes is what matters. The forty-five minutes is enough that the body, by the end of it, is in a substantially different state than it entered.
What this does to the rest of the evening
Removes the depletion. The body, having had forty-five minutes of deliberate restoration, walks back into the apartment as a body that has already done its weekend recovery. The small fatigue of the week has been addressed at the start of the weekend, not over the course of it. The Saturday morning that follows is a Saturday morning that begins from a clean baseline.
The Friday evening itself, after the practice, runs slower and quieter than it would have otherwise. The temptation to fill the evening with stimulation is mostly gone. The body has, in some way, already had what it needed, and the small extra activities that I would have, in past years, used to mark the weekend's start now feel unnecessary. The evening becomes, instead, a slow simple thing — a small dinner, a quiet conversation, a book, an early bed.
On the case for restoration before recreation
This is the small structural insight that the practice has taught me. The cultural assumption is that the weekend starts with recreation — the dinner out, the social event, the small celebration. The body's actual need, after a working week, is for restoration — the slow restoration of the systems that have been working for five days.
When the recreation comes first, the body is doing the small fun things while still in a depleted state. The fun is muted by the depletion. The recovery has to happen across the rest of the weekend, in fits and starts, and the cumulative effect is a weekend that does not quite restore.
When the restoration comes first, the body is in a state to actually enjoy the recreation that follows. The Saturday morning is fresh. The Saturday brunch with friends, the Sunday afternoon walk, the small weekend pleasures — all of these are received by a body that has been properly restored on Friday evening, and the receiving is qualitatively different.
What I would say to anyone who is exhausted by Friday evenings
If you arrive at most Friday evenings depleted, try this for one Friday. Cancel whatever you had planned for the early evening. Take forty-five minutes between work and dinner for a restorative practice. The shape of the practice is less important than the duration — forty-five minutes of slow horizontal time, in whatever shapes the body wants. See what the rest of the evening is like. See what Saturday morning is like.
If the experiment goes well — and in my experience it usually does — make it a weekly practice. Friday evening restoration, as the first event of the weekend. The rest of the weekend, organised around the small dependable starting point of a body that has already had its recovery. Two years in, this has become one of the small structural rhythms of the week that I would not want to be without, and the weekends, as a result, have become weekends in a way they had, before the practice, not quite been.