How I stopped being afraid of Mondays
By: Reagan Pugh
Tags: Work, Self, Relationships, Leadership, Fear

You know the feeling in the pit of your stomach on Sunday evenings as you stare down the barrel of the next week? Right around lunchtime whatever joy you found in your weekend has dissipated and the rest of your day is now spent planning how to carry the weight of the next five days.

I’ve heard of a phenomena called the Sunday Scaries, Domingo Dread and The Doom. There’s also a thing called Sunday Funday where millions of people each weekend drink away their anxieties about Monday morning.

In reality our Sabbath fears are mostly ungrounded. We’ve begun work thousands of days prior and we’ve made it out alive. So why do we nervously anticipate participating in a job we’ve successfully navigated day in and day out?

As I reflect on my own fear of weekly work, I can name several reasons the end-of-weekend terror comes to visit each Sunday afternoon:

The unwillingness to stay in the present and enjoy the remainder of my weekend.

Lack of trust in my ability to adapt to the unknown challenges of the coming week.

Fear of others — perhaps coworkers or clients I’m afraid might wound me.

A quiet and unexamined discontent with my work or myself.

A desire for more out of my work or my life resulting from a lack of purpose or meaning.

Doubt I have what it takes to tackle an upcoming challenge I’m afraid of.

My incessant need to compare my life to the lives of others or to the imagined life I believe I should be living right now.

A lack of gratitude for what I currently have and an unwillingness to appreciate the current chapter of my life.

The inability to realize the ability to be proactive and positive I have over my experience and my environment.

No focus or clarity on what I really want.

An obsession with myself instead of focusing on what I might do for others.

The future is rarely as good or as bad as we think it’s going to be. We forget this. We imagine our week or our days not giving us what we want right now, but we’re terrible judges of what is going to make us happy or fulfilled. We also have no idea what it is we really need to grow.

So then, how do we address this looming worry about our work and our week?

We must shift the way we view our work. Ask yourself this question:

What might change if instead of an obligation or something to fear, I viewed work as a relationship?

Consider the relationships which matter most to you. Rarely are those relationships always as fulfilling or meaningful as you wish. They require commitment and investment and reshaping. Yet we continue to seek relationship with others.

All of life is relationship.

The poet and author David Whyte puts this beautifully in his book The Three Marriages. He describes our relationships to ourselves, our work and others as three beautiful and inescapable unions:

We can call these three separate commitments marriages because at their core they are usually lifelong commitments and … they involve vows made either consciously or unconsciously… To neglect any one of the three marriages is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.

Work, then, as any other relationship, will never be perfect. But we don’t give up on our most meaningful relationships because they don’t give us what we want all the time.

Whyte again:

Work is a constant conversation. It is the back-and-forth between what I think is me and what I think is not me; it is the edge between what the world needs of me and what I need of the world. Like the person to whom I am committed in a relationship, it is constantly changing and surprising me by its demands and needs but also by where it leads me, how much it teaches me, and especially, by how much tact, patience and maturity it demands of me.

As someone who tends to view the world from an either/or, zero-sum perspective, I appreciate Whyte’s shift in the way we view our work from a battle to be won or something to execute perfectly, to a conversation. Work is a daily shifting interaction in which we must learn to play and listen and adapt. Just as any relationship, there must also be distance and modification to the dynamics of our interactions.

Also worth remembering — regardless of the state of any relationship, there is always the opportunity to recognize meaning in our midst. The more we get to know ourselves and others, the less fear there is. So goes it with our daily devotion to a skill, task, job, career or vocation. It is not to make meaning but to see it.

If there is something stopping us from participating in the relationship we have with our work, perhaps it’s time to consider the list at the beginning of this post and understand more deeply our relationship with ourselves so we might clarify where the blockage is.

The power of daily reflection cannot be understated here. The only constant in your relationship with our work is you. How familiar are you with yourself right now? This underscores the importance of another of the other three marriages Whyte discusses — the relationship we have with ourselves.

For the vast majority of us, there is no freedom from work in the traditional sense — but there can be peace as we learn to settle into relationship with what we do. The core component of any good and meaningful relationship is that of commitment. To foster and maintain meaningful relationships we commit to endure changing seasons and bringing whole selves to each interaction.

Therefore, when we learn to commit and stop worrying about perfection, answers seem to bubble to the surface. Relationships are about being together, not doing things perfectly. Our work can be a thing we must do each week, or it can be a relationship. We can do our work or we can be with our work.

Which sounds more meaningful to you?

Happy Monday!