A few weeks ago, a friend of mine mentioned an expression in passing that I had never heard before. We had been talking about our classes, and I mentioned how stressed I sometimes get on Sunday nights knowing that I have unfinished assignments due the next day and a busy week ahead of me.
“Yeah, Sunday scaries,” she said. “I get them too.”
When I asked what she meant by the phrase, she explained that the Sunday scaries are the anxious feelings people get as the weekend winds down and people realize that they have to transition back into going to school or work on Monday. I knew exactly what she meant — I had been getting the Sunday scaries since high school, but at the time I did not know what to call them. Now, I did. It felt incredibly validating to have the language to describe this experience and to be able to talk about it with someone who had gone through the same thing.
As it turns out, there are a number of phrases that describe this phenomenon: the Sunday blues, Sunday evening feeling, Sunday syndrome — take your pick. They are characterized by feelings of dread and unease that typically kick in around four or five pm and build as the night goes on. Sunday scaries are also extremely common; a LinkedIn survey found that as many as 80% of Americans find themselves struggling with anxiety on Sunday nights.
According to psychologist Susan Albers, the primary cause of the Sunday scaries is the anticipatory anxiety people feel about the coming work or school week and loss of freedom involved with attending to those responsibilities. The Sunday scaries also stem from a belief that the weekend was “wasted” if you were not productive enough or unable to have as much fun as you wanted. When I get the Sunday scaries, I sometimes make the problem worse by getting upset with myself for being upset in the first place; I recognize that my anxiety about the coming school week is ruining my evening, and I become frustrated with my inability to calm myself down, triggering an additional layer of anxiety that makes the situation even worse.
Luckily, there are a number of steps that can be taken to minimize or avoid the Sunday scaries. The Cleveland Clinic recommends creating a fun Sunday night routine to turn the final hours of the weekend into something to look forward to rather than something to fear. This could include creating art, watching a favorite TV show or spending time with friends, basically anything that makes you happy.
Another suggestion for managing the Sunday scaries is challenging anxious thoughts and replacing them with positive ones. This article from Healthline is a good place to start if you are looking for further information on this technique. You may also consider relieving excess nerves by exercising or by going to bed early, so you can bring your A-game on Monday. Healthline encourages making a to-do list and brainstorming solutions to problems that are contributing to your anxiety. This allows you to take control of the situation and develop actionable steps to address the source of your fear. In addition to thinking about solutions that might be of use to you in the future, reflect on what you have already accomplished over the past two days. It is important to give yourself credit for the work that you did instead of only considering your shortcomings. Often, you may have accomplished more than you realize: sure, you didn’t quite finish that Bio assignment, but you did manage to catch up on laundry and sleep, and that’s something to celebrate!
Another recommended action is keeping your Monday workload light. This helps make the transition from relaxation to work mode less extreme and therefore less unpleasant.
It is important to acknowledge that although this advice holds true in most cases, the Sunday scaries may be indicative of a deeper issue. Feeling fear and dread at the start of each school or work week may be a sign that you have stretched yourself too thin. If you are overbooked and are experiencing anxiety over everything you have to do, you should consider lightening your load.
My biggest takeaways are that the Sunday scaries are A). very common and B). in our power to control. If you experience them, you are in good company. And if you, like me, are just now learning the words to describe an all-too familiar feeling, I hope this article makes that feeling a little more manageable and a little easier to talk about.