It arrives around four and it is not really about Monday. It is worth paying attention to rather than managing.
It arrives somewhere around four in the afternoon. Nothing has happened. The weekend was fine. And a particular heaviness settles in, and the rest of the evening is spent slightly bracing. Almost everyone has some version of this and most people treat it as weather. Something to be got through, distracted from, managed with a longer shower and an earlier night. I think it is more interesting than that.
Or not only. If it were about the tasks, it would scale with the difficulty of the week ahead, and mostly it does not. People get it before easy weeks. People get it on holiday, the night before going back. What it seems to track is not workload but the transition back into a version of yourself. The weekend self is one arrangement. The weekday self is another. On Sunday evening you can feel the second one coming for you, and some part of you registers a small loss. Which raises a question worth sitting with: what exactly is the thing you are about to stop being?
A mild flatness on a Sunday evening is close to universal and probably not worth much analysis. But the size is information. If it has grown over the last year, if it now starts on Saturday, if you have begun structuring your weekends around not thinking about it, that is a different signal from mild reluctance. It has stopped being a mood and become a system.
Mostly, they distract. Something on in the background, something to scroll, plans made specifically so there is no unstructured hour in which the feeling can arrive. That works, in the sense that the evening passes. It also means the feeling never gets examined, so it keeps arriving, and each week the distraction has to be slightly larger.
Not a technique. An hour of not managing it. Let the Sunday evening be quiet once and pay attention to what the feeling is actually made of. People find quite different things when they do this. Dread of a particular person. Boredom, which is often the hardest one to admit. A sense of being behind. Sometimes grief for a version of their life they stopped believing in some time ago without announcing it. Those are different problems with different answers, and the distraction treats them all the same.
When the answer to what the feeling is made of turns out to be bigger than a job. When it has been growing for a year or more. And when you notice that a substantial part of your week is now organised around not feeling it. That last one is usually the point at which people write to me, and it is a good moment to arrive.
Written by Satlaj Sachan, a counsellor in Bengaluru working Book a first conversation.