You know how it is. Saturday is a blissful day. You get some exercise. Do chores around the house. Spend time with family, friends, and/or pets. You go out Saturday night. And then, it’s Sunday morning. And you know that Sunday leads inevitably to Monday. And on Monday that to-do list will rear its head again. Suddenly, you want to bury your head under your pillow and hope it all goes away.
That’s the Sunday scaries.
They’re common, but luckily, they’re not inevitable.
WHAT ARE THE ‘SUNDAY SCARIES?’
The cloud of dread hanging over you on Sunday evening; the wave of anxious anticipation you feel ahead of a new week; the cold sweat you get thinking about Monday. These feelings have a name: the “Sunday scaries.”
There’s a line in Haruki Murakami’s sprawling novel, 1Q84, that encapsulates the subtle dread many people feel as the weekend wraps up: “Time flows in strange ways on Sundays,” he writes, “and sights become mysteriously distorted.” From worry to being overwhelmed to straight-up sadness, these “distortions” are depressingly common.
In 2023 LinkedIn surveyed 2,000 U.S. workers and found that 75% experience Sunday scaries. And while it may seem like workers have long-dreaded the end of the weekend (look no further than Garfield’s disdain for Mondays as cultural evidence), LinkedIn’s research suggests that the extent to which workers currently experience the Sunday scaries is, in fact, and on the rise.
WHAT CAUSES THE SUNDAY SCARIES?
To beat the Sunday Scaries, you have to start by understanding why they happen. Then, there are a few things you can do that will not only help you to enjoy your Sunday, but also hit Monday morning excited to get to work. Here are a few causes of the Sunday scaries:
1. Economic and job fears
Among those who face the Sunday scaries in 2023, 74% said their feelings increased because of economic uncertainty; 37% said they worsened because they are more overwhelmed at work than ever before; and 31% blamed their fear of a potential recession.
LinkedIn career expert Andrew McCaskill admits that he was surprised by how common pre-workweek anxiety is. “However, there are tons of employees who are feeling burned out,” he says. “And most recently, there has been a sense of economic uncertainty, so it makes sense that this critical mass of people are feeling Sunday scaries.”
LinkedIn is not alone in observing heightened anxiety among workers. Meditation app Headspace recently found that nearly 30% of users have a hard time sleeping nearly four nights per week out of fear of losing their job.
“Research has shown a correlation between economic uncertainty and stress, so this concept isn’t necessarily new,” says Dr. Dana Udall, chief clinical officer of Headspace Health. “However, what is unique in today’s current environment is the compound effect of multiple global crises coming to a head at once—the global pandemic, political unrest, rising inflation, and economic instability to name a few. All of these factors can impact how we show up in the workplace—and ultimately our overall mental health.”
2. Reflection
McCaskill also says that the rise in pre-workweek anxiety could also be traced back to the first few years of the pandemic, when people had time to pause and reflect on the role that work plays in their life. He wonders if perhaps this opportunity to pause, much like the pause many of us enjoy over the weekend, has allowed for reflection’s evil twin—anxiety—to sneak in.
But if reflecting on your job and your career causes anxiety, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pause and take a break. But it might mean that it’s time to look at the root of that anxiety.
3. Avoidance motivation
The Sunday scaries are a form of “anticipatory anxiety,” according to Steven Meyers, a clinical psychologist and professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago. That’s why concerns might creep in as you consider the upcoming week. At some level, worrying about future events is human nature. Stress is the emotion you naturally experience when your brain engages “avoidance motivation.”
Whenever there is some noxious or dangerous thing in your environment, your motivational system wants to help you avoid that bad thing. While the potential calamity still lurks in your environment, you experience fear, stress, and anxiety. But prolonged anxiety can lead to chronic stress, which increases your risk of health problems including depression, heart disease, digestive problems, sleep issues, and more.
The Sunday Scaries happen when you think of your work primarily in terms of the avoidance of bad outcomes. You might be concerned that your boss will get angry at you, that a client will leave, or that a key task will fall through the cracks.
4. Monday’s reputation
Hating Monday is practically a national pastime—even among those who love their work. Ben Brooks—a New York-based city career coach and founder of career management technology Pilot—previously told Fast Company, “There’s a bit of a collective conscience that Mondays suck.”
Social media also perpetuates the idea that Mondays are a drag. Over time, we internalize this narrative, and we miscalculate the negative effects of a new week. In his bestselling book, Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote, “we overestimate how happy we will be on our birthdays, we underestimate how happy we will be on Monday mornings, and we make these mundane but erroneous predictions again and again, despite their regular disconfirmation.”
The key word here is “predictions.” A survey published in the Journal of Cognition and Emotion found that day-of-the-week stereotypes (like the Sunday blues and T.G.I.F.) were most powerful when people predicted their moods for each day of the upcoming week. The stereotypes were least apparent in the moods they actually experienced on each day.
7 WAYS TO BEAT BACK THE SUNDAY SCARIES
So you know what’s behind your Sunday scaries — that’s the first step. But what can you actually do about it?
Check out these additional tips below:
1. Plan your Mondays in advance
McCaskill recommends workers take their beginning-of-the-week-experiences into their own hands by organizing their Monday schedules in advance, blocking off time to ease into the week, and creating opportunities for connection.
“Take breaks, have that lunch with the person at work that you really enjoy speaking to, go for a walk, get a change of scenery if possible,” he says. “You’re entitled to feel how you feel, but you also have a lot of agency in managing your Monday experience, too.”
The flip side of anticipatory anxiety is looking forward to an upcoming event. Whenever possible, schedule something uplifting on Monday, whether it’s a spin class or a coffee date. For added benefits, spend time with friends and family. When researchers from Rochester University studied the “weekend effect,” they learned that autonomy and connectedness influenced the higher levels of well-being that people report on Saturday and Sunday. Making social plans can extend those good weekend vibes into the workweek.
2. Keep a running to-do list throughout the week
Part of the reason that your brain keeps reminding you of all the things you need to do on Monday involves something called the Zeigarnik effect. When you have a goal that you haven’t yet completed, information about that goal remains easy to think about, because your brain wants to help you complete that goal. That helps you to remember what you have to do.
One way to help quiet those internal reminders of what you have to accomplish is to keep a good to-do list and to update it frequently throughout the week. If you develop the habit of keeping an agenda and to consult it when it is time to decide what task to engage with next, then you learn that you don’t need to keep all of the tasks you’re juggling in mind. That frees you up to think about different things on the weekend.
3. Practice disconnecting from work
A big reason why the weekend can be stressful is because most of us have been convinced — by ourselves, by our employer, or by our hustle-culture society — that the world might fall apart if we don’t work long hours and take care of the tasks in front of us. And if you don’t make steady progress on your work, then there might very well be some significant consequences to that.
Nonetheless, working long hours during the week won’t necessarily make you more productive, and worrying about the work you haven’t done yet on weekends certainly won’t make you more productive on Monday.
Start by making a pact with yourself to work when you’re at work and to not work when you’re not. Then, rather than starting by trying to get through a whole weekend without worrying about work, start just with one night during the week. Leave your phone plugged in out of sight. Stay off your computer. Discover that all of the things you had to do when you left work in the evening are still there in the morning, and the world (and your business) did not end.
Gradually expand that practice to two nights and more. Eventually, step away from your work on Sundays as well. After all, the Sunday Scaries are all about the sense that there is a real threat in your environment. If you learn that time away from work does not cause catastrophe, then eventually, you can have more peaceful weekends.
4. Add joy to your Sundays
Treating yourself well on Sunday can help you feel better about Monday. Peggy Neu, president of The Monday Campaigns—a nonprofit public health program connected with Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Syracuse Universities—suggests a Sunday night S.E.L.F. Care plan. Neu told NBC news that the method includes the following:
- Serenity—a form of relaxation, like meditation or deep breathing
- Exercise—anything from yoga to running
- Love—expressing gratitude
- Food—eating nutrient-rich foods high in vitamin B6 and avoiding caffeine and alcohol.
To address the Sunday scaries, Udall—perhaps unsurprisingly—recommends mindfulness, meditation, practicing gratitude, and seeking therapy. But she also recommends taking breaks from the news, and even work, when necessary.
“If your job requires you to regularly interact with the news, it can be helpful to schedule time to intentionally disconnect,” she says. “Spend these breaks doing something that fuels and restores you, whether that’s talking with friends, making a cup of tea, or going on a walk.”
Consider what would make Sundays better for you personally: Do you need a day dedicated to relaxation? Or are you someone who might benefit from a Sunday activity to look forward to? If you’ve always dedicated Sunday to chores and Saturday to fun, consider spreading the negative and the positive out between both days. If you make it so you look forward to Sundays, you’ll focus less on having to work the next day.
5. Focus on the positives
The central cause of the Sunday Scaries, of course, is the engagement of avoidance motivation. Another way to calm that down is to focus instead on approach motivation. Focus yourself on the beautiful, wonderful, desirable things you can accomplish at work. Remind yourself of important positive outcomes you have achieved.
When you succeed in achieving some positive outcome, you experience joy, happiness, and satisfaction. And when there is some desirable thing on the horizon for you, then you experience excitement and anticipation.
If you focus on the amazing things you can accomplish at work, the colleagues you enjoy seeing, and the benefits of success, then you engage your approach motivation. That quiets your avoidance system. It also leads to the prospect that you might actually be excited to get to work on Monday morning rather than dreading it for the entire weekend.
Who knows, you might even get to the point where you wake up at the start of the week thinking TGIM.
6. Explore the source of your anxiety
The Sunday blues often feature a mental script of regrets from the past week, like “I should have finished that report,” or worries about an upcoming meeting, presentation, or deadline. Instead of dwelling, psychiatrist Vania Manipod recommends identifying and challenging each negative thought. “For example,” she writes in an article for Self, “You’re just anxious because you want to do a good job and you will.”
Addressing the source of your anxiety also allows you to tackle it head on and write a new mental script. A Gwen Moran previously reported for Fast Company, “Think about the benefits of your job or the parts you like. Think about your income and how it provides for you and your family. Think about how your chores and errands contribute to your quality of life.”
7. Consider a change
If none of the above tips seem to be working, you may need a longer-term approach to your Sunday scaries. When you think about the sources of your anxiety or try to think of the positive aspects of your job there’s always a chance you’ll realize that it is your current work situation that’s the problem—not what day of the week it is.
Did your Sunday scaries start after some change at work made your daily tasks feel insurmountable? Do you fear you might be in a toxic work environment? Maybe you’ve been in your role for a few years and it’s become boring rather than challenging. These are just some of the signs that it’s time for you to start looking for a new job or searching for solutions to a problem at your current one.
Art Markman and Aytekin Tank also contributed writing, reporting, and/or advice to this article.
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