How to avoid the Sunday Scaries

Is Monday morning making you anxious? Here are 3 steps to help you truly enjoy your weekend or vacation and tame the Sunday Scaries

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Vacations (with healthy boundaries) can be profoundly restorative for your physical and mental health. The Sunday before you return to work, however, can be equally stress-inducing. You don’t even have to go on vacation to experience the Sunday Scaries—a heavy workload, toxic office environment, or big deadline can douse your Sunday with distractions and anxiety about what you’ll face on Monday morning.

Sunday Scaries: Anticipatory stress starting on Sunday afternoon or evening, when you start to feel worried about the work week ahead.

I’m just now returning from three weeks in South Africa, where I was truly off the grid. (See below for my actual OOO message.) I’m now on the precipice of what could be the mother of all Sunday Scaries—three weeks of catching up with emails, newsletters, social media content, meetings, projects, marketing plans for the new book, and our upcoming May Whole30 Community Cohort (all while managing my 8-hour jet lag).

Of course, I’d never do that to Future Melissa. Here are three areas I focus on before vacations and weekends to help me avoid the Sunday Scaries while holding space for my well-deserved time off.

Pre-planning

One of the best tips my sister ever gave me around vacations is to take the Monday following your scheduled trip off too. This practice makes a huge difference, especially if your trip is a week or longer. (Spoiler: I’m actually NOT in the office today, because I put this into practice!)

On Monday, I’ll be unpacking, doing laundry and meal prep, making sure my house is organized, and catching up on grocery shopping and errands. Tomorrow when I am back in the office, I’ll at least feel like the life side of my work/life balance is organized.

Not everyone has an extra vacation day, of course—but you can still implement a version of this by giving yourself Sunday afternoon and evening to settle in at home. The last day of vacation is always a bummer anyway, as you don’t really have enough time to enjoy much. Book an early flight home or start your drive in the morning to give you at least a few hours to settle back in on Sunday. (The small sacrifice will be worth it, I promise.

Tip: If we’re talking about a weekend and not a vacation, I have a policy of not making plans on Sunday nights. Any plans we do have for Sunday are usually wrapped by noon so I can use the rest of the weekend to “reset” my house and truly relax before Monday.

At work

I was deeply committed to taking this vacation time off from work. In fact, even on weekends, I rarely work, unless it’s a true emergency. However, I knew that work thoughts, ideas for content, and things I forgot to do before I left would keep popping up throughout South Africa, and I knew how easy it would be to get sucked back into work (and stress) mode. Here are a few things I did throughout our vacation to stay relaxed and enjoy my time off:

• Keep a notebook handy. Any time I thought of a work task—the ad approval I needed to secure, a meeting I needed to schedule, the content idea I didn’t want to forget—I’d write it down. (In South Africa, I used my Notes app.) Science shows that the brain loves a plan and can relax once you’ve documented a to-do, even if you haven’t done it yet. Now, I have a list of things to do when I return, versus a vague but impending sense of “I have so much to do.”

• Keep content organized. I spent my whole vacation taking photos and videos, knowing I’d want to create content at some point during and after my trip. However, I didn’t want to feel any pressure to create in the moment, or post at all if I didn’t want to. At the end of each excursion, I went through my photos, favorited the best, and stuck them in an album labeled “Penguins” or “Lion’s Head.” Knowing my content was organized and easy to find made the process of posting it later ten times easier.

• Clean my office. One thing I did on Sunday that wasn’t technically work was organize my desk and office. Often on Sundays, I’ll throw on a Netflix show or audiobook and organize my papers, file away what needs to be filed, get rid of any trash, and make my physical space neat and tidy. From experience, I know this will have a positive impact on my mental health come Monday morning.

• Build in margins. After a weekend (and especially a vacation), you may feel major pressure to answer every single email on Monday morning while catching up on projects and connecting with your team—but I’m not even going to try. My out-of-office message addresses this, plus I’m blocking off two hours on Tuesday (one in the morning and one in the afternoon) for checking in with my leadership team and creating a plan for the week. I will also do my best to not schedule any back-to-back meetings the first few days I’m back, because any one of those running long can throw my whole day into a tizzy.

My OOO message for this trip (feel free to steal):

“I am in South Africa with my family snuggling baby lions and frolicking on the beach with penguins. As you might expect, I will be holding firm boundaries around this trip and my family time. If you need to speak to someone at Whole30 sooner or if this is a time-sensitive media request, please email headquarters@whole30.com. If it's urgent and requires my attention, they know how to reach me, but it had better be because Drew Barrymore is calling.

I will be back in the office on Tuesday, April 23 and appreciate your grace as I dig through what will surely be a dumpster fire of an inbox. Worth it!

Baie danke,
Melissa”

Monday (and Tuesday, and Wednesday…)

Despite your best planning and intentions, the Monday after a vacation or weekend may still feel hectic. Getting back into the swing of things is hard, especially if your job is already stressful.

Your mantra here: Let good enough be good enough. Eating a Made By Whole30 meal every night for dinner? You’re doing great! Laundry piling up? Don’t sweat it today. Kid buying school lunch instead of taking something homemade? Fed is best! Can’t get a workout in, but you did take the dog for a walk? That 100% counts!

During busy seasons (short or long), you have to triage. If that means my first week back from my trip includes a lot of pre-made meals, a messy house, walks instead of workouts, and early bedtimes to catch up from jet lag, I’m going to let that be good enough.

You may not be able to implement all of these suggestions, but at least a few (especially in combination) will certainly make your return to the office on any given Monday feel less stressful and more productive.

Share your best tips for the Sunday Scaries in comments—and if you’re doing the May Whole30, share that in comments too, and find your Cohort buddy!

XO MU

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• Access to our private Slack community

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