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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is to celebrate your golden hours. That is, the hours after work and before bed.

These evening hours can be hard to use well.

But time is time, and with a little intention, these hours can be a favorite part of the week.

So I hear from many people about their time, and I know that the hours after work and before bed can be a particular pain point.

For many parents of young kids, this second shift can feel like

a slog of feeding and bathing people and trying to convince them to go to bed so you can do it all

over again the next day. For other folks, the evening can fill with mindless screen time, and nothing more memorable than the

knowledge that the day ended eventually. Not all time can be bliss, of course, but these post-work hours

comprise a reasonable proportion of people's leisure and family time.

If you are home from work at 5.30 p.m. and in bed at 10.30 p.m., that is 20 hours spread

over Monday to Thursday. That's a lot of time to spend unintentionally or worse, wishing

it away. But what if we reimagine this time as our golden

hours? What if we saw them as a potential source of pleasure? Not in some future time, but

now. I do think it is possible and even a little planning can go a long way toward changing the experience of time.

The phrase golden hour is often used in photography to describe that hour around sunset

when the light makes everyone look good. But I also like the connotations of golden years, a phrase describing an era of active leisure

and family time after a period of hard work. Golden years come in retirement, but golden hours

could happen every day. I think this potential rebranding can be helpful for switching up our mindset.

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