Self care? Chores? Try and fix every problem with your life before you have to go back in less than 24 hours to the job you hate?
Easily the most effective for me has been to develop, review, and/or do one action item off a plan to be able to leave the job and work towards something I want to spend my time working on. Knowing I have a plan, remembering it and seeing that it’s a good plan, and taking steps on that is a concrete reminder that the job I hate is temporary and I’m not stuck. That reduces the scaries significantly for me.
Then I also like to clean my place, light a scented candle, and read/watch something to make where I live feel cozy, comforting, and home-y. A reminder that even though the job is shit, I have at least built a home that I come back to. Might call a friend and talk it out too - works on both levels.
What do you do?
Thr scaries start for me once it gets close to noon and the day no longer feels young. The feeling that the day is lost merges with a similar feeling about life, which urges me to do something, anything, with my time.
That’s when I usually get a burst of productivity that lasts until it’s 5pm. The weekend is gone and it’s time to enter self care mode. That usually means good food and entertainment in one form or another. As it gets dark I’ll start trying to stop time with booze or a bit of weed as I indulge myself with sports or a movie.
I will often go to bed early so I can be all cozy and in a safe space to go down a wikipedia hole, read a book, listen to music and just veg in general.
Once the day is actually over the scaries usually have disappeared oddly enough.
What’s a Sunday scary?
It’s a general feeling of dread of the weekend ending and having to go back to work on Monday. Some people let it ruin their Sundays.
Get yourself some long term goals so you aren’t just living for the weekend
I should clarify. By “long term” I mean longer term than one week.
Get some goals that the job feeds into. This can be:
- Saving money to buy something (example: you want to travel to Italy, so you’re saving for plane tickets. Going to work means earning money for this)
- Gathering work experience to prepare yourself for something (example: you want to be a counselor, and dealing with shitty retail customers allows you to practice your patience for when your clients are frustrating)
- Directly achieving the goal with your job (example: you think lead is bad in water, and your job is replacing lead pipes for the city of Denver)
This is three different types of long term goal that can make your monday morning meaningful.
Monday sucks when all your reasons for getting up are negative. Examples of negative meaning are:
- You don’t want to get yelled at by your boss
- You don’t want to lose your job
- You don’t want to be evicted
- You don’t want to be lazy
If all the meaning that’s getting you out of bed on Monday morning is like the above, your life is basically a living hell. Being motivated by fear sucks really bad.
Finding goals that are positive lets you be motivated by desire, which feels much better. Positive goal examples:
- Travel to Italy
- Practice being cool when faced with people freaking out
- Reduce the amount of lead people are consuming
It takes a while to get the hang of it, but organizing one’s life as being motivated by desire makes life so much better you can’t even imagine it.
Cope
just living for the weekend
You want a piece of my heart?
You better start from the start
You wanna be in the show?
Come on, baby, let’s go!
Make a long term goal to find your dream job, and dedicate to yourself each weekend until you do. I no longer have Sunday scares.
For my dad we used to call it his “sunday night mood”
My trick is that I enjoy my job.
What if you like your family more than your job? Hustle and bustle of the work/school week (even an enjoyable one) makes it incredibly hard for me to spend time with my family outside of weekends.
You recognize that you can’t always get what you want, and focus on appreciating what you have, rather than what you cannot change.
And you evaluate the parts you don’t like, asking “is this somehow serving the parts I do like?”
The job is meaningful if it allows your family to have a house.
But if there’s another job that maybe sucks less but pays just as much, then maybe your current job isn’t so meaningful. It’s just meaningless pain.
By doing this evaluation you get benefit on both sides of that outcome:
- When something does serve the parts you like, it’s easier to bear
- When something doesn’t serve the parts you like, it’s good to know so you can work on swapping it out with something that does
Sage advice.
Bring your family to work by getting rid of child labor laws! /$
I’d be an awful person if I didn’t like my family more than my job. Yeah, I’d love a better split of work and home time, but it is what it is. I’m home by 5.30pm or earlier every weekday, so there’s evenings and weekends for family time, but we couldn’t do things if I didn’t have a job that pays well.
I like people in small snippets. A whole day with someone I deeply love and care about can be actual torture for me. But having a short snippet in the morning, and then 6 hours in the evening? Perfect for me.
I used to ask the same question as OP, then I discovered this trick (with crap load of luck, I had tried to find a job that I’d enjoy for a long time before I got one).
I remember thinking in my early twenties that I might as well kill myself if my experience was all adulthood had to offer. Thankfully it has quite a bit more to offer, it just takes a lot of time and effort to find it. I’ve never been suicidal, but at that point in my life I seriously couldn’t see putting myself through such misery for 40-50 years until I could retire, and was desperate for answers.
Similar experiences. I was thinking “that’s it? Now i have to do this 5 times a week, recover on the weekend, and then again for the rest of my life?!”.
People kept telling me you get used to it. I felt hopeless after couple of years because it didn’t get better.
Now I realize that a full time job doesn’t need to mean that you are a husk working your life away, always completely drained.
That was exactly it. Plus my job was incredibly physically demanding, and dirty. Then I’d come home after a 1.5 hour commute, take a shower, and spend the rest of the night in college classes. I’d go home after that and get as drunk as I could to try to feel some release, or happiness, then wake up hung-over at 4 am and do it all again. I was miserable. I never had time to surf, or see my friends, or do much of anything besides work, school, Army reserve duties, and drink. I didn’t really find a different path, but circumstance pushed me into different paths, and eventually some of those paths led to a life I enjoy. So, for any youngins out there feeling the same way, stick with it! It does get better if you’re trying.
Work hard. Play hard. I try to do all my chores and tedium in the weekday. Weekends are two-day vacations.
100%
I have a lot of “momentum” mentally, it takes a lot for me to task switch from work to play or from play to work.
Work from home on Monday
Back when I drank, and didn’t like my job, I’d deal with it by being drunk as often as possible. I loved being drunk, and it created a clear delineation between play time and work time.
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I love my job and usually work weekends.
Drawbacks. I get paid less than tuition. I didn’t get renewed so I get to find a new one.
Big slow breakfast. Do one very small thing (e.g. fix the bed). Tick that box. See how you feel. If it motivates you, try ticking another box. If that doesn’t take, find the nearest sofa.
I like this a lot, could be a new Sunday trend. Cheers!
Psychedelics, drink, smoke, remind myself i only have 50 years left of my shift on earth, get a vasectomy because it is child abuse to force my offspring to wage slave for less then what it takes to afford basic necessities.
Yoga. It’s a great way to start the week off on the right foot by dedicating some time to taking care of myself, and nice slow stretch feels really good
I’m blocked at the minute (n Irish term for pretty damn drunk).
So yeah I guess Sunday is the day I try to think the least about anything in an attempt to keep myself sane.
Drugs
I try to just do stuff I enjoy. I’m a football guy so Sunday is a great day for me this time of year. If I’m not doing that though, I’m spending time with my wife and daughter or tinkering with things that interest me like emulation.
Overall I make it my day and try not to worry about what is happening tomorrow. I will say the thing that really puts it into perspective for me is that I left a job earlier in the year that was unhealthy. I was working overnights and weekends. Sometimes I was only home 8 hours before I had to go back. I decided it was controlling too much of my life and I moved back to a regular Mon-Fri job. I’m so happy to have a regular schedule again and weekends to myself. I do my best to appreciate the time I have now.
Sauna, Changing jobs. However now that I have new job but no contract yet, and hence have not yet given my 2 weeks, my Sunday scaries are extra bad until that happens.
