It’s Sunday. The cold winds of next week’s to do lists are starting to blow through your mind. The email from Friday you put off replying to. A big presentation to your boss. The thought of going back through another round of meetings on the same topic with the same people. Again.
75% of us experience some form of Sunday night anxiety.
For those of you in opening this today in the UK and US, you get a hall pass - tomorrow is a holiday. That makes Monday your new Sunday.
But holiday or not, we can’t stop our thoughts about work, but we can change our perspective.
Here are 5 tools to help you if the Sunday Scaries come tapping today:
Remember that your mind prioritizes negativity. “I feel it, so it must be true”, can be crippling. Your mind is merely trying to protect you. It’s giving you zombie invasion scenarios so you’re ready with your axe. In reality, like 99.9% of our worries, Zombie invasions are relatively rare. Try acknowledging the negative thought by thanking your mind for protecting you, then flipping it into a growth thought. For example, going from, “The 9 am update meeting is going to go badly because I have nothing of substance to update”, to “I’m going to use the 9 am meeting to ask good questions to help the team move forward. And I’m going to raise my hand on a project”.
Set an intention. If you’re anything like me, unless I write down how I want my week to go, it ends up going as someone else wants it to go. Setting an intention is mental armor. Even if you only get 50% of what you intended, it’s 50% more than you would have got without it. I find writing it all down on a Sunday morning frees up my mind for the entire day. I don’t think about Monday again. It’s pretty powerful.
Remember it’s a game. Having lived through more restructures, acquisitions, lay-offs, and things-not-going-as-planned than I care to remember, give yourself perspective by saying that all things will pass. Work is a game. It’s a serious game at times, but it’s still a game. Players come and go. Rules change. You won’t always come first. Seeing work as a game helps you emotionally detach, and even better; it drives curiosity - why is it being played this way? Who set the rules and why? How can we play it differently?
Stop trying to be everything to everyone. A lot of our existential stress is dependent upon the delivery of things we need from others. Micro-management of our mind and the things we can’t control is crippling. By osmosis, you end up absorbing not just your own stress, but the stress of others. Let it be. When you write your weeks intention, only focus on what you can genuinely control. If you can impact it, write it down. If you can’t, let it be.
You’ll never get this Sunday again. Ever. As we get older, we get a more finite view of our lives. Every second we have on earth can only happen once. Even if you think you’ll get a second shot reincarnated as your cat. If that doesn’t happen, worrying about work is corrosive when it takes us from our present moment. By practicing the tips above, you can put those seconds back into your bank account, and spend it on what’s most important; friends, family & the things you love.
With love and excitement for the week ahead, and not a single solitary ounce of dread.
Yours poetically,
The Jolt.