Sunday Scaries: Are You Your Own Terrible Boss?
Simple self-talk steps to overcome both causes of the "Sunday Scaries."
The “Sunday scaries” is an unofficial name for a feeling of dread, melancholy, anxiety or guilt, which begins Sunday afternoon and worsens into Sunday evening, and is marked by doubts regarding how you used your time, how you feel about your job, and even existential doubts about how you’re living your life.
It’s the attack of the Sunday Scaries!
The schema therapy parts approach to understanding ourselves, or what I call self-talk, offers some powerful tools to overcome this common ailment.
Two Types of Sunday Scaries
Start with understanding the cause of your Sunday dread. Are you clear about why the upcoming week makes you feel bad? Most often, there are two possible reasons:
Work Life: You actually hate your job, or your coworkers or boss.
Inner Critic: You are your own terrible boss, a highly critical and demanding of yourself.
Two Steps to Fix Work Life Causes
You may be overwhelmed by the pressures of having a job you don’t like. You may have fallen into avoidant and detaching patterns in order to avoid the subject and feel some relief. This is a short-term solution that preserves a longer-term problem. Because, while you feel relief on Friday night, by Sunday, it all comes rushing back!
First, try to get organized and make a list of all the things you don’t like about your job. Ask yourself some questions and journal the answers. “What needs to change to make this job good for you?” Alternately, ask yourself “What do you have to do to get a job you will enjoy?”
Now start making lists of tasks to get you where you need to go, as well as a timeline for how long these will take. This may feel heavy, so take these step by step. If you find that this process is overwhelming, it’s a good sign you would benefit from getting the support of a coach or therapist.
Handle Your Inner Critic
If you have ruled out a problem with your job, but are still having Sunday scaries, your inner critic may be the main cause of the anxiety and depression. In other words, you are being your own terrible boss!
We all have an inner critic, with varying degrees of intensity on a spectrum of being mean and demanding. The inner critic naturally develops in childhood, as the voice of morality, conscience, guilt, and shame. To one degree or another, we can all go through periods of having a strong inner critic that causes trouble, before we learn to be kind and realistic with ourselves. If you were raised with punitive, demanding, or critical parents, or in a situation of neglect, you are likely to form a mean and overly demanding inner critic.
The inner critic seduces us into thinking that being mean and overdemanding equals having high standards and ambition, but these are not the same thing. In fact, the inner critic can con you into believing that being self-critical is a promise of making improvements. That’s actually wrong. It just makes you feel bad about yourself, and can even make improvement harder. We need self-esteem to succeed, not mean self-criticism.
The worst part about the inner critic is that it gets you coming and going. First, it will criticize you for not getting more done, and if you do that, it will criticize you for not relaxing more. It always finds a reason to criticize, even if it’s inconsistent and unfair.
3 Steps to End Inner Critic Sunday Scaries
Use to-do lists and a planner. Start with a list of things you might want to get done on the weekend. This will include work and chores stuff as well as relaxing stuff. Your inner critic will likely make the list too long. So work with the priority items. Calculate how much time each will take (be realistic!) and plot the items on your days. You may not regularly use a planner which is fine. Just use the note app on your phone and block out time slots to get things done. Now you have a realistic sense of what’s actually possible and your goals. You will need to allow for the unexpected (things taking longer, or new tasks) so be flexible and kind to yourself.
Talk back to your inner critic. This one takes practice, but the good thing is that you feel relief right away once you start doing it. Try to notice when you are speaking to yourself in a mean and overly demanding way. If you have made your weekend plan, you have an excellent argument for realistic limits, so you can fight the inner critic's excessive demands. “Nothing is good enough for you! I have a plan for what can get done this weekend, and I’m going to stick to it. I’m in charge, not you. You’re just making this worse, so back off!”
Try out the exciting world of being bored. Your inner critic has you trying to do too much all the time, and feeling anxious if you aren’t efficiently using every minute. Push back! Boldly put time aside that is unstructured and boring. This can be a great antidote to all the demands. “Look! I’m not doing anything and enjoying it!” This can take practice. You may want to start with walking for an hour with no plan or direction. Focus on noticing what you see and hear on the walk. Or just enjoy listening to music for a while. Avoid detaching activities like web surfing or scrolling, which don’t count as being bored; those are numbing and don’t actually help with stress.
photo credits: Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash; Priscilla du Preez on Unsplash
