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No emails. No “quick jobs”. No getting ahead for Monday. The Men’s Weekend Reset isn’t about cramming 48 hours with wellness activities. It’s about remembering what your life feels like when work isn’t running it.
Friday evening arrives and you’re officially finished for the week. Except you’re not, really. You check one final email while waiting for dinner. Something comes through on Saturday morning and you decide it’ll be quicker to deal with it now. Sunday afternoon arrives and you start thinking about Monday, so you open the laptop for half an hour to “get organised”.
By Sunday night, you’ve technically had a weekend, but work has been sitting quietly in the corner of it the entire time.
For plenty of men, particularly those with demanding careers or businesses, switching off isn’t as simple as shutting the office door. Work lives on the phone in your pocket and, perhaps more importantly, in your head. Even when nobody is asking you to work, you can find yourself mentally solving problems that can do absolutely nothing about until Monday morning.
So, here’s an experiment: give yourself 48 hours where work isn’t invited. This isn’t a rigid weekend wellness programme. You don’t need to wake at 6am for meditation, drink something green or spend Sunday evening writing down your intentions for the week ahead. In fact, we’d quite like you to avoid turning relaxation into another thing you need to perform successfully. Instead, think of this as a collection of ideas. Steal the ones you like and completely ignore the rest.
The weekend reset actually starts before you leave work. Spend the final few minutes of Friday getting whatever is still circling around your head somewhere you can find it on Monday. Write down unfinished tasks, identify anything genuinely important for next week and make a note of whatever you’re worried you might forget. Then stop.
There will still be work left. That’s normal. If you wait until everything is finished before allowing yourself to switch off, you may never switch off again.
Once you’re done, create some kind of dividing line between work and the weekend. If you commute, that journey may already provide one. If you work from home, you may need to create it yourself. Go for a walk, take a shower, change clothes, put some music on or head somewhere for dinner. It doesn’t particularly matter what you do; the point is to give your brain a signal that one part of the week has ended. And turn off the email notifications. The inbox will cope.
Friday night doesn’t need to become a huge social event. After a demanding week, you may have absolutely no interest in going anywhere, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Cook something good. Order your favourite takeaway. Go out for dinner. Watch a film you’ve been meaning to see. Play a game. Meet somebody for a drink. Put some music on and sit outside. Go to the cinema. Read. Do absolutely nothing for a couple of hours.
The important distinction is between choosing to relax and simply collapsing from exhaustion while scrolling through your phone until bedtime.
Give Friday evening something enjoyable, even if that something is extremely small. Work has probably received the best part of your energy all week. The rest of your life deserves a little too.
There is something about Saturday morning that can make a weekend feel significantly longer when you actually use it.
You don’t need to set an alarm at dawn. Sleep if you need sleep. But once you’re awake, resist losing the entire morning to your phone and eventually discovering that it’s 12.30 and you’re somehow still sitting in exactly the same place.
Go somewhere.
Find a great breakfast. Walk somewhere you’ve never been. Play golf. Go cycling. Take the dog somewhere different. Head to the gym if you genuinely enjoy it. Visit a market. Go fishing. Drive somewhere for absolutely no reason other than you’ve always wondered what’s there.
It doesn’t need to qualify as exercise, personal development or anything remotely productive. You’re simply getting out into the world.
There is a surprising amount of life happening on Saturday mornings while the rest of us are scrolling.
Switching off from work doesn’t always mean sitting still. Sometimes doing nothing creates exactly the space your brain needs to start thinking about work again. Instead, find something that absorbs your attention.
Cook something complicated. Work on the car. Play golf. Build something. Garden. Watch live sport. Go karting. Pick up a camera and walk around somewhere interesting. Play a video game for three hours without feeling remotely guilty about it. Get the barbecue going. Try something you’ve never done before.
What you’re looking for is an activity capable of making you forget to check the time.
Adults can become strangely reluctant to spend hours doing something unless it produces a useful outcome. If you’re going to exercise, there should be a fitness goal. If you’re learning something, perhaps it should improve your career. If you’re making something, maybe you could sell it.
Not this weekend. Do something because you enjoy doing it. That’s the entire business case.
Adult male friendships can become ridiculously difficult to organise. Everybody has work, partners, children and a diary requiring three weeks’ notice for something that once involved simply turning up at somebody’s house. Make the effort anyway.
Meet your mates for dinner. Watch the match. Have people over. Go to a gig. Go bowling. Find a comedy night. Have a barbecue. Meet for a couple of drinks if that’s what you enjoy, although the entire weekend doesn’t need to revolve around alcohol.
If nobody is available, that doesn’t mean Saturday night is cancelled. Take yourself somewhere. Go to the cinema, find somewhere good to eat or do something you’d normally wait for somebody else to agree to.
There is a difference between being alone and being lonely. Occasionally having an evening entirely on your own terms can be brilliant.
Sunday morning still belongs to the weekend.
This seems obvious, but Sunday has an unfortunate habit of becoming a waiting room for Monday. You wake up knowing the working week is approaching, and gradually the emails, meetings and responsibilities start making their way back into your thoughts.
Don’t invite them in early. Have a slow breakfast. Go for a walk. Read the paper. Take the kids somewhere. Play sport. Meet somebody for coffee. Cook breakfast properly rather than eating something while standing in the kitchen.
Most importantly, don’t open the work inbox “just to see what’s there”. If there is something unpleasant waiting for you, you’ve now allowed Monday’s problem to occupy your Sunday too.
If nobody needs you urgently, ignorance can be surprisingly peaceful.
We all have them. Things we genuinely enjoy but somehow never seem to get around to doing.
The book beside the bed. The bike in the garage. The guitar you haven’t played in years. The friend you’ve been meaning to visit. The game you bought six months ago. The place nearby you’ve always wanted to explore.
Sunday afternoon is perfect for it.
One of the dangers of working hard is that life can gradually become divided into two categories: work and recovering sufficiently to go back to work. Hobbies disappear, friendships receive less attention and things we used to enjoy become something we’ll eventually return to “when things calm down”.
Things may not calm down. Make some room anyway.
This is where the experiment becomes more difficult.
Sunday evening arrives and suddenly Monday feels very close. You start wondering what your diary looks like, remembering things you need to do and considering whether perhaps you should spend half an hour getting ahead.
You can if doing so genuinely makes you feel better. But be careful. Half an hour has a remarkable ability to become two hours once the laptop is open.
Try another approach. If something important enters your head, write it down and leave it for tomorrow. You don’t need to solve it tonight simply because you’ve remembered it tonight.
Then enjoy the final part of your weekend. Cook Sunday dinner. Watch something good. Have a bath. Read. Get an early night. Spend time with your family. Whatever makes Sunday evening feel like part of your life rather than preparation for your job.
Monday is perfectly capable of waiting until Monday.
There are jobs where completely disappearing for 48 hours isn’t realistic. Healthcare, social care and plenty of other sectors operate around the clock, and senior people may occasionally need to be reachable if something serious happens.
Being contactable in an emergency, however, isn’t necessarily the same thing as monitoring everything.
Decide what genuinely requires your involvement. Make sure the appropriate people know how to reach you if that happens and then allow them to do their jobs. If an organisation cannot function for a Saturday afternoon without its leader reading every email, that may be a wider problem worth addressing.
You can be responsible without being permanently online.
Perhaps you spend Saturday morning watching television and Saturday afternoon asleep on the sofa. Fine.
Perhaps your perfect weekend involves football, beer and a takeaway. Perhaps it’s hiking, cooking and an early night. Perhaps you’ve got children and your idea of a peaceful weekend is wildly unrealistic anyway. There isn’t a correct way to reset.
The point isn’t to complete a checklist of wholesome activities and arrive at Monday morning as a fully optimised human being. The point is to have parts of your life where you aren’t an employee, manager, business owner, director or whatever title appears underneath your name in your email signature.
You’re just you.
Work is important. It pays the bills, provides purpose for many of us and can be a huge source of achievement and satisfaction. But it is very good at expanding into whatever space you give it.
If you check email on Saturday morning, there will be something to answer. If you open the laptop on Sunday afternoon, there will be something to do. If you spend Sunday evening thinking about Monday, there will always be something to worry about.
The work doesn’t run out. Your weekends do.
So every now and then, give yourself 48 hours where work doesn’t get a vote. See your mates. Cook something. Go somewhere. Watch the match. Sleep. Play. Spend time with your family. Pick up an old hobby or find a completely new one.
Then go back on Monday. The emails will still be there.
But at least you’ll have had a weekend.
Wellbeing looks different for everyone, and sometimes the most useful thing is simply finding the right information at the right time. Explore more from Daily Round with our dedicated Women’s Health, Men’s Wellbeing and Wellbeing for Leaders sections, or head to the Leaders Library for our latest book recommendations, ideas and inspiration for life in and outside work.
Or, if you’re ready to get back to what’s happening across the sector, catch up with today’s Daily News for the latest health and social care stories.
Posted by:
M Ramalani
Editorial Assistant – The Daily Round
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