5 Tips for Reducing Sunday Night Anxiety | Quickstart Guide

Hey there everybody, and welcome to this presentation on reducing Sunday night anxiety. This is part of the new Quick Start guide series and I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. What is Sunday night anxiety? Well, it's that dread that washes over you when Monday morning is almost here. It can come from a variety of factors, but a lot of times it's caused by anticipating the worst from the upcoming week. Thinking about all those meetings that you really don't want to go to, all the sleep stuff that you've got to do, fears that you may not be able to meet expectations, or maybe there's some tasks that you're being told you have to do that you feel ill prepared for or that are very uncomfortable for you. Challenging co workers There are a variety of things that you can focus on. And just like anything else in life, our brain is designed to focus on more attention, on the threats as opposed to the benefits of things. So your brain goes to those things that you may be reading and, and pays more attention to those and does not highlight the positives. So what can you do about it? Well, acknowledge your feelings. Your feelings are real, that they are what they are. So being mindful acknowledging them is the first step. The next thing that you can do is unhook from them. You acknowledge your feeling, I'm dreading the upcoming week, okay? Then you unhook by saying, I'm having thoughts that are that I'm dreading the upcoming week. So you can unhook from those and you can say, okay, I have these thoughts here. What can I do with them? Positive affirmations is one of the things that you can try to do. Remember, your brain pays attention pretty much effortlessly to the negative things, to the things that you're dreading, to the things that cause anxiety in you. But it doesn't automatically pay attention to the good things. So you can also turn your attention to the good things that you expect that week. Maybe you're going to get to see some co workers that you really like, or you've got a project that's finally going to be finished. Whatever the good things you expect, make sure to pay attention to those. Not to minimize the stuff that you don't like, but to help balance it out, to recognize that it's not all bad. You can also think about things, good things that have happened last week. And then throughout the week, even throughout each day, stop and be mindful of, okay, what are the good things that happened today? What is making my day more pleasant? And these can all be journaling. Prompts, hence the little JP at the end. The next thing that you can think about or focus on or journal about is your ability to handle the suck. And I'm sorry, there are just some days that suck and it's important to recognize that, yes, it's unpleasant, but you've gotten through them before. Whether it is an eight hour meeting, been through those, whether it is, you know, a whole day's worth of things that you don't want to do or. When I worked in community mental health, we would regularly have audits and those could be very stressful, but I would focus on my ability to get through those and how could I see them as challenges instead of burdens. You can also explore the things that you are dreading in terms of the dialectics, looking at the good with the bad. I really don't want to go to work and have to go through sit through this eight hour meeting because, you know, eight hours is a really freaking long time. However, I am grateful to have a job and hey, maybe I can bring some of my paperwork and work on that throughout the meeting. So you can embrace the dialectics, you can figure out ways to make it more tolerable. You can modify situations to lessen the dread. What can you do to make things more amusing? Maybe you can in a meeting, you can sit by a friend. Maybe you can bring paper and doodle. You know, maybe not coloring crayons and everything, but if you bring paper, you can doodle or for me, I make lists. There are a lot of different things that you might be able to do in situations. I hate doing progress notes. That's just one of those things. I don't like doing them. So thinking about ways that I can modify doing some of my paperwork, I put on a video on the computer while I'm doing my paperwork. I'm not paying a whole lot of attention to it, but it's in the background and it helps me feel more relaxed and it makes it less unpleasant. So I com I pair something I don't like with something I do like. You can have what's and you can journal about that. What are different ways you can modify the situations you hate in order to make them more palatable? You can create a Karma box or what some people call a God box, and you can write down your stresses and your anxieties on index cards or pieces of paper and put them in that box and say, you know what, I'm just going to put this over here right now and literally put that anxiety up on the shelf. One of my favorites, because I'm a kid at heart, is blowing bubbles. Two benefits to blowing bubbles. Number one, it forces you to deep breathe and breathe slowly, which can trigger your rest and digest. So it can help trigger the relaxation response. But you can also envision your stresses in each one of those bubbles. So think about something that you're stressing about and then blow a bubble and watch it float away and then pop. So you can see it just disappear into the atmosphere. Thought stopping or redirection is something else you can do. And you can journal about this. What are three or five ways that are you find effective in order to thought stop? Basically tell yourself, no, I'm not going to think about that and redirect because when you stop thinking about it, then you got to do something else. So I'm going to not think about this and I'm going to turn my attention to, you know, what are three or five things that you can turn your attention to? Another cause of Sunday night anxiety is burnout work environments. And I'm not going to talk a lot about this right now because I have an entire other video on burnout work environments. And some things in the burnout work environment you cannot change. Sometimes you can have an attitude adjustment about them. Sometimes you can embrace the suck. Sometimes you need to look for a new job. So there are times, different things that you can do depending on the characteristics of your burnout work environment. Sometimes you are stuck in that environment for a period of time and it's figuring out how you're going to make the best of a really bad situation. I've been there and, you know, seeing this light at the end of the tunnel, I knew I had to stay in this position for at least another four months because I wasn't going to leave the job in under a year. So how did I navigate that? And that's something that only you can answer for yourself. You can talk with your supervisors, you can talk with human resources. You can try to resolve some of these issues. But burnout work environments do tend to create an attitude of dread on Sunday night. And finally, a lack of rewards. Just going through the daily grind can be dread provoking, so to speak. It's just another week, another day, another dollar, whatever you want to say. If you're not focusing on rewards or if they're not rewards throughout the week, it can seem onerous to have to go through and just trudge along through the same stuff, different day. So schedule in fun throughout the week and even throughout the workday. You know what can you do that is fun, that is funny, that is lightens the mood, that encourages cooperation, whatever it is that can make your environment a little bit more pleasant and also help you look forward to work instead of dreading it on Sundays. Another tool you can use is developing hardiness, commitment, control and challenge. Your job is only one aspect of your life. What happens during the week? There are lots of things. There's family, there's, you know, doctor's appointments, there's shopping, there's all kinds of things. But identifying the things that are important in your rich and meaningful life that you're committed to is really important because you need to figure out the best way to use your energy to nurture those things that you're committed to. Control is the second aspect. You look at those things in your life to which you're committed and you identify what aspects of those are within your control. What can you do to nurture those things and make them be the way you want them to be, so to speak? And challenge is viewing obstacles, viewing problems as challenges or opportunities to improve the next moment. Instead of seeing them as something that is onerous, again, see it as something that is inspiring, that brings out your curiosity and your creativity. To think, how can I solve this? How can I make this better? Finding meaning. Another one of those journaling prompts. Think about what are the benefits of your job? It may just be a paycheck. You know, sometimes that's all the only benefit there is to a job. But hopefully there are other things that are beneficial in your job. And what aspects of your job do you like? Again, hopefully there are several things, but identifying any aspects that you like so you can focus on those. Instead of focusing only on the things that you don't like, evaluate the effects of your Sunday night negativity. Another journaling prompt. What are the benefits to your Sunday night anxiety? What? In what way does that help prepare you for the week? In what way does that help you build up your energy for the week? The answer to those is it doesn't. It wears down your energy. It inhibits your sleep. So there's really not a lot of benefit to Sunday night anxiety. There is nothing that you can do on Sunday to change the future because you can't predict the future. Practicing mindfulness on Sunday, living in the moment, focusing on those things in your life other than work, which happens on Monday. Focusing on those things in your life to which you're committed and using your energy on those things. Which takes us to the final journaling prompt. How could you use that energy that you usually spend with Sunday night anxiety and dreading the upcoming week and worrying about what's going to happen. How could you use that energy to nurture those things that are important to you, that you're committed to? For some more in depth videos, you can look at the one on best practices for anxiety treatment@allce.com anxiety tx, which is short for treatment. And you can also look at the one on Burnout. I told you there was a whole other long video on it, and that's@allce.com exhaustion.