In this blog, Marina Love, Solution Focused Hypnotherapist at Inspired to Change Aylesbury, explores why Sunday evenings can bring a sense of dread about the week ahead. Drawing on her own experience and professional understanding of how the brain responds to stress, Marina looks at why the “Sunday Scaries” can happen even when life seems fine, and how understanding the patterns behind them can help you switch off, enjoy your weekends again and face Monday with a little more ease.
The Sunday Scaries
It’s Sunday afternoon, and instead of feeling relaxed and enjoying the moment, you feel the dread of Monday already creeping in. Lunch out with friends or family that you’d been looking forward to starts to feel like effort, and by the time evening comes round, your mind is already somewhere else, with the to-do list running in the background and the conversations you need to have playing through in your head.
It’s a familiar feeling for many people. It even has a name: the Sunday Scaries. And it’s something I hear a lot from people who, from the outside, seem to be coping just fine.
Why This Happens When Life Seems Fine
When you’re getting on with things and managing day to day, it’s easy to become very good at masking how much you’re carrying. From the outside, everything looks fine, and sometimes you don’t fully realise how much it’s taking out of you either.
There’s never really a moment where the constant drip of demands and worries feels like enough of a problem to stop and address. So, it just quietly builds under the surface, week after week, until Sunday evenings arrive and your mind, finally not fully occupied with something else, has the space to start bracing for what’s coming.
You can think of it a bit like a ‘stress bucket’. Each individual demand, worry or thing you need to think about might not seem like much on its own, but they keep adding up. By the end of the week, there can be far less space left in your stress bucket than you realise, which is why even things you’d normally enjoy can start to feel like another demand. For more on how stress builds up, Mind has helpful guidance.
I know this all too well. I used to get through the week telling myself the weekend would sort it out, that I’d properly relax and come back Monday feeling focused and on top of things again.
But the weekend arrived, and I didn’t really have the energy to enjoy it. Part of me hoped my plans would be cancelled and I could just stay in instead.
Then Monday would roll around and the whole thing would start all over again.
It’s Not About How Your Week Is Organised
A lot of the advice out there for the Sunday scaries is quite practical: plan your week on Friday, put your phone away earlier, that sort of thing. Some of that can help a bit around the edges, and they’re good things to do.
But if the feelings keep turning up, no matter how well-organised your week actually is, it’s worth asking a slightly different question:
What’s been taking up your headspace all week?
More often than not, this isn’t really about how much you’ve got to do. It’s about what your mind has been quietly rehearsing all week without you fully clocking it: the overthinking, the second-guessing, needing everything to be perfect before you’ll properly commit to it.
Sunday night is one of those times when there’s finally nothing else loud enough to drown that thinking out, so you notice it more.
The Way Through Isn’t Pushing Harder
There’s a lot of talk around just pushing through this kind of thing: crack on, you’ll be fine once you get Monday out of the way, you’ll feel better.
And sometimes you do. You can get through Monday’s email backlog, get through Tuesday’s meeting and keep pushing till Friday. But if the same pattern of thinking is creating the dread every Sunday, pushing through doesn’t actually change the pattern that created it.
It just gets you to the other side of it.
When your stress levels are already high, it can also become much easier to slip into the reactive, emotional part of the brain and harder to access the rational, intellectual part that helps you think things through and puts things into perspective. That’s one reason why telling yourself to stop worrying or just get on with it often doesn’t change how you’re feeling.
What helps is different.
It starts with noticing what’s working, even when something is only slightly better than it was before, and noticing when things feel a little easier or when you feel more able to cope, so your mind has something different to work with.
Because what you repeatedly pay attention to becomes easier for your brain to notice.
This isn’t about pretending everything is fine or telling yourself not to worry. It’s about focusing on what’s going well, or even what’s going a little better, rather than spending the whole week preparing for what might go wrong.
What Actually Changes When You Beat the Sunday Scaries
The important thing to know is that this isn’t a personality trait and it’s not just who you are now. It’s a pattern of behaviour that you’ve got into, and those patterns can change.
That means weekends can start to feel like weekends again, where you can properly switch off and be present with the people you’re with rather than half-thinking about Monday the whole time you’re supposed to be enjoying yourself.
You can see friends, do the things you actually enjoy and have a Sunday afternoon without that background hum of everything you need to deal with next week hanging over you.
And Monday can arrive without that familiar knot in your stomach, because your mind hasn’t spent the whole weekend bracing for a battle that hasn’t even happened yet.
Changing how you think about what’s ahead, and catching the pattern before it runs the whole weekend for you, is really where getting your weekends back starts.
If the Sunday scaries are a regular thing for you, it’s not necessarily a sign that you’re not coping.
It may be that you’ve become very good at coping for a very long time, without much left in reserve.
And that is something that can change.
Making Space to Switch Off
This is where Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can help. By understanding how your brain responds when your stress bucket starts to fill up, while focusing on the changes you want to make, the aim is to help you create more headspace and make it easier to switch off.
This can mean spending less time constantly rehearsing everything that might go wrong and having more space to enjoy what’s actually happening now.
If you recognise yourself in this and you’d like things to feel different, you’re welcome to book a free consultation and we can chat it through to see if it feels like it could help.
About the Author
Marina Love spent 20 years working in start-up businesses alongside founders and realised it’s not usually one big thing that overwhelms us, but the accumulation of lots of little things that never quite let your mind switch off. Marina now supports people both online and in person in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.
