Published on 12:00 AM, May 01, 2015

Water Cooler Chronicles

Friday Chillin’

There's advice on the internet for absolutely every single thing you can think of. You've probably also been in the shoes of an advisor more than once in your life (as hard as it is to believe someone would actually take advice from a train wreck such as yourself.) Truth be told, we love giving advice and/or reading about it, but a lot of the time, we hardly ever apply it to ourselves (unless you're one of those YouTube gurus who are pretty, smart, rich, successful, talented, and basically have it all figured out.) So for the rest 99 percent, we can only hope that one or two things out of the endless lists of advice on Buzzfeed, Entrepreneur, and of course Next Step, stick with us. Rants aside, here's what I like to do best to on the first day of the weekend to turn off my brain that's been on autopilot all week.

To cool down

Sleep in, and have a late brunch (preferably at that chic new bakery-bistro in Banani that comes with a smoking zone and Wi-Fi, and makes you feel all grown-up and fashionable.) Do your brain a favour after a week of excess (i.e., days of junk food at the office canteen), and pick the tomato and cabbage salad over the white-bread grilled cheese, the nuts and dark chocolate bar over the plain milk chocolate, or the pan-fried salmon over the medium-rare sirloin – none of those gray matter-killers for you!

Take a long hot bath, take off the two-week old chipped stained nail polish, bring out the clay facial mask, do some hot oil therapy with at least three different kinds of oil, and moisturise all over until you feel like a two-month old baby. And yes, this one's for the ladies and the germs: get rid of that prepubescent stubble forming on your upper lip, it's doing you no favours.

Buy yourself that new book you've been meaning to get to – in addition to being absolutely mind-blowing it probably smells like wet grass and vanilla and everything nice; or those adorable black pumps you just gotta have – no one can spoil you better than yourself. Get back to friends and relations, at least the ones that matter – you'd be surprised how good it can actually feel to just sit down and gossip about your common frenemies. Get your significant other to give you a back-rub, and maybe, just maybe return the favour. If you don't have one, get one of the multiple small children running around the house to totter all over your back. Free massage, ah!

Saturday is not an extension of Friday

While we've all been told sleep is the best medicine in every other self-help column we've ever read, it's best to not take it to heart. How much are you supposed to sleep? What if you slow down and can't get back into your groove on Saturday, and then wake up late for work on Sunday? Personally, sleep has been a great adversary of mine – toying with my sense of duty and everything it means to be an adult. As the proverbial saying goes, you snooze you lose. So this Friday, pamper yourself with a few extra hours, but come Saturday you better have some sort of a game plan figured out. Remember, Saturday is Sunday Funday for folks on this side of the globe. You already got your beauty sleep and late brunch yesterday. Don't miss out on the one entire other day you get all to yourself before you have to say goodbye to the things you love and make way for that enormous pile of virtual documents you have to work through.

So next week we'll talk about revving up and making the most out of Saturday, because frankly there's not enough column space (and we like to take things slow.) You should also have a few ideas by now about how exactly you'd like to unwind today. It's time to love that overworked body of yours that surprisingly hasn't blown a fuse. Yet.