How To Beat The Sunday Blues?
Discover a few tips to beat the Sunday blues
You know the Sunday blues... the feeling that turns up when the Sunday is coming to an end - a certain melancholy or sadness, maybe a sort of mild depression.
I believe that the Sunday blues is a by-product of certain structures in Western society, namely school and work.
Underlying the Sunday blues is the feeling that on Monday morning we have to go back to school or to work, and that the mini-holiday that is the weekend is ending.
For me the Sunday blues takes the shape of stress usually - I feel as if Monday "is already here" and as if I'm not getting enough time to do all I want to do.
Sometimes, when I haven't taken care of those thoughts and feelings, they turn into resistance and I end up wandering around the house up to 1am, avoiding going to bed.
Tips to beat the Sunday blues
The root of the emotions which come with the Sunday blues is our thoughts being more focused in the future (Monday morning) than in the here and now (Sunday evening).
These thoughts are subtle - you may not even be conscious that you're not fully present, until you realize you that you feel sad, apathetic and unmotivated, and you don't even know why.
So, with the intention that they are useful to you, I present you with a selection of the top five ways in which I beat the Sunday blues:
- Focusing on the breath. It always works - letting all thoughts and emotions go, leave everything aside, and just focus on your breathing. If your thoughts wander (they're likely to), then just come back to your breathing.
Just a couple of minutes of focused breathing make a large difference to your state of consciousness - sometimes just doing this helps me beat the Sunday blues immediately. - Imagining I have an infinite evening in front of me. I do this when the Sunday blues shows up as stress because I want to do a lot of things, but I tell myself the story that I have to get to bed by a certain time and that I don't have that much time.
I tell myself in as many different moments as possible something on the line of "Here I am, it's Sunday evening" - the repetition of it at short intervals does actually make me feel that I'm in Sunday evening all the time - which eliminates stress. - The Rampage of Appreciation, a technique from Abraham-Hicks. It consists of taking time to express appreciation and gratitude for as many things as you can think of.
The longer you keep going, the better you feel - you will know when you're feeling that good that you can then stop.
I picture the rampage of appreciation as a tool to refill our energy. Once you're done, there will be no traces of the Sunday blues ;-) - Pretending I'm on leave the next day. This is a nice game I play to beat the Sunday blues, a bit on the line of imagining that I have an infinite evening, but to deal with different feelings: melancholy and sadness.
Pretending that I'm off the next day helps me to relax and feel better. It's as if I had instantly given myself (mentally) an extra day of vacation.
It doesn't matter if that's not actually the case, because by the time I get up on Monday morning to go to work I'm already in a different state of mind; playing mentally that I'm off serves its purpose in the moment. - Painting, gardening, reading... Anything that I do for the pleasure of doing it sends away the feelings of sadness and stress.
This is powerful in that it's very direct: as long as you're focused on what you're doing, you feel fine.
The key point to beat the Sunday blues is to take your attention off the future and actively put it on to something that makes you feel good here and now.
As you start feeling better and continue focused on what's making you feel good you build momentum, and eventually the sadness, melancholy or stress disappear altogether.
Now sometimes we just want to feel sad, even if we refuse to acknowledge it - and that's fine, just be aware that that is your choice.
It also takes just the choice to feel good to be open to things that make you feel good - or actively seek them.
Out of experience... feeling good is a much nicer way of spending the Sunday evening than feeling bad ;-)
"This is the best time in all eternity for a Creator to Create."
Abraham-Hicks