You’d planned to enjoy a leisurely lie-in, but you bolt awake at 6am, head already full of a running to-do list of everything you’ll need to take care of when you go back to work. You try to ignore the creeping sense of dread, to have your fry-up and watch TV, but it spreads like toxic ivy wrapping around your throat. You open your laptop and try to at least clear your inbox ahead of tomorrow, but that doesn’t sort it. At bedtime, you toss and turn, wracked by anxiety about what Monday will bring. 

These are the Sunday scaries. We’ve all been there. And they’re what prompted Marisa Jo to come up with the idea of ‘bare minimum Mondays’, something she believes can stop the Sunday scaries in their tracks. 

“I started implementing bare minimum Monday in March of 2022,” Marisa Jo, a video creator and startup co-founder from Phoenix, Arizona, tells Stylist. “It actually came from a video I made on a whim when I was feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work I’d assigned for myself on that specific Monday: I picked up my phone and said, ‘This video is permission to do the absolute bare minimum today,’ and I captioned it, ‘Welcome to bare minimum Monday’ without realising at the time how monumental that moment was for me. I’ve implemented BMM every single Monday since.”

The name ‘bare minimum Mondays’ might seem self-explanatory, but let’s break it down. 

This does not mean giving up entirely and doing nothing each Monday (something that would likely get you in a lot of trouble with your boss). Instead, it’s about giving yourself permission to only do absolutely essential work tasks on the first day of a new week. Nothing more. 

“The next few Mondays, I kept the experiment going,” Marisa Jo explains. “I would wake up and only write down to-dos that absolutely had to get done, and left any ‘wishful thinking’ tasks until Tuesday. I promised myself that these tasks, and these tasks alone, were all I needed to do today, and week after week, I felt better.

“Over time, the act of lowering the stakes, taking unnecessary pressure off myself, and being nicer to myself has allowed me to do more than when I was in my constant state of stress, assigning myself a mountain of work and barely making a dent due to overwhelm.”

Marisa Jo’s bare minimum Mondays are typically made up of “three or four hours of focused work (just the absolutely-have-to tasks)”, with the rest of the day for her. As someone who’s self-employed, she knows that those of us with a traditional 9-5 might not be able to follow that exact formula. Instead, she recommends considering what a bare minimum Monday could look like for you. 

“This could mean taking a few tasks off your plate, delegating to team members, introducing more self-compassion, saying no to social gatherings after work, taking a longer lunch, going on ‘do not disturb’ more – there are really no rules here,” she suggests. “Removing any ‘wishful thinking’ tasks, as well as tasks that are neither urgent nor important, from your plate is a great first place to start.”

For Marisa Jo, the benefits of this approach have included a total disappearance of the Sunday scaries, the ability to prioritise and value rest, increased motivation and waking up every Monday morning “excited to start the week, rather than feeling behind from the moment my alarm goes off”. 

Subira Jones,  a corporate burnout prevention consultant known as ‘The Corporate Hippie’, backs this as a way to not only tackle stress but even make you better at your job. “I personally am someone who likes to ease my way into the start of my working week after a weekend, as opposed to diving head first into my tasks,” she shares. “If done in the right way, a bare minimum Monday can give you the time and space to prepare for your week ahead, helping you remain empowered and in control of your role and duties.”

Jones’s version of bare minimum Mondays sees her reducing morning meetings, and instead using that time to organise and prepare for the next four days. She also takes an 80/20 approach to tasks, doing only the most important 20% of things and leaving the other 80% for the rest of the week. “For me, doing the bare minimum actually looks like only focusing on tasks that are of priority due to impact, necessity or time constraints,” she explains. 

Soma Ghosh, a career happiness mentor, also backs bare minimum Mondays. She notes that potential benefits include “feeling less pressure about the week ahead and less anxious about work”, having a better start to the week, being able to focus on key tasks rather than doing a panicked attempt at multitasking, and lower levels of stress long term. 

And Madeleine Dore, author of I Didn’t Do The Thing Today, reckons that by letting go of some of the pressure around productivity, we could end up being more productive. 

“It seems paradoxical, but the more pressure there is to be productive, the less productive we are — instead we feel anxious, overwhelmed, and burnt out,” Dore tells us. “Approaches like bare minimum Mondays can be helpful because they help reframe expectations around perfection and pressure to be constantly doing.”

But all three of the experts we asked about bare minimum Mondays noted that while this practice can absolutely be helpful in tackling the Sunday scaries, we shouldn’t view it as a magic cure-all to the issues of chronic stress, overwhelm and unhealthy working cultures. If your job has a toxic approach to overworking and it’s wrecking your mental health, you can’t just bare minimum Monday your way out of this. 

“There needs to be a holistic plan in place for each individual at work,” Ghosh recommends. “Where HR, occupational therapy, careers coaching and mental health professionals come together to help organisations and individuals figure out what works for them to prevent burnout and stress.”

Dore says that bare minimum Mondays need to be just a small part of how we rethink our working lives. “I think it’s important to recognise that much of the pressures we face are systemic or embedded in certain work cultures and can be difficult to untangle from as individuals,” she notes. “I think bare minimum Mondays speaks to something broader about finding flexibility and more human approaches to work, and that is something that needs to be championed in a multifaceted way.”

“Burnout is not an occupational phenomenon, therefore managing workplace stress alone is not enough to prevent it,” adds Jones. “In order to prevent burnout, you have to create a lifestyle that is preventative of it.”

And it’s vital that you suss out what works best for you – bare minimum Mondays could do wonders for one person and just compound stress for another. 

“My biggest tip is to figure out where you’re putting unnecessary pressure on yourself, asking too much of yourself or setting unrealistic expectations – because that is often where most of the stress is coming from to begin with,” says Marisa Jo. “Back when I was in the depths of corporate America, I could’ve benefitted from telling myself, ‘You don’t have to show up perfectly, finish every project or have the most productive day of your life — and it’s OK.’”

Bare minimum Mondays might do the trick for you, but if not – or if you just want some other tools in your arsenal – here’s how the experts recommend tackling the Sunday scaries head-on. 

Get to the root of your Sunday scaries

“Some of us may struggle with the Sunday scaries because of a few reasons,” says Ghosh. “It could be that you work in a very pressured environment and thus feel this pressure straight away when it comes to mid-afternoon Sundays and evening. It could also be your work environment and culture isn’t currently suiting you and the anxiety around this is making you dread your week ahead. One other reason could be that the people you work with often cause you to worry or stress about work and stop you from doing your work.” 

“There are two main factors why people experience the Sunday scaries,” believes Jones. “Overwhelm: when someone feels like they have no control over their time and workload, the thought of going to work fills them with dread and anxiety. This is compounded if they also feel like they have limited agency in their personal life. Lack of purpose: if someone is doing work that feels misaligned with their core values, who they are or the career they aspire to have, then it may be really hard for them to be enthused and motivated to go back to work after the weekend.”

Have a real, hard think about what’s triggering Sunday anxiety and overwhelm. Is it an internal pressure? Do you hate your commute? Is your job making you miserable – and is it time to move on? 

Change the practical bits to make Mondays easier 

If what causes you dread each Sunday is knowing you have endless meetings on a Monday, could you ask to move them so they’re more evenly spread across the week? If you hate the Monday commute, could you work from home? 

Schedule relaxing activities on a Sunday

Ghosh recommends a yoga class or doing some meditation and making sure to prioritise sleep. Perhaps you might like the routine of a Sunday bath night with all the oils and candles your heart desires. 

“Having a good Sunday nighttime routine will help you feel renewed and refreshed on Monday morning,” Ghosh says. 

Set boundaries

Have some hard limits and rules to mark off your Sunday as your own and stop Monday creeping into your weekend. That might look like setting a weekend out-of-office message, refusing to open your laptop or scheduling in some joyful activities that have absolutely nothing to do with your work self. 

“The best way to tackle the Sunday scaries, is to “take back your personal power”, argues Jones. “Reinstate both control and purpose into your life, which can be done by having an intentional Sunday evening routine and Monday morning routine.”

Write a to-do list – but without the pressure

Madeleine Dore’s One Good Thing is to hold our to-do lists a little more lightly, and that’s a key tool in ridding yourself of the productivity guilt that can strike every Sunday evening. 

Writing down what you need to do can get it off your mind and onto the page, thus making it feel a lot more manageable than what you were imagining. 

Journal 

Writing down your worries can help you process them – and work out which things are within your control and which are just taking up unnecessary mental space.

“The best way to make the intangible manageable is to write it down,” notes Jones. “Sometimes a problem is not as bad as it seems once it is written down, and it allows you to create a plan/solution to solve it.”

Images: Getty