Joe Pinsker, writing for The Atlantic, on the dreaded Sunday Blues:
“This feeling, whether we call it anxiety, worry, stress, fear, whatever, it’s all really the same thing,” says Jonathan Abramowitz, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Psychologically, it’s a response to the perception of some sort of threat.” The perceived threat varies—it might be getting up early, or being busy and “on” for several days in a row—but the commonality, Abramowitz says, is that “we jump to conclusions” and “underestimate our ability to cope.” For most people, he reckons, the stress of Sunday is uncomfortable but ultimately manageable—and they end up coping just fine. (And just as with other forms of anxiety, some people don’t feel the Sunday scaries at all.)
This is a fascinating article in that it looks at something most people can identify with, but attribute to a multitude of different sources. From psychobiological to sociological, hypotheses run the conceptual gamut. I remember listening to Henry Rollins, no stranger to hard work, once blaming the feeling that set upon him on Sunday nights on “school damage.”
I was mulling it over today and concluded for myself that it’s the notion of a “weekend” at all that causes the feeling: if you’re hunting and gathering or farming or otherwise living life a little closer to the metal, you don’t think about things in terms of five-day work cycles. You do what you have to do when you have to do it. It’s an affordance of our modern era–where we work for someone else–that we standardize some amount of time off.
And as is noted in the article, a four-day work week would be very welcome indeed. Those feel positively luxurious.