Follow the show:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Everywhere else
The Sunday Scaries are an experience most working moms have on Sunday afternoons when their brain unintentionally starts thinking about work the next day, which then produces stress, anxiety and overwhelm. In today’s podcast, I am going to explain exactly why you experience the Sunday Scaries, how it is something that is actually controllable and 4 specific steps to ending them.
Topics in this episode:
Why your brain likes to bring up the Sunday Scaries
How the Sunday Scaries are something you create, not something that happens to you
The Sunday Scaries are a survival mechanism
What it takes to control the Sunday Scaries
4 specific steps to end the Sunday Scaries
3 questions to intentionally shift your mindset on Sunday’s
Show Notes & References:
Do you have a topic for the podcast? Send me an email at Rebecca@rebeccaolsoncoaching.com
Schedule a free coaching call if you want to not just control the Sunday Scaries, but eradicate them from your working mom life: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
Don’t forget to leave a rating and review to help spread this resource to other working moms!
Enjoying the podcast?
Make sure you don’t miss a single episode! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or where ever you listen to podcasts.
Leave a rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.
Transcript
Intro
The Sunday scaries, an experience most working moms have on Sunday afternoons when their brain unintentionally starts thinking about work the next day, which then produces a whole lot of stress and anxiety and overwhelm. In today's podcast, I'm going to be explaining exactly why we experienced the Sunday scaries, how it's something that's actually controllable, and four specific steps you can take to end them. You ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Okay working moms, happy monday. It’s the start of a new week and I want to talk about a topic today that comes up a lot for my clients. I didn't even know what this was really until I started coaching a whole lot of working moms, and this phrase came up all of the time, and it makes perfect sense to me exactly what it is. I just never even knew it had a label. It's what we call the Sunday Scaries.
The anxious feeling you get at the end of your weekend before work the next day.
We've all experienced this - It's where Sunday rolls around, usually Sunday afternoon, and your brain starts thinking about what you have to do the next day at work or what you have coming up this week at work. And then there's this rise of stress and anxiety that hits your body. All of a sudden, your restful weekend is over. Nobody likes this experience. Nobody wants to feel the sense of anxiety and dread about going to work the next day. And nobody wants to cut off the relaxation of their weekend where they really should be resting. But most women, when they talk to me about the Sunday scaries, they share it with me like it's just the news, as if it's just something that happens to them every single Sunday and they don't have any control over it.
One of the conversations that comes up as I talk to working moms about the Sunday scaries is they start talking to me about, ‘well, maybe I should just quit my job or change jobs’. It's a lot of women's first instinct to say that because they experienced the Sunday scaries, there must be something wrong. It's a sign that something is wrong in their job, like it's a problem, and maybe they should be considering doing something about it. Now, I want to be clear that it may be that you need to change your job or you do need to make some changes right now, but it's not because of the Sunday scaries. You never want to ascribe meaning to a feeling. You experience feelings all day, every day. Some of those emotions are positive. Some of them are negative. Some of them feel good, some of them feel bad. You kind of go in and out of all sorts of emotions every single day. There's no reason to take just one emotion that you experience on a Sunday and decide that it means you should quit your job. You do not want to ascribe meaning to an emotion. You don't want to take it to an extreme.
The Sunday scaries are just as they are labeled, it is the experience of being scared or anxious or overwhelmed or stressed on a Sunday due to the way you are thinking about your work on Monday. Likely some of those key thoughts that create the feelings of anxiety and stress on Sundays are, oh my gosh, I have too much to do. I can't get it all done. I've got a lot going on. I'm so behind. A lot of people need something from me. I don't want to let anybody down. This is a big week to hear all of those thoughts. How do they feel when you just listen to me share them with you, anxiety inducing, right? It starts to make you feel like maybe you're not on top of your work. It makes you feel just sort of overwhelmed thinking about it. When you are thinking you have 50 things to do on your to do list and you only have time to get ten done, that doesn't feel very good. It doesn't make you excited to go to work tomorrow, doesn't make you love what you do. You feel overwhelmed and anxious.
You have to change the way you're thinking about yourself and your job.
If you want to stop experiencing the Sunday scaries, you have to change the way you're thinking about yourself and your job on Sundays. If you want to stop experiencing the Sunday scaries, you have to do two things:
You have to change the way you're thinking about yourself and your job on Sundays when the Sunday scaries appear.
You have to change the way you're thinking about yourself and your job in the big picture.
I want to help you learn how to shift in the moment when the Sunday scaries appear. And I want to help you figure out how to not ever experience the Sunday scariest ever again. But before we jump into talking about how to shift your mindset and some of those thoughts, let's talk about why this is such a common experience for working moms or really all humans.
Your brain's primary function is to keep you alive, not to make you happy.
Let me say that again. Your brain's primary function is to keep you alive, not to make you happy. Your brain's primary function, or at least its default function, is safety and security. It does not want you to fail. It does not want you to let anyone down. And so on a Sunday, the day before you start work again, your brain is going to start offering to you lots of thoughts that ensure that you get everything done and that you make sure everybody is happy with you. Because if you get everything done, and everybody's happy with you, your brain is going to start thinking you're really successful at your job. You think that you'll be happier, you think that you'll be liked more, you think that you'll be promoted faster. That's what your brain thinks. And all of those things, being happy, being successful, being liked, those are your safety and security brain driving the bus in your head. Your brain offers to you all of these thoughts on a Sunday, all of these thoughts that bring overwhelm and anxiety and stress, aka the Sunday scaries, because it thinks it's useful to you. It thinks that you need them in order to be alive, to be successful, to be liked, those are the things that you kind of need in order to survive.
All of our brains operate this way. It's not just yours. All of us have this default part of our brain that's reminding us of all of the things that we have yet to do that we're not doing well, and the ways that we are failing people all around us, the things that we could be doing better. All of us have this part of our brain and it's not a problem, we actually need this part of our brain. For sure, if you were to meet a lion in the woods, you want your safety and security brain to kick it into high gear, right? We don't want this part of our brain to go away. We just don't want it to be the dominant part as we think about our work. The problem is, a Monday morning day at work that's not life or death. You don't need your safety and security brain to be dominant while at work or even while you're just preparing or thinking about work, it's actually just not very useful to you. Instead, you need to be tapping into the more sophisticated part of your brain that can think more rationally, make decisions that are based on values that really understand trade off. It is the part of your brain that understands reasoning.
Let me give you a really great example or a demonstration around how each of these parts of our brains work. I'm going to use the example of when I decided to leave my job and become a coach. I know this is like a really extreme or big example - a lot of people are listening to this podcast that aren't thinking about changing their jobs or leaving work or whatever it may be like I was about…this would probably be about eight years ago now. But I think that as I describe this to you, it's going to really help you see which thoughts are coming from your safety and security brain and which thoughts are coming from the more sophisticated part of your brain.
What the safety and security side of the brain sounds like.
So when I first started considering this, like my safety and security brain reeked out this part of my brain, I had let it be the dominant for almost a year, which is why it took me so long to leave my job, even though I knew 100% it was exactly what I wanted to do. It was the part of my brain that was saying that leaving my full time kind of cushy job where I was the breadwinner and I held all the benefits, leaving that job would be way too risky. My brain wanted to tell me all of the reasons why I shouldn't do it, how failure was a really high potential, the financial hit that my family would take. My safety and security brain was very mean to me. She told me how selfish I was being, how cashing out my stocks in order to pay for coach training and start my business was selfish. How irresponsible I was, how I had a family to provide for. Now, if you're listening to this podcast and you've been thinking about changing your job, I 100% know that your brain sounds very similar to mine. This is your safety and security brain and it can be loud, very persuasive, and cause a whole lot of anxiety and stress in our body.
What the confident side of the brain sounds like.
Now, it wasn't really until I started listening to the other side of my brain, the sophisticated part of my brain that can think a lot more rationally, that things really began to shift for me. That part of my brain was able to think about how important it was to me to show my kids that I could be a strong woman that has a career that I love, have an amazing job and be a great mom at the same time. It's a part of my brain that reminded me how loved I am, how valued I am, no matter if I have a business that's successful or it completely fails. It's the part of my brain that could look at the numbers and see that it was risky but decide that that trade off for me being happy and doing something I absolutely love and am passionate about every single day is worth it. It's the part of my brain that can remind me that my identity is not found in my job, that what I do matters a lot less than who I am. It's the part of my brain that reminded me what a badass I am and how successful I have been in my life up till this point and that I am dedicated and hard working and I never settle and I wouldn't moving forward.
Do you hear how different this part of the brain sounds? You hear the confidence on this side of the brain, both sides of my brain, the safety and security brain that was reminding me of how irresponsible and selfish I was being and the more sophisticated part of my brain that knew I was worth it and that I was capable. Both sides are speaking truth on some level based on how you looked at the situation, you could rationalize either side. Each side had a perspective that made sense. But only one of those perspectives got me to what I wanted, which was to wake up every day in a career that I absolutely loved.
One thing I really want you to hear as I share with you this example from my own life, is that both voices were speaking to me really all of the time. When the safety and security part of my brain was most dominant, that was when I felt stagnant and stuck and I just couldn't leave my job and I couldn't rationalize it. I had the hardest time making any kind of move. That was when my safety and security brain was the loudest, when I was listening to that part of my brain the most. And then when I turned up the dial on that more sophisticated part of my brain and I made that one more dominant, that's when things really began to shift. I started to look for ways to kind of exit that job. I ended up doing a kind of a part time gig for a while that kind of bridged the gap between what I was doing full time and then moving into my full time business. And I was able to open up all of those opportunities because I started listening to that more sophisticated part of my brain.
Intentionally redirect your brain into a more sophisticated side.
Okay, so let's talk about a much more real life example of these two parts of your brain. The Sunday scaries is such a great one. On Sundays when you begin to feel anxious and nervous and overwhelmed and stressed for the work day ahead and the work week ahead, It's your safety and security brain that is reminding you of how much you have to do and how little time you have to do it. It's reminding you of all of the people you have to get back to. It's reminding you that if you don't get back to them, people are going to be disappointed in you. It's reminding you that you're not 100% prepared for that presentation you have this week, and you're going to have to win some of it. That's not going to feel good. Your brain is going to offer you all of these thoughts. It's almost inevitable. Your job is to not listen to them, to instead intentionally redirect your brain into a more sophisticated side and begin to think about how amazing you are, that you're the perfect person for this job. How it's not a problem that you're so busy, that being busy is actually a very good sign. You're going to have to redirect your brain very intentionally back to how you don't need to be 100% prepared, that 80% is good enough, and you can just trust yourself for the final 20.
You're going to have to redirect your brain to the perspective that you love what you do and where you work and who you work with. And you wouldn't want to be anywhere else. Because when you're thinking those things, your body begins to feel much more grounded and assured. You trust yourself, you feel capable. And when you feel assured and grounded and capable, you start making better decisions. In this case, you make decisions to prioritize your family instead of log back on. You make decisions to be present instead of checking messages on your phone. You make decisions to write down those first three things that you're going to tackle on the work day tomorrow so that you can feel super productive and your brain can move on.
The 4 steps to shifting your mindset.
So how do you intentionally shift from the part of your brain that's just trying to keep you alive and survive to the part of your brain that makes you feel confident and capable? Now I'm going to walk you through four steps that I give all of my clients.
The first one is to normalize. This is a very normal experience for almost anyone I have ever met. And it's okay that your brain freaks out on Sundays. The less weight you give it, the less you listen to that scared part of your brain, the less it's going to speak up in the future. So that first step is to normalize.
The second step is to take a moment and calm down your nervous system. All of the anxiety and the stress and the overwhelm, that's a real experience inside of your body. You can't ignore that. You have to do something with that energy that's been created in your body. And the number one thing you could do is focus on your breathing. Direct your brain to your breath, to your inhale and your exhale. I like to put my hand over my heart as an act of self compassion and recognize all the stress and anxiety energy that's happening inside of me. I want to do it with love. And this is something that should begin to shift. You should continue to breathe and focus on your breath until there's almost like this little break in the discomfort and you'll notice that kind of the anxiety and the stress and the energy that's happening in your body that that lessens. So you want to keep doing that until you feel that shift. For me, that can sometimes be as little as 30 seconds. Sometimes it's as much as maybe two minutes, but it's usually not much more than that.
Now step number three is then to very intentionally redirect your brain from the safety and security side to the more intentional side. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to pick one of these three questions and I want you to answer it. How do I know I am more than capable of doing my work this week? Number two, how do I know I am amazing at what I do? Number three, why is this exactly where I want to be? Now this is where the real shift happens. So don't just answer this question once. Answer it as many times as it takes for your whole energy to shift. For me, that's at least five minutes, but sometimes it can take me 15 or 20. Just take one of those questions and answer it in as many different ways as you possibly can.
Step four is to then take immediate action towards doing something that you want to do at that moment, because what you don't want to be doing is thinking about work and checking your email and your messages and starting to stress out and freak out over all of those different things. That's not what you want to do. So now that you've shifted your energy, it's time to take an actual action towards something that you want to do in that moment. Spend time with your kids. Jump into a good book, take a walk, take a bath, take a nap. Write down the three things that you plan to do tomorrow and stick them on your desk so you can look at them tomorrow when you start working. The goal here is to just capitalize on your energy so that as you shift out of the Sunday scaries, you do something immediately that you've planned to do that day. Or maybe you didn't plan to do it, but it's just something that's going to meet that goal of being present with your family, which is what most of us want, instead of wanting to sit there and work all the time and think about work and stress about work.
Conclusion
All right, working moms. So, the four steps to ending the Sunday Scaries - normalize the fact that it happens, calm down your body, be intentional with your brain and redirect it. And then four, take intentional action. As always, I love being here with you. If you ever have a topic that you want me to cover on this podcast, I encourage you to reach out and send me an email. I read every single one of them. You can reach me at rebecca@rebeccaolsoncoaching.com. And if you would be so kind as to leave a rating and review of this podcast, that still is the number one way to get this resource into the hands of other working moms out there. Let's spread the love, working moms and I will see you next week. Let's get to it.
