Curing the Sunday night blues

Curing the Sunday Night Blues

If you’re unhappy at work, or stressed, or feel overwhelmed, chances are that come Sunday night you are dreading the week ahead. 

That’s not good enough. You know that, don’t you? You know that you deserve better? 

I bet it's not just you that’s affected. Probably you’re not enjoying your time with family and friends as much as you could and they aren’t getting the best of you. What about your colleagues, your organisation and the students in your class or your customers and clients? 

The question is, how long are you prepared to put up with it?

One way of looking at it is this: there are three things in the world: 

1. Things we can’t control or do anything about
2. Things we can influence
3. Things we can do something about

So the start point in curing your Sunday night blues is to make sure that you aren’t spending loads of time and energy focusing on things you cannot control. You can’t control that there was a pandemic, you can’t change the economy and you can’t change the education system. 

You may not be able to control how your organisation behaves or the policies and values it works to. You may be able to influence certain things to some extent. If you can, then do it. 

But where you can make the difference is in knowing what falls into category 3, the things that you can control. Whilst those things may be very personal to you and your situation (your school, college or university for example), I've got some great tips to get you going. 

Before we get into that, I just want to talk about the mindsets involved here. 

Firstly, if you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. In other words, if you carry on doing whatever you’re doing right now, you will still have the Sunday Night Blues. 

So you need the second mindset: I notice what I am getting and if it isn’t what I want or like, I do something different. It almost doesn’t matter what you do different, as long as you notice the results it produces for you and if they aren’t to your liking, guess what? Yes, do something else different. 

So, what are some of the things you may be able to do something about: 

Setting boundaries: decide when you’ll stop work and go home. Decide when you want to spend time with your family and do it. Maybe that involves talking to others: your partner or family, your boss or colleagues. 

Find new ways to look at work. Can you find ways to make parts of your work more fun? Can you make parts of it into a game? Does it make a difference if you think about the all of the differences you make, or about how it contributes to your long term goals. 

Turn up differently. That could be about changing what you wear, or it could be about asking yourself “if I am going to have fun this week at work, how will I need to turn up?”. That can make a big difference. Someone on a workshop we ran did this and said “I like my year 9s now”. 

Of course you may find other things too, and a great question to ask any time you’re not enjoying what you’re getting is “what would I rather have?”. Answer the question and then find at least three ways you could get closer to it. 

Pick the best one and, whatever you do, make sure that you do something