Sunday anxiety: why the week grabs you before it has even begun

“At four in the afternoon something shifts. The sun is still out, the coffee is still warm, nothing has happened. And yet it’s as if someone inside me switched off the light.”

That is how a woman who liked her job described Sunday. She didn’t hate it, she didn’t want to leave, she got on well with her team. And still, every Sunday afternoon the same thing happened: a knot in her stomach, a restlessness with no object, impatience with the children when they wanted one more game. At nine in the evening she opened her email, “just to see what’s waiting for me”, and then couldn’t stop thinking about it until eleven.

If you recognise yourself in this, you are not alone. The phenomenon even has a popular name in English, the Sunday scaries; here I will simply call it Sunday anxiety. It isn’t a diagnosis, and it isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you. But it is a message — and it is worth reading carefully, because it can tell you something about how your nervous system works, something about what you learned as a child, and sometimes something about your job.

Anxiety that runs ahead of the event

Sunday anxiety is a form of what we professionally call anticipatory anxiety — the anxiety of expectation. It doesn’t respond to something happening now, but to something that might happen later. In a 2013 review of the research, the psychologists Dan Grupe and Jack Nitschke described this as the very core of anxiety: uncertainty about future threats. A brain that doesn’t know exactly what lies ahead starts preparing the body for every possibility at once. The heart speeds up, the muscles tense, thoughts begin scanning everything that could go wrong.

There is an interesting finding here from a 2010 study by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert. Using an app that asked people at random moments during the day what they were doing and what they were thinking about, they found that people’s minds were somewhere else in almost 47 per cent of moments than on what they were doing. And when their minds wandered, they felt worse on average. Sunday afternoon is ideal for this: the body is still on the sofa, but the head is already in Monday’s meeting.

Anticipatory anxiety is not a fault. It is an old and useful mechanism: whoever prepares for a problem before it arrives has a better chance of surviving it. The trouble starts when the mechanism fires too often, too strongly, or for things you can’t prepare for on a Sunday evening anyway. Then it is no longer preparation, but going round in circles. I wrote about how the brain would rather predict a hundred disasters than one calm day in “What if …”: why the brain would rather predict a hundred disasters than one calm day.

Monday is often easier than Sunday

Here is something that often surprises people with Sunday anxiety. In 2012 Arthur Stone and his colleagues analysed extensive data from daily American mood surveys, looking for the famous “Blue Monday”. They found that mood at weekends is indeed better than during the week, but Monday hardly differs from Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The Monday we experience as a mountain on Sunday evening is in fact an ordinary day.

The body does prepare for the start of the working week. A study of British civil servants (the Whitehall II cohort) showed that the morning rise in cortisol, the hormone that wakes us and readies us for the day, is larger on working days than at weekends. This isn’t an illness, but a body that knows more is waiting for it. Yet between what the body prepares for and what you imagine on Sunday evening there is often a big gap.

This is an important insight. Sunday anxiety is not a forecast of Monday. It is a response to an image of Monday — and images are almost always darker than reality, because we pack into them everything we don’t know and paint it in the worst colours. Once Monday begins, the uncertainty turns into concrete tasks. And our nervous system copes far better with the concrete than with the uncertain.

Sunday began back at school

When I ask people when they first felt Sunday anxiety, many remember school. Sunday evening was the time of unfinished homework, packing the school bag, perhaps a test on Monday. For some it was also the time when father came back from the pub, when an argument about the week ahead began, when mother went quieter. The body remembered: Sunday afternoon means things are about to get worse.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we often see that adult reactions are not reactions to the present alone. They are also echoes of early experiences the body stored before we could put them into words. Christian Gostečnik describes how the emotional atmospheres of childhood repeat themselves in adulthood in new circumstances — not because we want them to, but because the body recognises them as familiar. If Sunday meant tension in childhood, it can mean it now too, when the reason is quite different.

If you are curious about how anxiety before school shows itself in children, you will find a short explanation in the knowledge base under school anxiety. You may recognise part of yourself in it, too.

Sunday evening in the family

Sunday anxiety is rarely just personal. It happens in a home where others live too. Your partner notices that you are irritable from five in the afternoon. The children learn that nothing important is to be said to mum or dad on a Sunday evening. Dinner turns quiet or tense. And sometimes the boss, who isn’t in the room, sits down at the table — because you talk about them, think about them or answer their message.

In systemic language we call this a triangle: the tension between two (you and work) spills onto a third (your partner, the children), who is not to blame but carries it. If your partner listens every Sunday to how awful tomorrow will be, they may start to feel helpless or angry. If the children sense that Sunday evening is a dangerous time, they learn it too. I wrote about how stress from work comes through the front door in A crisis at work and at home: the stress you carry through the door.

It helps to name it in the family. Not as an excuse, but as information: “I’m more on edge on Sunday evenings. It isn’t because of you. It’s because of the week ahead.” A sentence like that relieves the others of reading your irritability as a message about themselves. And it gives you the chance to see the tension as something that is happening to you — not as something you are.

What Sunday anxiety tells you about your job

Not all Sunday anxiety is the same. Roughly, we can distinguish two kinds — and the difference matters, because they call for different responses.

The first is transition anxiety. It is a general restlessness without a clear object. It appears because you are moving from one way of living to another: from freedom to structure, from rest to responsibility. It usually eases on Monday morning, once the week gets going. Some Sundays it is barely there. This anxiety doesn’t tell you much about your job — mainly that the transition is demanding for your nervous system. Something similar happens after a longer holiday, which will be the subject of Why after a holiday anxiety arrives before the rest does.

The second is anxiety as a signal. This one is concrete: it is tied to one person, one meeting, one kind of task. It doesn’t ease when the week starts, but lasts. It is there every Sunday and grows over the months. Often the body joins in: poor sleep, digestive trouble, headaches, frequent colds. This anxiety tells you something very important — that there is something in your working environment that threatens or drains you. Perhaps a boss with whom you never know where you stand, which will be the subject of The boss who leads through fear: what happens to your nervous system every day. Perhaps a workload that has gone beyond what you can manage. Perhaps work that has lost its meaning.

Why you don’t switch off at the weekend

Sabine Sonnentag, a German work psychologist, has devoted much of her career to the question of how people recover from work. One of her central findings is that rest is not simply the absence of work. What matters is what she calls psychological detachment: not thinking about work when you are away from it. According to her research, people who can detach in their free time are less exhausted and more satisfied. The irony is that those who find it hardest to detach are the most overloaded — the very people who would benefit most from rest.

Sunday anxiety is often a sign that detachment never happened on Saturday. If on Saturday morning you checked your email “just quickly”, thought about the project on Saturday evening and answered a message on Sunday morning, your nervous system never really switched off. Sunday evening is not the start of the tension, but its peak after a weekend that wasn’t one.

There is no need to be hard on yourself here. Many people check email precisely to calm down — to know what awaits them and not fear the unknown. But this works like any avoidance: it helps for a moment and feeds the anxiety in the long run. I wrote about this mechanism in Anxiety and avoidance: why avoiding helps you today and harms you tomorrow.

How a conversation about it can sound

This is what part of a session might look like (composite, not a real person):

“Saturday’s great. But on Sunday it starts. By five I’m a completely different person.”
“What happens at five?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. I just know it’s Monday tomorrow.”
“When you think of Monday — what do you see first?”
Silence. “The nine o’clock meeting. When the manager goes through who’s done what.”
“And what do you feel when you see it?”
“As if I’ll have forgotten something again. As if in front of everyone she’ll …” He doesn’t finish the sentence.
“So it isn’t Monday. It’s one meeting and one person.”
“Yes. Strange. I thought it was the whole week.”

This is a common shift. When Sunday anxiety gets a concrete face, it often shrinks, because with something concrete you can do something. With “tomorrow is Monday” you can do nothing. With a nine o’clock meeting you can: prepare, talk, look for support, look at what this person wakes up in you.

An exercise for Sunday afternoon

Here is an exercise you can do this very Sunday. It takes around twenty minutes. It works best if you do it at the same time each week, before the anxiety spreads — for example at four or five in the afternoon.

1. Write the week out. On a sheet of paper (not on your phone, where your email is waiting) write down everything going round your head about the coming week. No editing, no sorting. Just get it out of your head.
2. Split it into two columns. On the left write what you can influence, on the right what you can’t. Circle the right-hand column and tell yourself: “I’ll leave this for now.” You will find an exercise based on this idea in the knowledge base under postponing worry.
3. Choose one first step for Monday morning. Just one, and as small as possible — the thing you will start with when you sit down at your desk. Write it at the top of the sheet.
4. Close the sheet. Fold it, put it in your bag or on the desk where you will find it on Monday. It is a small ritual that tells the brain the week has been “saved” and no longer needs to be turned over.
5. Plan something pleasant for Sunday evening and something for Monday. A walk, a film, a conversation, a coffee with a colleague you like. Let Monday be not just a day to be survived, but also a day with something to look forward to.

The exercise won’t remove the anxiety on the first Sunday. But after a few weeks people often notice that the tension no longer spills over the whole evening, but stays more contained. If Sunday evening keeps you awake, Overthinking at bedtime: why the mind starts the film just when it should be switching off may help too.

One note: the exercise isn’t meant to get rid of anxiety at any cost. It is meant to give it space and time — twenty minutes, not the whole afternoon. Anxiety that is listened to often settles faster than anxiety you try to drown out.

When it isn’t about work

Everything I have written so far assumes that Sunday anxiety is connected to work. It is only fair to say when this isn’t true — and when Sunday exercises are not the right answer.

When the anxiety is there every day, not just on Sunday. If worries trouble you all week, about all sorts of things, and you find them hard to stop, it may not be Sunday anxiety but a broader anxiety that simply shows most on Sundays. You will find a short explanation in the knowledge base under generalised anxiety. In that case it makes sense to talk to your GP and to a mental health professional.

When there is emptiness beneath the anxiety. If Sunday is marked less by restlessness than by hopelessness — a feeling that nothing makes sense, that nothing brings you joy any more, that you don’t know why you should even get up — this can be a sign of depression. I wrote about how to work when you can’t cope in Depression and work: how to work when you can’t cope — and when not to. In that case, turn to a doctor. If thoughts appear that it would be better if you weren’t here, in Slovenia call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline Zaupni telefon Samarijan on 116 123 (24 hours a day). In an emergency, call 112.

When the job is genuinely harmful. If your Sunday anxiety is a signal that someone at work humiliates, intimidates or exploits you, no Sunday exercise is the solution. Then you need support and perhaps change — a conversation with a trade union, legal advice, sometimes leaving. In that case the anxiety is not your fault, but your healthy response to an unhealthy environment.

When exhaustion already runs deep. Sunday anxiety is sometimes an early sign of burnout: a body that already knows it won’t manage another week, before the head admits it. I describe the signs in Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break.

Where therapy can help

Some people carry Sunday anxiety all their lives as part of who they are — “I’ve always been like this”. But because it often has roots in early experiences and in how the week ran in the family, talking about it can be very useful. In sessions we look together at what exactly Sunday wakes up, which person or situation stands in the background, what your body already knows that you haven’t yet admitted to yourself. Sometimes it turns out to be an old atmosphere from childhood repeating itself in a new form. Sometimes that the job really has become too tight. Both are valuable to know.

Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work in English. If you are interested in the wider picture — how work, worry and rest ran through the generations of your family — a longer session with a genogram, A Look into the Past, can be useful. You will also find a short explanation of what anxiety is and how it works in the knowledge base under anxiety.

What to remember

• Sunday anxiety is a form of anticipatory anxiety: it responds not to Monday, but to your image of it.
• Research shows that Monday is often easier than you predict on Sunday evening.
• Tell transition anxiety (general, passes) apart from anxiety as a signal (concrete, lasts) — the first needs a ritual, the second a conversation about the job.
• Sunday anxiety happens within a family: name it, so others don’t read it as a message about themselves.
• If the anxiety is there every day or comes with hopelessness, see a doctor; in a crisis in Slovenia call 01 520 99 00 or 116 123.