Mondays Are For Worrying About STDs

Next time a coworker appears to have a “case of the Mondays,” remember that they aren’t necessarily bummed out about being back at work; There’s a good chance they’re just preoccupied by the burning sensation in their pants. A new study found that after their weekly acts of debauchery on Friday and Saturday, people become concerned about the STDs they might have picked up on Mondays.

Previously, Danish researchers found that people have more unprotected sex on Fridays and Saturdays, and calls to an AIDS/STD hotline in the country peak on Mondays. According to MSNBC, the researchers assumed people only waited days to call the hotline because it wasn’t open on the weekends. However, a new study found that visits to a website about sexual health also surge on Mondays, even though it’s available anytime.

Maastricht University researchers tracked the number of visits to the website SOATEST, which provides information about whether people should seek STD testing, and it always got the most hits on Monday. The only exception was when a holiday fell on a Monday, in which case visits peaked on Tuesday. The researchers hypothesize that even if people start worrying about contracting a disease immediately, they like to “sleep on” the decision to get checked out and only seek information when the work week starts.

The researcher hope that this finding will lead counseling services to add more staffers on Mondays, and say future studies should focus on how to get people to address possible health risks more quickly. However, it may be hard to make people face reality on Sundays, when their instinct is to hide under their covers all day.