Creating Career Happiness Series: Beating the Sunday Night Blues

People often talk about the Sunday night blues (AKA the Sunday scaries); that feeling that comes over you when your weekend in ending and your start thinking about going to work tomorrow morning. Know the feeling? Too many people do. 

LinkedIn did a survey in 2018 and found that 80% of professionals start feeling anxiety about the work week on Sundays. Similarly, a study by The Sleep Judge found that these Sunday feelings can manifest as worry, depressive symptoms, difficulty sleeping, and even psychosomatics symptoms like headaches and nausea. And while the ending of the weekend might always be a little bit of a bummer, people who enjoy their jobs don’t have quite the same angst on Sunday nights. 

Whether you are looking to make a career shift to eradicate those Sunday night blues or you simply want to be more intentional about creating more positive feelings about your current work, we’ll be discussing some strategies. As you may recall from last week’s post, PERMA fosters workplace wellbeing. This week, we are focusing on the P of PERMA – creating Positive Emotions about work.

To foster positive emotions (P), begin by asking yourself some questions:

• How do you want to feel on Sunday nights/Monday mornings about going to work?
• How do you want to feel each morning when your alarm sounds?
• How do you want to feel while you are at work?
• How do you want to feel coming home after work?
• What have you done in the past that has brought about these feelings?
• What would you need to do now to feel that way?
• What’s the first step you will take?
• What commitments are you making to yourself to create and maintain positive emotions about work?

Once you have your responses, jump into action with your first steps. Although your actions will be customized to your needs and your responses to the above questions, there are some things we all can do to help create positive emotions about our work.

1. Maintain healthy physical self-care. This includes getting enough sleep, eat nutritiously and judiciously, getting some physical activity (including work breaks to take a walk around the office building, home office, or outdoors), and using your sick days if you’re sick. We often don’t give enough credence to the impact that taking care of our physical wellbeing has on our emotional and mental wellbeing. They really do go hand in hand. When we take care of our physical wellbeing, we are more refreshed mentally and emotionally to tackle our work projects.

2. Squash negative thinking patterns and replace them with positive ones. In essence, stop crap talking yourself. Speak affirmatively, positively, hopefully, and resiliently to yourself instead. I call this RESCRIPTing. This means:

• Release Ruminations over unpleasant or confusing work interactions. The rude email from a client – release it from your thoughts. It won’t break you. The distracted look on your colleague’s face during your presentation that you’ve been analyzing the meaning of – it most likely had nothing to do with you and if it did, it probably doesn’t mean whatever negative connotation your mind is giving it. Move on from it. It means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

• Engage Growth Goals instead of evading them. Another thing that evokes unpleasant feelings about our work is when we are avoiding or running away from opportunities to grow. We ultimately get upset with ourselves when we do. We might tell ourselves, “I can’t handle that project because I’ll have to present and I’m terrified of public speaking.” You fill in the blanks for what scares you, but you know will grow you. Instead of running that limiting script in your mind, spend your commute to work (or in your morning shower if work is remote) contemplating how you’ll take positive action on work tasks and goals. Seek a mentor. Take a course. Practice small. But, don’t run from your own growth. You’ll cultivate good feelings just by taking small steps forward. 
• Seek Strengths instead of scrutinizing your shortcomings. We all have things we struggle with. No one is great at everything. And, it’s not nearly as a big a deal as we make it. We spend way too much time thinking about the skills we lack and not nearly enough time feeling proud of our many strengths. Bring all of your professional strengths to your mind. Allow yourself to feel great about them. You kick a$$.
• Challenge Catastrophizing about work related projects or relationships. Whatever awfulness we are imagining, it’s almost always nowhere near as bad as we envision. Stop worrying about what others at work think of you. Most of the time, they aren’t thinking about us at all. They have something else on their mind. The challenging interaction you had with a client can be dealt with. The report with the deadline fast approaching can be completed. Ask yourself, “What do I control in this situation?” Then, act upon it with the quickness. Call upon your experiential, intellectual, informational, and people resources. You got this. And once you realize that, the positive feelings can flow in.
• Restrict Regret over perceived previous work-related mistakes or missteps. We all make mistakes. Mistakes are no fun. But, we really don’t need to or deserve to keep reliving them. No need for wondering what would’ve been or could’ve been if you hadn’t _____. What happened, happened. Consider what you learned and what you’ll do different moving forward. Leverage the lesson and take positive action. This leads to positive feelings.
• Invite Imperfection instead of striving for perfectionism. Done is better than perfect. Good enough is often good enough. And sometimes in a busy workday (and life), that’s what it will have to be. Having high standards is awesome. I believe it shooting for the moon, but I don’t believe in beating yourself up if you land among the stars. Stars are awesome too. And your journey is yours, so avoid comparing yourself to others (supervisors, supervisees, colleagues, other professionals). Other folks are kicking a$$ in ways you might not be, and you are kicking a$$ in ways they aren’t too. It’s all good, there’s enough fabulousness to go around and thank God we all get some. We don’t need it all. We feel more joy when we invite our imperfections.
• Purpose Passion & Purpose in your work instead of putting up with passivity. Works stops feeling good when we start being passive about it. If it’s gotten boring or feels less meaningful, contemplate how you’ll infuse more passion and purpose into it. This could be in your current role or might mean planning a major career change. Most important is that we don’t allow ourselves to feel that unexciting work is all there is for us. There’s always more passion and purpose to be created. We’ll discuss this in more in future blog posts. 
• Think Thankfully about work instead of thinking deprived. Sometimes we get caught up feeling like other folks have these great careers that we don’t get to have. Every job has its ups and downs, stressors and joys. Each of us has positive experiences in our work, even in a tough job or on a tough day. It’s important for us to call upon these in our minds, especially when we are feeling down. Always bring yourself back to contemplating what you’re grateful for in your work – interactions with colleagues or clients, things you’ve been able to accomplish and contribute, resources to put towards your expenses or a trip. Focus your emotions on the good your work brings to you or others.

3. Create better work life balance/time outside of work. Our work is a pretty big chunk of our identity, but it most certainly is not our entire identity. Too much of the time, however, we treat it like it is. We need to nurture all of who we are. Create a personal development plan with goals/desires for other areas of your life outside of work (relationships, financial, living environment, community engagement, physical health, emotional/mental health, intellectual growth, recreation/relaxation, spirituality). When feasible, talk to your boss about creating a flexible schedule that incorporates modified hours or remote working time. Decide a time of day you’ll shut down work on evenings/weekends to do enjoyable things that recharge you. Use your vacation days and spend them doing the things you love with people you love. We talk a lot about creating balance, but often put off the things that would create that balance. There’s never a perfect time free of a project that needs doing. Now is the right time.

4. Create a positive physical work environment. Whether at home or at work, your physical space influences your mental and emotional wellbeing. A cluttered space becomes a cluttered mind. Organize and declutter your office space. Decorate your space in your style. Put up inspiring quotes to motivate you. Make sure that what you see in your workspace inspires a positive mindset and positive emotions.

5. Only make commitments you can keep. It’s easy to become a people pleaser anywhere in life, including at work. We don’t want to let our boss or colleagues down. We worry about people’s opinions of our work ethic. We end up saying yes to projects, committees, and other work commitments that don’t serve our future or our now. Then, we feel overwhelmed and resentful. Don't volunteer for additional work tasks if you don't have time and/or that doesn’t serve your career growth. Create and maintain professional and personal boundaries at work. Remember, when you say “Yes” to too much, it ultimately leads to overwhelm and unhappiness. 

6. Keep your mind refreshed. We often push ourselves through work projects when we know we’re exhausted and having a deep difficulty focusing. We tell ourselves, “Just keep going. You gotta get this done. You can rest when you’re finished.” However, the time we spend working in that exhausted frame of mind often produces mediocre work quality. If we just give ourselves some short refresher breakers, we could quickly get back to our work with an awake and focused mind that produces our best. Take some music breaks. Listen to a song you love that gets you pumped. Take brief brain breaks, including resting your eyes for 20 minutes, or meditating, or doing a breathing exercise. Or, laugh! Watch a funny video. Giving your mind brief refreshers during throughout your day can go a long way in keeping the positive feelings flowing and keeping the negative emotions at bay.

7. Do work that engages your strengths and passions. We’ll talk about amplifying work Engagement in depth in the next post!  Stay tuned!

The Sunday Night Blues are beatable, but it requires regular maintenance. It's not just about what you do on your weekend that matters (although, as I mentioned, doing things you enjoy on the weekends certainly helps!). It's about regularly nurturing your work-related joy, so that work feels good on the regular, thus Sundays ain't so bad at all.

Want to really immerse yourself in creating career happiness in your life? Check out my Creating Career Happiness Course!