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If you’ve ever felt the existential dread of Sunday night before returning to work, you know how deeply unpleasant the experience can be. In this article, I will walk you through some things you can try, so that you may feel less anxious and more in control.

There are three basic steps to this process, outlined in more detail in the following sections:

1. Recognise what’s happening
2. Learn key concepts to deal more effectively
3. Take tiny, meaningful actions

Ready? Let’s begin the journey toward a better week ahead!

1. Recognise what happens between weekend and work

There is a specific relationship between dread and anxiety, which if left unheeded, can lead to panic attacks, shutting down, or other unwanted states. This sets you up poorly for the day (and week) ahead.

Of course we know this. And knowing this can be part of what we might be fearing when the Sunday night fright strikes.

However, the better you can understand and recognise what specifically happens to you in the liminal hours between weekend and work, the more empowered you will be to recognise and rerail the process at its many inflection points.

Before I broke free from my own vicious cycle, this was my typical Sunday night pattern:

1. I would think about the work week ahead, which prompted a sense of impending doom
2. This prolonged and unexamined feeling of dread led to a low-level anxiety attack
3. For me, anxiety attacks typically mean nausea, which led to sleep issues
4. Therefore, I would wake up feeling terrible, unrested and unprepared to face work
5. This reinforced my belief that my fears were founded, leading me to worry when next Sunday rolled around

Small activity: What is your typical Sunday night pattern? Write it out, make a sketch or verbalise what is happening for you as you feel Sunday night dread. Also list any thoughts or feelings you have.

Surfacing the bigger pieces of my pattern was useful, but digging even deeper uncovered more insights.

Your experience may vary here, but in my case, I discovered that what this was really about: resisting my sadness.

• I was sad about the weekend being over. (This was the literal state of things.)
• I was sad about the end of fun and the start of work. (This was what the weekend being over symbolised for me.)
• I was sad about the current state of my life, opportunities missed, not feeling seen in my role, and burning out. (This was the broader, existential meaning of my situation.)

Because I was feeling these things and I didn’t want to be feeling them, I resisted all of it.

Resistance is a fundamental mismatch of feeling and action

Resistance is a form of cognitive and emotional dissonance. It is an unwillingness to accept something. You might feel this way when you are wishing that something was different about:

• The current time or place, “I don’t want to be here.”
• The situation, e.g., going to bed and facing the week.
• The current state of things, “This is not what I signed up for.”
• A truth revealed, e.g., ignoring or denying something said, the time on the clock.

In my case, I didn’t want to accept that it was Sunday night (time), in an expensive, cold rented house (place and state), facing the unconsciousness of sleep that would pass like a flash before heading to work (situation). Evidence of this truth was all around me, but it was made explicit in various ways, such as:

• Seeing my screen switch into nighttime mode.
• When my partner said, “The film is 2 hours long and it’s already 8:30. If we start it, we should watch half and finish the rest later in the week.”
• Receiving a text from a family member asking how my weekend was.

However, things started to get much better once I allowed myself to feel sad.

Allowing a feeling is essentially the same as stopping the resistance. Put another way, letting feelings happen is part of what it means to accept things as they are.

Two questions you can ask yourself right now:

1. What, if anything, am I not allowing myself to feel?
2. What, if anything, could I accept about my situation?

2. How to accept; letting go of resistance

First, notice what you are feeling, including any resistance to it. Befriend the idea that you dislike the state of things. Noticing and appreciating that you don’t like something can be part of acceptance, too.

You may never get to liking Sunday nights and that’s ok.

The goal may not actually be to change your opinions or feelings about the end of the weekend, but rather to be able to get much better at dealing with your feelings around this (or about any other dread-inducing sitation).

Try this thought experiment:

What if you let your dread be as big as possible?

Sometimes when we give ourselves space to wallow in the awfulness of a situation, we get a truer sense of how big it actually is.

With space to expand, you find out what you’re dealing with.

Maybe it’s massive. Maybe it only feels much bigger than it is. Regardless, accurate sizing can be useful information.

It’s yea big, now what?

Sit with it.

Reflect on the size of this problem, now that you’ve given it room to expand.

“Sitting with it” may not feel like anything at all, but it is useful work. Acceptance doesn’t like to be rushed.

The difference you may experience after reflecting for a moment may only amount to a small shift. Don’t discount it; that’s meaningful progress.

A small shift can look like this:

• Feeling kinda bored
• Starting to get annoyed or impatient
• Questioning yourself, “what am doing now?” or ”what’s the point of this?”

Regardless of what that thought or feeling is, notice that it’s different from where you started out. That’s the shift.

You may now be in a place to take some action, however small.

3. What you can do to deal with Sunday night dread

Below are several strategies to try. See what works for you and adapt the examples and ideas to your situation.

Start by identifying the source of the dread

What specifically brings about feelings of dread? Once you know that, you can start addressing it.

Make a list of what brings about your unwanted feelings. Be specific as possible.

Maybe it’s, “I hate knowing that it’s the longest time possible before Friday again.”

Or, “I don’t want to engage in the small talk with my coworkers about how the weekend went.”

Perhaps it’s something like, “The incompetence I feel when I’m reminded of the work responsibilities I currently have, which I’d forgotten about over the weekend.”

Whatever the sources are, list as many of them as possible.

If you spot any themes, patterns, or a ranking order to your list items, note that too.

Notice any judgement about what you are experiencing

Judgement often happens as a mental habit — deeply worn thought-grooves we easily slide down — but it is not helpful or necessary. Judgement can sound like:

• “I shouldn’t feel this bitter about heading to work tomorrow.”
• “Other people love their jobs; what does it say about me that I’m feeling this way?”
• “I hate myself for feeling this angry.”

Note that the last example is an expression of a meta-emotion — feelings we have about feelings. It’s similar to saying, “I feel shame about feeling angry.”

All of these thoughts listed above contain judgements — that we should feel, be, or act different from how we currently are. Judgements are subtle forms of self-inflicted pain and they are an optional kind of suffering.

For now, simply notice the judgement. Spotting it is a huge part of beginning to slide into more productive grooves of thought.

Take tiny actions to improve your Mondays

Incorporating small delights into your days doesn’t make the bad parts go away, but it does temper them a little. And gives you something to look forward to at various points during the day.

Here are some ways I improve my Monday experience:

• As a rule, I don’t book meetings on a Monday. Sometimes that’s not possible, but when a meeting must happen, I recognise that A) it’s an exception to the rule, and B) I’m choosing to make that exception. This gives me more feelings of control and autonomy over how I spend my time and the demands of others.
• I changed the delivery day of my weekly meal kit to Monday. This guarantees an easy, fresh meal that evening and having three to choose from is a delight. Side story: I’ve not historically been a fan of food delivery kits; they seemed wasteful, expensive, and extravagant. However, my life circumstances have changed and with that, meal kits have become novel, nourishing, and efficient. We actually save money that — were we in better health — we’d spend on dining out. Plus, the kit gets delivered in a free cardboard box every week, which is perfect for our upcoming move. The moral of this story: it’s sometimes worth rethinking our judgements we have about other things, too.
• Plan a weekly event, treat, or routine to bring some joy. In my house, it’s been watching the latest episode of The Last of Us. When that season ends soon, we will look forward to trying out a new Monday night event.

What can you try to make your Mondays easier and more enjoyable for yourself?

Create a mini-routine for winding down the weekend

Routines help us with transitioning from one state to another by making actions regular and effortless. Specifically, routines can help when we need to wrap-up our weekend and deliver ourselves to our desks.

Here are a few things I do to ease this transition:

• Have a writing hour. I was surprised to discover that Sunday evening is an excellent time for me to write for my blog or Medium, this article being a case in point. Sometimes, however, I simply make lists, journal, or organise content. It’s an activity that provides a good bridge between the creative free-for-all of a weekend and the content-with-purpose activities of the workdays.
• Take a weekend walk or some other light activity. This allows me to release some of the anxiety and reflect on things, which in turn sets me up for a better night’s sleep.
• Do a wind-down routine. For me, it involves making tea, listening to a podcast, and setting out my clothes for the next day.

What activities might be a nice fit for that liminal space in between weekend fun and work-like tasks?

Also create a mini-routine for starting your week strong

Having a lightweight, easy structure to follow first thing Monday morning means you don’t have to think too hard as you ease into the week.

It’s having rails you can whoosh down, like a rollercoaster.

I always start my week with a 15-minute review of my yearly goals, current projects, and task list. This is literally a ‘scan my eyes over this’ check to see that the items I’ve marked Doing, Delay, or Delegate are still labelled correctly. And if there’s anything I can Dump, I do that here too.

Next, I plan my week using my spreadsheet, which I call the SET List. You can find out more about that and get your own free SET List template here

A Monday morning planning routine is deeply rewarding because it means I start each week feeling clear about what I’m trying to achieve. I also know that I’ve adjusted my calendar to reflect what’s realistically possible.

Do whatever works for you. It may be an exercise routine, a meditation, eating a frog, or whatever else you think could allow you get started off on the right foot.

What will you try tomorrow?

What your routines give you

Over time, these routines and practices will bring calm, clarity and some helpful structure to the transition between your weekend time and your work week.

With workable processes in place, you increase your self-belief. That’s because you demonstrate week after week that you can do things to self-sooth and that those things work well for you.

When you trust your systems, your systems become more trustworthy. Literally, your systems become more worthy of your trust. You are setting standards and meeting them.

You don’t need to consciously work on increasing your self-belief in this way; it happens naturally as a byproduct of carrying out the actions. And even if you aren’t consistent in following your routines, recognising and accepting that is progress too.

Ready for the week ahead

Even though eliminating Sunday dread is a process that takes time, you might start to see some early rapid improvements once you decide to take notice. By reading this, you’re well on your way; the shift in your thinking has already begun.

The key to keeping it going is tiny steps and small actions, giving yourself space to reflect as you go. Before long, you’ll be managing this (and other transitions) with greater resilience, slowly but surely turning these dreadfully viscious cycles into delightfully virtuous ones.