What's really behind our Sunday scaries?

Happy Monday! I’m hopeful this email landed in your inbox after a restful weekend, with your mind entirely unaccompanied by thoughts of the upcoming workweek. So much so that when you read the title of this edition, you thought:

“What a foreign and faraway concept - I can’t at all relate to being anxious about work before I go back to work!”

But if at any point this weekend you felt: apprehensive, worried, or otherwise preoccupied with a sense of doom related to going back to work on Monday morning….

Then you are well acquainted with the Sunday scaries.

Sunday scaries can be bleh, or they can be brutal. They can be brief, or they can bully you the entire weekend.

Whatever flavour they come in for you, we can all agree: They suck.

The Sunday scaries are fear. They usually show up on Sunday afternoons and evenings. They’re different for everyone, but my “Sunday scaries” seasons have been:

✅ When work things would change significantly over a weekend, leading a feeling of “not knowing what to walk into” on Monday morning

✅ When I had to be responsive to work queries on the weekend after working a normal work week

✅ Weeks where I didn’t feel prepared for the next one

✅ Feeling so exhausted by work that two days didn’t feel long enough to truly recover, do life admin, sleep in, etc.

Overall: scary.

If every Sunday feels like this - you’re not so much in a nice workplace as you are a spooky one. What now? 🎃