Saturday 7 May –

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The phrase ‘Sunday Scaries’ is a newly built phrase in today’s society, which describes the feelings of anxiety and dread about the week ahead or the weekend you’ve just had which you get on a Sunday. It’s often connected to ‘hangxiety’ – the feelings of anxiety when you have a hangover, including the guilt or anxiousness you face when rethinking the night before of heavy drinking and partying.

To have Sunday Scaries is not uncommon; I’m pretty sure we all experience it to some degree as we think about the week ahead and all the things we need to get done or should’ve done over the weekend. I remember during school I’d get this every week, after two days of lie-ins and time spent doing things I actually enjoyed, like sport or relaxation and my other hobbies.

What helps? If you’re like me and at university, Sunday can feel like any other day, especially in the era of online lectures and seminars. However, I like to keep my Sundays feeling like a ‘Sunday’ – relax and de-stress during the day (find the joys in what a Sunday could be!). If you have work/school the next day, I can understand the dread you may feel. What I like to do is treat Sunday as a self-care day, to keep structure in my week, especially during the upcoming exam season or when the week ahead is looking more stressful with deadlines and assignments approaching.

When anxiety starts to arise, it’s difficult to push down. I’ve learnt to accept my emotions, especially anxiety, instead of ignoring them and hoping they just go away. By doing this, you can start to unravel why you’re feeling so anxious. Is it just because it’s a Sunday and you’ve always felt like this since school? Or is it because you have lots of deadlines due this work, or you didn’t get nearly half the things done you were meant to over the 2-day break? Once you know the real cause of the anxiety, it’s slightly easier to address. Treat yourself kindly and have a pamper day: bath, read, take your mind away from work, have an early night, go for a leisurely walk, take yourself for a coffee date, and, in particular, have a detox from social media. I cannot stress the last tip enough! Social media is draining and toxic and Sundays are the perfect day to put your phone down and allow yourself to just be in the moment and have a (hopefully) less anxious day of self-care.  

Sunday scaries surface when you begin to ponder too much over the past or future (what you didn’t get done/the amount of alcohol you consumed over the last two nights, or what you need to get done/what you’re dreading about the week ahead of you). This is another reason, as I’ve talked about in the past, to live in the present. Thinking about the past/future serves nothing. It doesn’t help you with the guilt/anxiety you may feel other than build on it. What’s in the past is done and over with – put it to rest and focus on what you can do today to build the life and future you want, without thinking about what you have/haven’t done over the past few days or weeks. What’s coming is unknown. That is something scary, I know, but we can never know! There’s no point worrying about what could be with ‘what ifs’ and what not, but it just shows how exciting life can be. Enjoy life as it is today, not how it might look tomorrow or how it should’ve looked yesterday. You can only control today and right now, so focus on that.

This brings me onto Mondays. Some people call the ‘Sunday Scaries’ ‘Monday scaries’, as this concept usually refers to the routine of going back to work/school tomorrow and not feeling up to it/really worrying about it. But I LOVE a Monday! It kind of gives off the same energy as Spring, offering hope and the promise of a new week, like Spring does for a season, with brighter days and earlier mornings, and new life and fresh smells of blooming flowers and blossoming trees after a long winter. Mondays offer so much hope of a new start – you can reinvent yourself on a Monday and begin all over again! (Not that you can’t do that any day, any time anyways.) Mondays hold promise and potential for a good week. If you didn’t get that work done over the weekend, you can be productive and get it done first thing Monday morning with the motivation that this week will be good.

To tie it all together, I think the real moral of this blog post is to get yourself to think more clearly in the present. Be present with yourself and your thoughts, not just on Sundays/Mondays but with every day. Anxious and guilty for the food or drinks you consumed last night, or the work you didn’t complete yesterday, or the workout you missed three days ago? So what? That is in the past. Yeah, you might have consumed too many calories, but that’s just a number. Think of it as memories – you went out last night with a group of your bestest friends at a really cool restaurant and ate all your favourite dishes whilst trying new ones, as well as drinking expensive yet tasty cocktails at the new bar that just opened in your town. You shouldn’t feel guilty for creating memories with friends or family (or yourself for that matter, when you treat yourself to a much-deserved day off and discover a new hobby that you now love and have become obsessed with – mines colouring in, as daft as it sounds!).

Remember this tomorrow or Monday, when anxiety and dread may start to build up and take over, or on any day, at any time, that you feel this way. Be present and enjoy what you have right now 🙂