5 Ways to Recover From Your Long Weekend

Sleep a lot. I’m normally not a fan of napping or of getting more than 6 hours of sleep, to be honest. However the one time I’m comfortable making an exception to my “sleep is for the weak!” rule is when I’ve had an emotionally exhausting weekend. And there aren’t a lot of things out there more emotionally exhausting than a long-ass holiday weekend. Especially if you spent any/all of that time with family/old friends. Did you hang for hours around the dining room table, “shooting the shit” with grandpa? Perhaps you loitered in your hometown bar with old friends while you slowly came to the devastating realization that you were officially bringing the median age of the room a hell of a lot closer to 30? Or maybe you professed your love via drunk texts to an old crush from your high school yearbook staff only to run into him an hour later because your town is way too small and now you feel like it’s unsafe to ever go back home without a disguise/alias/sex change? I need a goddamn power nap after the mental rehash alone.

Watch movies that put you in the mood. For the pending holidays, not for other things you perv! (I don’t think you need a list to remind you to do that). Thanksgiving is over. Done. Caput! But don’t worry, the holidays are FAR from over. So instead of getting all depressed because the fun seems to be just flying by and/or because someone polished off the last bit of stuffing before you could get to it, why not just distract yourself with movies that will surely help you escape your current state of PLWD (post-long-weekend depression)? Try You’ve Got Mail or Love Actually. They both do a fantastic job of setting your expectations for the holidays/love/life in general unrealistically high, but whatever! Tom Hanks is security blanket in human form and watching him gets me high off of optimism and smiles. Two hours WELL spent!

Audit your Facebook profile. You will definitely want to reserve at least 30 minutes (that’s 3 hours in Facebook time) to auditing/detagging all of the incriminating photos you were tagged in over the weekend. And I know this might not sound super “rejuvenating,” but do you really want Auntie Sue’s new “Thanksgiving 2012” Facebook album (volume one of TEN!!) going viral?! Um, not if you like yourself you don’t. She’s 5 feet tall and we all know that her photo perspective is one horribly unflattering, double-chin-filled nightmare. A nightmare you can stop in its tracks right now if you so choose! Plus I bet you that as we speak, more than half of the people in your office are also doing serious damage control as they casually keep an excel window open on their desktop to make it look like they’re doing real “work.” So go ahead, detag until you’re blue in the face. A clean, blackmail-worthy-free newsfeed is a happy newsfeed.

Gloat in your Black Friday purchases. While everyone else was hanging out in their food comas, you were out bright and early Friday morning burning that shit off via your shopping and dropping excursion to Macy’s and Brookstone and other mall-ish places. And now you have this tall stack of discounted crap to show off! If there were ever a time to instagram things and spam your friends, it’s now. Documenting your purchases will not only create the illusion that they’re worth more than they are, it will also be a totally fun way to distract yourself from the inevitable pain you will experience when you finally decide to check your bank statements. Didn’t participate in Black Friday? Congrats on still having money and closet space!

Sign up for a 5k/10k. You ate pie. You ate a lot of pie. And now you kind of feel fat. So why not slap on those stretchy pants and start a new “training” regimen? This will make you feel good about yourself and help you restore your bloated, post-long weekend bod, I promise. I mean, the idea of a free t-shirt alone should put a spike in your endorphin levels! And being able to run will be quite the useful skill to have, especially come Christmas vacation when you very well may bump into that high school crush again and be forced to flee the premises. Maybe you can even go all out and get one of those obnoxious Nike training devices that allows you to auto-post how fast your miles are trending so all of your friends can see. Something to the tune of “Stephanie just ran 3.4 miles in 2.5 hours and for some reason she’s not embarrassed about sharing this with all of you.” I feel more self-important already!