The best antidote I have for the Sunday (or even Monday) Scaries

Maybe you love your job. Maybe you hate it.

Perhaps you had a fantastic holiday break you don’t want to leave behind. Or perhaps you spent the break stressed out and feel like your promised time off has been short changed.

If you are feeling anxious, sad, or upset about getting back to ‘real life’ after this break, you probably know that you are not alone.

I was in my twenties the first time I came across the term ‘Sunday Scaries’ though I immediately recognized what it was describing. At the time, I was incredibly burnt out from my job - a job that I loved more in theory than actuality - and every attempt at taking time off was trampled by an overflowing to do list and ever increasing sleep deficit. The crawl back to work after every weekend and every break felt like the world was ripping a warm fluffy comforter off of me on a freezing cold day.

I have since heard this term phrased in a variety of different ways - Sunday Scaries, Back-To-Work Woes, or a plain old Case of the Mondays. All of these sayings refer to the anxiety we can feel around the transition from slow to fast, from stop to go, from rest to work, from my time to their time.

Unfortunately, when this sentiment was first shared with me, an accompanying remedy wasn’t provided. In fact, a satisfying remedy was never really provided. It seemed like the best advice out there was to make sure you love what you do - as though that is an easy task for everyone to accomplish or that loving what you do might categorically erase all uncomfortable feelings associated with returning to work.

But then what about the people who do love what they do? If they are still feeling the stress of their own internal countdown, what then? Does that mean they actually don’t love what they do? Ah, the anxiety has returned.

Here’s what I have come to understand…

A frequent symptom of scarcity is hoarding behavior. And even though it isn’t a tangible good, when humans feel that time is quickly running out - or growing scarce - we have a tendency to try to hoard it.

This is tough, because we can’t actually collect time. Not tangibly anyways. Unlike the coffee mugs I like to hoard on my desk, I can not simple put a few minutes or hours in a drawer for later.

So, what does it look like when we hoard time?

Well, the best way to put it is that like with money, when we hoard time, we stop spending it on the things we actually want or even need. We dive into obsessively worrying about the worst case scenarios. We create extra pain and stress where there doesn’t necessarily have to be such a large amount of it.

Unlike with money, time can’t be saved. It has to be spent. It’s just a matter of - what are you actually spending it on?

When we attempt to hoard time, we cling to a definitively fleeting thing and end up spending our time dealing with the fallout from that endeavor. We get stuck in our mind space and quickly watch as the moments we wanted to hold onto for longer slip through our fingers that much more quickly.

The way out of time hoarding - the way out of the Sunday Scaries - is to practice presence.

Take a moment. Breathe. Take another breath. And another.

How do you want to spend this next hour? What will bring you joy? What will bring you peace? In this hour, only right now. Set a timer. Do that.

When the timer is done, take another breath. There is another hour in front of you. How do you want to spend that one?

If an hour is too long for you, try 30 minutes. Try 5 minutes. Or don’t try at all. Just breathe.

In our reality, time moves forward - it always does. Trying to prevent it from doing so is an exercise in futility. Trying to pretend like it’s not is sure to cause pain.

Got a massive case of post-holiday anxiety? Be present with the time you have right now. It’s the best - and only - thing you can do.