What Are “Sunday Horror Stories” and How to Defeat Them?
You probably know this feeling: the evening before you return to work or school after a two-day (or longer) vacation, you begin to feel anxious. You can’t focus, you can’t sleep, and you find yourself imagining all the stressful or annoying things that are waiting for you at work next week. Welcome to Sunday Horror Stories.
While the name sounds cute, “Sunday Scarecrows” is actually a form of what’s called ” anticipatory anxiety ,” a generalized feeling of fear and worry about things that haven’t happened yet—things that might happen in the future. This does not apply to Sunday; it can hit you any night before you have to go back to work or school. And it’s incredibly common—about 80 percent of Americans have experienced this sense of impending doom the night before before returning to their day job.
People usually report a growing feeling of depression and anxiety during the day, culminating in a dreary evening spent in anxiety. There are often physical symptoms, including headaches, nausea, agitation, and poor sleep, which combine to ensure that Monday mornings are terrible, justifying your concern. If any of this sounds familiar to you, it’s time to take control of the Sunday Scares and learn how to manage them, if not banish them completely.
What are Sunday horror stories?
Your first step to a life without Sunday horror stories is to understand the mechanics of it. There are two fundamental things going on here:
- Feeling of diminishing opportunity. “Sunday Scarecrows” is essentially the emotional opposite of “Thank God it’s Friday.” If Fridays represent the end of our labors and the beginning of a great period of free time, then Sundays represent the opposite. And this feeling of hours getting shorter is partly responsible for the fact that we cannot enjoy this time, because it already seems lost. You’ve skidded off the runway and are about to crash into work or that awful class at 8am.
- negative assumption. You assume that the upcoming work week or class schedule will be terrible. You may have good reason to believe this, but again, this is an anticipatory alarm. None of the bad things you imagine actually happened.
It’s one thing to know how tired you are of Sunday horror stories, but how do you actually deal with them?
Identify the source of concern
The first step is to deal with your anxiety and ask yourself what you are worried about. For some people, this will be very specific—perhaps you have a weekly meeting with a stressed boss, an unpleasant weekly assignment that looms large, or a first morning class that you struggle with. Narrowing down the exact cause of your anxiety will arm you with information that you can use to dispel your fear.
For some, Sunday horror stories have more to do with Sunday than Monday. If you dedicate your Fridays and Saturdays to rest and load your Sundays with housework, it robs you of time you could use to relax and catch your breath, leaving you feeling like you’re rushing through your Sunday and unprepared for what’s to come. happening. coming.
For others, there is no specific reason. Your whole job might suck, or your high school career might turn into a mess in your class schedule. But knowing this is still useful because there are strategies you can use to deal with it.
How to reduce your Sunday fears
Once you’ve identified the cause of your Sunday night anxiety, there are some steps you can take to curb it:
Make your Sundays better
You may not be using your Sundays well. If you’ve filled Sunday with to-dos and to-do lists, try re-arranging them and freeing up time for rest, especially at night. Dealing with anxiety often involves the same strategies as trying to improve sleep: you need to calm down and reset your brain a bit.
Also consider adding some “growth time” to your Sundays by learning a new skill, pursuing a hobby, or reading about a topic that interests you. The feeling of accomplishment will be very pleasant and relaxing. If you are busy but not crazy, your mind will also be busy on Sunday, which can help keep it from chasing the same red flags over and over again.
Change your schedule
If your Sunday horror stories are related to a specific event in the coming week, see if you can change something. Scared to meet your boss on a Monday morning? Ask to be rescheduled for another day. Calling the class first? Consider dropping it and switching to another time.
This is also the time to think about work-life balance. With the advent of remote work, many people struggle with the line between work and personal time – when you’re constantly scrolling through your work email, are you really “off”? This stress exacerbates Sunday fears, so try to set clear work-life boundaries, starting by never checking work email after hours.
Make a plan
If you can’t avoid stressful situations at work or school, you can make a plan to deal with them. Instead of viewing your Monday (or the entire week ahead) as a frothy soup of vague fear, sit down and think about how you’re going to handle this terrible meeting or how you’re going to prepare for this terrible presentation or project. Having a plan will reduce your stress levels and help you be in better control of the situation.
Live clean bro
If you’re living for the weekend, you may be inadvertently triggering the Sunday Alert. A hangover is never pleasant, but spending your Sunday breastfeeding blues can set off a chain reaction of self-hatred and regret because you may feel like you’ve wasted your entire day. If you recognize this pattern, by pushing back on the Saturday bacchanalia a bit, you will make your Sundays more lucid and productive, which in turn will lessen the feeling that you just threw an entire day of your life in the trash.
Consider making bigger changes
Finally, if you have seriously considered all your options and tried several ways to reduce stress at the end of the weekend with no success, you can consider the nuclear option: change jobs, change specialties, or otherwise change some of the other fundamental factors. aspect of your life.
If you decide more significant changes are needed, use what you’ve learned about your Sunday horror stories to avoid similar scenarios in the future. If there are aspects of your job that you fear, look for a job and office culture that doesn’t include those things. If you have lost sleep due to class work, consider whether you are working correctly. In other words, look at this as an opportunity to forget about Sunday horror stories forever.