Beating the Sunday Night Blues

For those working the regular nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday pattern, the weekend serves as a pause button, bringing a welcome break to many business activities. A time to kick back and unwind, it's a precious two-day spell. Unfortunately, every good thing has an end—a fact that seems to hit home twice as hard with regard to the weekend. As Sunday afternoon unfolds, thoughts turn to your beloved leisure time winding down and how, in a matter of hours, you will be heading back to the office. What's more, with the thinking time available at the weekend—where you have a chance to simply "be" without the mental clutter of having to "do"—you can find yourself slipping into introspection. Sunday night can easily become a time of mixed emotions and not knowing what to think, adding to a sense of anxiety.

Harder to shake off than that weird feeling you've left the iron on, many workers dread the Sunday blues, hoping above hope that the weekend honeymoon does not come to an end at all. The main reason why we experience this dread is because of the task list left at the end of the previous week awaiting us on our return. We start to fear because we believe we do not have enough time to do all we have to do, and begin to dwell on the potential stress ahead. However, this is a thinking error that causes many of us to sacrifice our wellbeing and can prevent us from being effective in meeting our goals in the first place.

On a Sunday many people feel tired, needful, or even bored. The first thing to do to overcome this and any panic about the week ahead is to become your own source of motivation. A simple and calming method is to approach each of the tasks you are given with a mindset of how you would go about them—and which would be of real priority—if time were not a factor. Mentally zoom out, and reflect on how much progress you will have made with your workload in, say, two months' time. You can also use this technique to look back and appraise everything you have accomplished in the previous two months. In your mind, tick off all those jobs, big and small, tackled over the last eight weeks. Take time to evaluate how everything you have done so far fits in with what you need to do and what you are aiming for. This taking a step back from the intensity of the moment can help you to keep things in proper perspective. If you adopt this mentality, it will enable you to set goals, and divide the tasks you have at hand into manageable objectives. What's more, remembering your past achievements will help you to have the confidence in yourself that you can perform—and that you can do things in an even better way in the future.

With this approach in mind, you will teach yourself that everything lined up for you to do on a Monday morning no longer represents an impossible wall to climb, but instead can be tackled one building block at a time according to priority. After all, there is little to be gained from worrying about things that do not need to be dealt with there and then in the first hour back at your desk. You have to remember that any fear you are feeling is just that—a feeling. Feelings are unreliable, but what's more, they are transient and do not last. Your feelings change, so you do not have to use your feelings to define yourself. Recognize the fear as a feeling and put it away so you can focus on doing the best job you can do.

Resuming work after the weekend break might not always be easy, but you are not on this ship alone. You can get out of bed and prepare for your week with a smile on your face. The truth is that if you allow the fear to linger, reality will catch up with you and you will be forced to go to work under-prepared. So get over the fear, get organized, and face the coming week like the lion you know yourself to be, achieving goals with minimal stress. And remember, there is always the next weekend waiting for you as a reward for a week's work well done.