THAT'S MEN:Sisyphus, as most of us know, was a mythological character punished for his deceits and treacheries by being obliged to push a boulder up a hill. Zeus, who had a good many reasons to dislike Sisyphus, arranged that the boulder would run down the hill whenever he had almost got it to the top, and so Sisyphus had to begin the task again and again and for all I know is still out there somewhere, pushing that boulder up that hill.
If so, he has company. As January rolls on, I expect a many of us feel like Sisyphus as we confront the same overwhelming list of tasks again and again.
The philosopher Albert Camus concluded that Sisyphus must be happy as he goes on striving for the summit. I am not so sure about that when it comes to the rest of us. Pushing the boulder up the hill may give some sort of justification to our lives – especially for men who often equate work with self-worth – but the experience probably brings more “overwhelm” than happiness.
I thought of our modern boulder rollers when reading a CNN interview with Dr Matthew Sleeth, a former A&E doctor who has written a book, 24/6: A Prescription for a Healthier, Happier Life ( iti.ms/S2puuP).
Dr Sleeth’s radical recommendation is that everybody should take one whole day off work every week. He calls this a “stop day”. That’s the day you stop pushing that boulder.
He points out that in the West we had about 2,000 years of not working on a Sunday until a few decades ago when working 24/7 became the lot of more and more people.
He believes we are making ourselves sick with depression and anxiety when we refuse to switch off. He also believes increases in diabetes and obesity are linked to our body’s continuous production of adrenalin and stress-related steroids.
If he were to take somebody into a hospital and give them a big shot of adrenalin, that person would feel physically “wiped out” a hour or so later and would stay that way for the day. But that, he argues, is exactly what too many of us are doing to ourselves by buying into our “always-on” work culture. Having a “stop day” gives the system a chance to recuperate and makes for a better quality of life.
He insists that if you know you are going to have one day without work in the week you will plan around it and things will not fall apart. When his family adopted this approach about 10 years ago his kids, even as they went through college, saw to it that the adults took their “stop days”.
“I have many people that I’ve talked to now that have said that keeping one day of rest a week has been the single best thing they’ve done for their marriage, their family and their spiritual relationship,” he told CNN.
I know many people take their Saturdays and Sundays off unfailingly and don’t really know what the fuss is about. I also know that people who are out of work and desperately want to be in employment might wish they had the problems I am writing about.
All the same, the number of people living and working in a state of “overwhelm” is on the way up, it seems to me, and if that boulder is going to keep rolling down that hill, maybe they – “we”, I should really say – need to step back and work as hard at taking a “stop day” every week as we do at our endless tasks.
As for Sisyphus, I guess he’d be better off if he let the boulder run down the hill and just walked away. But he can’t of course, because he’s got this boulder to get to the top and he’s way behind deadline. Gotta keep going.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@yahoo.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy
