Hopefully you don’t know the feeling, but chances are you do: 76% of Americans suffer from what has been called “the Sunday scaries.” It starts for most of us as we leave our live-in-the-moment childhoods behind and begin to plan for the future, to study for our SATs, get into a good university, find a good job, and do well at it.
It’s then that we begin to reroute our ancient fight-or-flight wiring to focus our anxiety instead on those intangible workplace what ifs: “What if my boss doesn’t like the work I turned in last week?” “What if that look I got means I’m about to be laid off?” “Did I forget to file that one bit of important paperwork on Friday?”
However it works, many of us are already “at work” in our heads when Sunday afternoon rolls in. And while there’s nothing wrong with a little anxiety, it’s a major shame when a quarter of your free time off is wasted worrying about something that won’t happen until the next day. So here are some tips for taking back Sunday.
1. A Friday list for Monday– Let the last thing you do at work on Friday be to compile a list of things that need to get done on Monday. This will let you leave the office feeling totally on top of things, and if you’ve been thorough you’ll soon take heart in the notion that Friday You has Monday You’s back, so Sunday You can get around to the important work of having fun and relaxing.
2. Feed your five senses– Since Sunday is probably your last free day for a week, go out in style. Do something you could only do with a full free day. And go somewhere that will infiltrate and stimulate all five of your senses in a way that working in an office (or sitting at home worrying about working in an office) never can. Let your senses take over, and even your anxiety will get distracted by the sense of in-the-moment immediacy you’re feeling.
3. See friends– Talk about great distractions. See you friends, talk to them about your Sunday scaries. They’ll either relate, and you’ll both laugh it off, or they’ll think you’re weird… and you’ll both laugh it off. Spending too much time inside your head is where the Sunday scaries come from, and nobody pulls us out of our heads better than our best friends.
4. Push worrying off– This takes a little presence of mind, but remind yourself that your Sunday worrying is an indulgence that isn’t helping anyone. Knowing that’s the case, simply make an arrangement with your anxiety to deal with all that later in the day, maybe after you make a nice dinner while holding a glass of wine, maybe even until after you tuck into bed. You still get to spend some time with creative worrying, but if you put it off it doesn’t get to strip your Sunday of the carefree moments you need to thrive on during the week.
5. Have more fun during the week – If you can, stop treating your weekdays like you owe them to your company, and stop trying to jam in every bit of fun and relaxation you have planned into just Saturday and Sunday. Most of us get off of work fairly early in the evening: if you’re not too beat from the workday, go out to a movie, a nice dinner, miniature golf, a walk on the beach. Use a few of your weeknight hours every week for the kind of thing you might reserve for the weekend, and suddenly the five-day workweek doesn’t seem like such a shot of gloom and doom.
6. Accept that the weekend is over– Here’s where we get real. Weekends are wonderful, and freedom is wonderful. In our modern lives, we’re given just enough freedom to remember how it tastes before we have to return to our responsible adult lives. And when the weekend is over, it may be unavoidable that a melancholy overcomes us, but it doesn’t get to take us down. Because we’re adults, we can deal with this, work is hardly a situation to fear, and – guess what – there’s another weekend just around the corner, maybe even the one where you reach your peak.
