How to Stop the Sunday Scaries: A Psychologist’s Counter-Move That Actually Works

Some time around 6pm on Sunday, the dread starts to land. Your chest tightens. You realise you’ve been scrolling for forty minutes without registering a thing. The wine that tasted good two hours ago tastes like obligation now. You catch yourself mentally rehearsing Monday’s calendar and you don’t even like Mondays in theory.

There’s a name for it, and a lot of advice about how to “cope” with it — most of it useless. This guide goes one layer deeper, drawing on clinical psychologist Guy Winch’s 2026 book Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life. Winch opens his book on Sunday evening on purpose. “For many,” he writes, “the workweek begins psychologically the night before.”

Here’s what the Sunday Scaries actually are, why generic self-care advice doesn’t shut them down, and the single counter-move Winch teaches his clients — small enough to install this week, real enough to feel by next Sunday.

What are the Sunday Scaries?

The Sunday Scaries are anticipatory anxiety about the coming workweek — a wave of dread, restlessness, sleep disruption, and low mood that typically lands Sunday afternoon or evening as the weekend winds down. The term has been around since at least the late 2000s. The phenomenon is much older.

Clinically, it’s a form of anticipatory threat response: your brain is bracing you for something it has flagged as challenging, before that thing has actually happened. The symptoms vary by man:

• A tightness or heaviness in the chest from late afternoon onward
• Trouble falling asleep, or waking at 3am with work on your mind
• Irritability with your partner or kids for no clear reason
• Mental rehearsal of Monday’s calendar, emails, or difficult conversations
• A pull toward heavier drinking, more scrolling, or staying up too late on Sunday night

If you experience some or all of this most Sunday evenings, you’re not malfunctioning. You’re standard issue.

Are the Sunday Scaries normal?

Yes — to a striking degree. An often-cited LinkedIn survey put the share of professionals who report regular Sunday-night anxiety at 80%. Surveys from Monster, Headspace and the Cleveland Clinic have arrived at similar numbers. If you don’t get the Sunday Scaries, you’re the outlier, not the norm.

There’s also data behind the dread. Mondays are statistically the most stressful workday of the week. They have the highest rates of workplace incivility. “More strokes happen on Mondays than on any other workday,” Winch notes, “particularly for men.” A full third of all cerebral haemorrhages happen on Mondays, and even deaths by suicide spike on that day. Your nervous system isn’t being dramatic. It’s pattern-matching.

That said, normal doesn’t mean fine. Persistent, intervention-resistant Sunday Scaries are real diagnostic data — usually about your job, sometimes about your career, occasionally about your mental health. We’ll come back to that.

Why your brain is doing this on purpose

Winch’s first move is to explain that the Sunday Scaries are not malfunction. They’re the alarm system doing its job.

“Your brain’s default response to threats,” he writes, “is to sound the alarm so that you can prepare for what lies ahead.”

Work is, in your brain’s accounting, a fundamental threat. It’s where the hardest mental and emotional challenges in your life live. Conflict, performance judgement, deadlines, hostile colleagues, financial pressure. So as Sunday afternoon slides into Sunday evening — as the workweek looms in your brain’s prediction window — it dutifully floods you with dread to brace you for what’s coming.

That’s not a bug. That’s the system working exactly as designed.

In a hunter-gatherer world, the same circuitry flagged the approach of dangerous weather or the territory of a hostile tribe days in advance so you could prepare. Your brain isn’t malfunctioning on Sunday evening. It’s applying ancient hardware to a never-ending modern threat — your job — that it can’t see an end to.

This matters because most popular Sunday-Scaries advice treats the dread as the problem. It’s not. It’s a signal. Trying to silence the signal by relaxing harder is like trying to silence a smoke detector by waving a magazine at it. The fix has to address what the alarm is reacting to.

Why “relax harder” doesn’t stop the Sunday Scaries

Open any wellness article on the Sunday Scaries and you’ll find variations of the same playbook: take a bubble bath, light a candle, meditate, journal, do a face mask, “set intentions” for the week.

None of it is wrong. Most of it does nothing to the underlying mechanism.

Two specific reasons it doesn’t work.

First, you’re trying to argue with the alarm instead of changing what it’s reacting to. The dread isn’t there because your Sunday wasn’t peaceful enough. It’s there because Monday is coming and your brain has the data on what Monday is like. Soothing yourself harder on Sunday doesn’t change the variable your brain is tracking.

Second, the most common Sunday-evening coping moves actively make Monday worse. The wine (and especially the third wine) wrecks your sleep architecture and amplifies Monday-morning anxiety. The two-hour doomscroll feeds your nervous system threat data right before bed. The “I should be enjoying this!” pressure piles meta-stress on top of the original dread. Now you’re anxious and annoyed at yourself for being anxious.

The men who suffer worst from the Sunday Scaries are often the ones who treat Sunday evening like a final stand against the workweek. They cram fun into it, drink to dampen the dread, stay up too late because going to sleep means Monday arrives sooner. By 8am Monday they’re under-slept, hungover, and starting the worst day of the week with the worst version of themselves.

Winch’s move is the opposite. Don’t fortify Sunday. Build a buffer.

How to stop the Sunday Scaries: the one move that actually works

The technique is one of the simplest in Winch’s book, which is part of why it works on the unconscious.

“To reduce your Sunday dread,” he writes, “you need to make the ‘threat’ seem less immediate and therefore less urgent. The best way to do so is to layer another activity between the end of the weekend and the start of the workweek — preferably a pleasant, enjoyable, meaningful, or connective one.”

That activity goes on Monday morning, not Sunday evening. Crucially.

Why Monday morning? Because what your brain is tracking is what comes next in the queue. If the next thing on the docket after Sunday evening is your 9am all-hands, your unconscious treats Monday as imminent and dread ramps accordingly. If the next thing in the queue is breakfast with a friend, a 7am gym session, or thirty minutes on a personal project — work gets pushed back one slot. The threat becomes less immediate. The alarm dials down.

Three rules make the buffer work:

1. It has to be Monday morning, not Sunday night. Sunday-night activities don’t push Monday further back in the queue; they’re still followed directly by Monday. The buffer only buffers if it sits between you and work.

2. It has to be something you genuinely look forward to. Cold plunges and 5:30am cardio are fine if you actually enjoy them. If you don’t, you’re just front-loading more dread. The buffer must be a pleasure, not a duty.

3. You have to message your brain about it. This is the step most men skip and the step that does the heavy lifting. Winch recommends explicitly narrating your anticipation. “I’m excited to see Jimmy for pancakes tomorrow.” “I love starting the day doing something healthy for myself.” “I’m really enjoying working on this project.” You sound like a self-help book. Your unconscious doesn’t care; it listens to the words.

Concrete buffers for modern men:

• Breakfast with a friend you actually want to see
• A morning workout you’ve been hyped about — new programme, new partner, new gym
• Thirty minutes with the dog on a route you like
• A side project — writing, music, woodwork, photography — that’s quietly become important to you
• Twenty minutes with your coffee and a book before anyone in the house is awake
• A walk to a specific café that has your specific drink

Make a thing of it. Pack the gym bag Sunday evening. Lay out the running shoes. Buy the croissants in advance. The more it registers as an actual event, the more your brain pushes work down the queue.

Yes, this might cost you 30 minutes of sleep. Winch addresses that directly: the sleep you do get will be more restorative because you’ll be less stressed. Anyone who’s been wide awake at 1am cataloguing Monday’s threats knows the trade is worth it.

The Monday-morning follow-through

Even with the buffer working, the first task you hit at work matters. Where you have control over it, don’t make the first thing on your Monday calendar the most stressful one. Difficult conversations, performance reviews, hostile clients — push those to later in the day. Begin Monday with something low-stress that uses your competence rather than your defences.

Where you don’t have control — the immovable 9am leadership meeting, the standing call with the difficult counterpart — Winch’s move is to find one element of the unavoidable task that’s interesting, satisfying, or entertaining, and focus on that going in. Curiosity about how a colleague’s weekend went. A small subplot inside the meeting itself. Anything that nudges your brain a step away from pure threat.

Combine the buffer with this and the difference compounds. Monday’s worst hour stops being your first hour. By the time you hit the meeting room you’re already two pleasant experiences and one moderate dopamine hit into the day. That’s a fundamentally different starting position than your colleagues will walk in with — tired, hungover, scrolling, and braced for impact.

When the buffer isn’t enough

Winch is honest about a hard edge case. “If your job is ridiculously oppressive,” he writes, “this technique might not be sufficient to banish the Blues entirely.”

That’s worth listening to. The buffer handles dread that comes with a basically reasonable job in a basically reasonable workplace. It doesn’t paper over actual toxicity. If you have a buffer dialled in, you’re sleeping well, you’re physically healthy, and Sunday evening still arrives like a slow-moving panic attack week after week — your brain may be telling you something the technique can’t override.

Persistent, intervention-resistant Sunday Scaries are real signal. They might flag chronic overwork. They might flag an unfit job, an abusive manager, a culture of incivility you’ve normalised, or a career you’ve outgrown. None of those get fixed with breakfast plans. They get fixed by addressing the job itself.

The point isn’t to dismiss the dread — it’s to know what it’s telling you. A small, manageable Sunday dimming is normal. A persistent Sunday-night chest-tightening that resists every reasonable counter-move is data worth treating as data.

A quick-start checklist

Run this for the next four Sundays:

• Friday afternoon: decide what your Monday-morning buffer is for the coming week.
• Saturday: make the buffer real — book the breakfast, pack the gym bag, charge the camera, plan the route.
• Sunday evening: explicitly narrate it. Out loud or in your head: “I’m looking forward to [the thing] tomorrow.” Repeat at least three times.
• Sunday night: screens off 45 minutes before bed. No work email. No third drink.
• Monday morning: do the buffer. Even if you don’t feel like it. Especially if you don’t feel like it.
• Monday at work: put the easiest task first where you have a choice.

By the third Sunday, you’ll feel a real difference. By the tenth, you’ll wonder how the dread got so loud in the first place.

Sunday evening, reclaimed

You spend roughly one-seventh of your life on Sunday evenings. If work has already hijacked Monday through Friday and bled into Saturday morning, Sunday evening is sometimes the last unclaimed block of the week. Don’t hand it over without a fight.

The Sunday Scaries aren’t a personality flaw. They’re not weakness. They’re not a sign you need more self-care. They’re an alarm system doing its job. The move isn’t to silence it. It’s to change what it’s reacting to — by putting something good between you and the thing it’s reacting to, and telling yourself, in plain words, that you’re looking forward to it.

It is the smallest, simplest play in Winch’s book. Start there.

Source: Guy Winch, Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life (Simon & Schuster, 2026). All quoted passages from Winch are drawn from the book.