Many people apply the binge approach to bring about lasting change or finding lasting fulfillment, an approach that rarely works.
I have never been a fan of binge drinking and don’t recall doing it too often. The reason is a practical one— for me, it takes the fun out of the experience and leads to a lot of wasted time in the form of recovering from the whole ordeal, leaving me fatigued instead of feeling rejuvenated.
Going on a binge of any sort comes with the risk of not feeling too good at the end of it as you are basically trying to do a lot of something in a very short span of time.
Even if you binge drink, you aren’t going to have a buzz for the whole week.
When you binge watch a TV series, you seldom remember all the episodes that you saw.
Many people apply the binge approach to bring about lasting change or finding lasting fulfillment, an approach that rarely works.
The concept of bingeing extends into another term - ‘weekend warriors’. It refers to someone who tries to compensate for what they can’t do on weekdays and goes overboard with a particular activity during the weekends. It can be fitness, some side-hustle, travel, partying.
On some level, all of us are weekend warriors to a certain degree. There are things that we can do only during the weekends when the weight of the weekday and responsibilities are not weighing down on us.
Consider this — a half marathon is 21 km.
If you manage to break it up across six days, with one day for rest, it’s 3.5 km a day.
On the other hand, if you wake up one fine Saturday and decide to run 21 km without much preparation, you will probably huff and puff after a couple of km and nurse a terribly sore body for a few days. It really isn’t a feasible idea.
In the same vein, having a peg a day may offer you more relaxation than finishing a bottle over the weekend. This is not a prescription, just an observation.
We face a similar problem when we read a book or listen to a podcast that spurs us to change something. That’s also why many motivational seminars, workshops, and offsites don’t reap the desired results — people expect to find solutions to everything that is troubling them over a weekend or in a few hours. Once back in the real world, the motivation to do the hard work of change becomes all too real and the effort involved, seemingly too much.
Of course, weekdays are different from weekends and holidays. Many people painstakingly plan their vacations months in advance and their relaxed state of mind dissipates the moment they step back into office.
Seth Godin put it beautifully when he said: “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”
It’s something we can all work towards.
