FSS syndrome and Time

Friday- Saturday- Sunday (FSS) syndrome is a new kind of experience which I am going through since my arrival in UK.

I would define FSS syndrome as the physical, mental, emotional and physiological effects and changes in ones body and mind before and after the period spanning between 17:00hours on Friday till about 8:00 am the following morning of Monday..

I did my schooling and undergraduate education in India and never thought that much about week-end and week-days (WEWD). Of course I may have been very naive or may be that I thought everyday is more or less similar. Anyway I never had this concept. Since my arrival here I slowly started to understand that everything here revolves around the concept of weekday-weekend cycle and it seems that every person in the west is a 'victim' of this condition in one way or other.

Most people work very hard, just to relax over the week-end, recharge their batteries, then again back to Monday- Friday cycle.... I know a lot of people have butterflies in the stomach from Sunday morning and have sleepless or disturbed sleeping on Sunday nights, called by the popular term Sunday night syndrome. Some people like to sleep on &on, on Saturday and Sunday mornings with out getting out of bed till noon to 'over-compensate' this...

"For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy day, a sabbath of complete rest to the Lord; whoever does any work on it shall be put to death-Holy bible Exodus 35.2; So this is not a new phenomenon. Also this is not just limited to the western world. I can see this process very much in India and other eastern countries too. In the Middle-east this is TF (Thursday-Friday syndrome) rather than FSS...

One of the problems with this WEWD cycle specially for a full time worker (ie from Monday- Friday 9:00-17:00) is that everything comes to a halt after 5:00pm during week days. The only time they can do the shopping and other activities like Banking, post office etc is on Saturday. Thank god, in the last few years because of the Sunday Trading Act(a UK law governing a shop's right to trade on a Sunday) bigger shops open for 6 hours on Sundays.

It seems that in UK all we know is Monday morning ie starting a new week and before we realise it is Friday and then the same WEWD cycle. How fast time moves....or is it just normal? I remember recently reading an article on time. 'Clock time' may be about minutes and hours, but 'Real Time' is down to how we experience it, which differs from person to person depending on what we're doing.

A child's school day(9:00-15:30) is like a 20-hour day for an adult. Children are experiencing everything for the first time, all their experiences are new. They also have an incredibly intense vision of the world, an amazing fresh perception. Children are amazingly awake to the world around us, so it seems time passes slowly for them. This is Perceptual theory first put forward William James. Also according to the theory of relativity, time is related to a lot of factors; its not absolute. So I think its all about our perception.

I remember as a child everything seems to be going slow especially each academic year at school. Everyone will be waiting for the summer holidays in each academic year and when we are through a few weeks (into the holidays) , think that the time is going slow and that we want to get back to the new year at school (for new books, new labels, new uniform , pen/pencils etc etc), some how as an adult we have fewer new experiences and so probably time goes too fast. Older people also tend to have fewer new experiences and this may be a reason why it feels like time is going fast.....It may be that Children don't have much responsibility and so feel like there is more time. Also an year is a long period for a child while for an adult it is too short!

If you have a meeting in London, rather than driving (though I love driving), its always better to take a train as one can get some work done or may be meet new people. In a long haul flight we can get 'more time' than our next seat sleeping passenger if we do something, even reading a book/ news paper.

So change your daily routines, bring in novelty, have new experiences. For example if you are an early riser try to do more at night and sleep late. For me who is a late sleeper and a late riser the best advice to follow would be....as the old saying goes..Early to bed and early to rise makes a man (and woman) healthy, wealthy, wise and may be slow down time too!!!