I used to dread Sunday evenings.

It had nothing to do with disliking my work. I love my job. The trouble was that I let it run my life. No break on the weekends. No clear sense of what Monday needed from me. Underneath all of it, a lurking feeling that I'd never done enough.

So I started working on Sundays.

Then a student told me she keeps Sunday as a true rest day. I balked at that. I was too busy for it. Too important for it, if I'm honest with you. Then I remembered we're not built to run without stopping. We're made to rest.

If you know the four o'clock feeling, the shoulders coming up and the brain opening a tab you didn't ask for, stay with me. The research on this is better than you'd expect.

Mondays show up in your bloodwork

In 2025, Tarani Chandola and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong published a study in the Journal of Affective Disorders. They used the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and looked at 3,511 adults over 50 in England. Each person answered one question. How anxious did you feel yesterday, zero to ten. The researchers noted which day yesterday was. A month or two later, some of those people gave a hair sample.

Hair keeps a record of cortisol over weeks. It shows what's been building rather than what happened this morning.

The people who reported anxiety on a Monday had about 23 percent more cortisol in those later samples than the people who reported anxiety on another day. Tuesday anxiety didn't do that. Thursday anxiety didn't either.

Retirees showed the same result. No Monday meeting and no inbox, and the Monday signature was still there. Chandola calls Mondays a cultural stress amplifier. The bell rings whether or not you have somewhere to be.

A study like this shows a pattern and stops there. It can't prove Monday causes anything, and every person in it was over 50 and living in England. Read it as a signal worth paying attention to.

Friday is where Sunday starts

Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz mapped what recovery time is made of. Their 2007 work named four experiences that restore you: control, detachment, mastery, and relaxation.

Detachment is the one that matters here. Your mind stops running work while your body is somewhere else.

A 2018 meta-analysis by Bennett, Bakker, and Field in the Journal of Organizational Behavior pooled the research on all four. Detachment had the strongest tie to lower fatigue. Control, meaning you decide what happens in your own hours, had the strongest tie to energy.

That second finding is the one that got me. For years I treated Sunday as leftover time, and leftover time belongs to whoever asks for it first. Usually that was work.

Management adds to the load

Sunday dread grows with the number of other people's unsolved problems you're carrying.

Someone without direct reports carries a task list. You carry a task list plus the team member whose performance is slipping and the boss who wants something Wednesday you haven't started. Neither one closes at five on Friday. Both of them close in a conversation you can't schedule yet.

Then there's the inbox, sitting there like a room you have to walk into.

So the dread is doing something reasonable. It's telling you there are open items and no plan. The timing is the problem, because Sunday at four is the worst hour of the week to fix any of it.

Three things you can do to change this

Give Friday an ending. Before you close the laptop, write two lines. The first task you'll pick up Monday, and the one decision you owe another person. That's it. If you have the luxury of shaping your own Friday afternoon, save the last fifteen minutes for it.

Decide what Sunday is for. My student had done this and I hadn't. She'd made a call about her Sunday and stuck to it, which is the control the recovery research keeps pointing at. Pick the shape that fits your life. Half a day, an evening, an hour. What matters is that you chose it instead of letting the week choose for you.

Make Monday's first hour yours. If your calendar allows it, keep it clear and start with the task you wrote down Friday. One finished thing early changes the shape of the day. If a standing meeting owns your Monday morning, find fifteen minutes you do own and use them the same way.

When it's bigger than a routine

If the dread shows up on Wednesday as well as Sunday, follows you on vacation, or changes your sleep and appetite, talk with your doctor or a licensed counselor. Please don't let a workshop, mine included, stand in for the help you need.

Resilience is a skill set, and skills train

We talk about resilience like it's a trait you either got or you didn't. The PR6 model treats it as six domains you can measure and build: collaboration, composure, health, reasoning, tenacity, and vision. Rossouw and colleagues developed it, and it's been used in university studies around the world. I've walked well over a hundred people through the assessment.

Three of those domains were sitting in my Sunday evenings, and I couldn't name any of them at the time.

Composure is emotion regulation under pressure. It's what lets you notice the dread at four o'clock and name it before it runs your evening.

Reasoning is anticipating a challenge and finding your way through it. My Sundays got easier when Monday stopped being a shape in the fog and became a written first task.

Vision is purpose and clear goals. That lurking sense of never having done enough lives here. Enough is a moving target until you decide where it stands.

The assessment takes about three minutes. Then you work on the domain that's costing you the most, which beats trying to become a calmer person in general.

Four Tuesdays in September

I'm running a small group resilience series this fall. Four sessions, on consecutive Tuesdays: September 8, 15, 22, and 29, from 12:15 to 1:00 Central on Teams. It fits inside a lunch hour. The cost is $125.

You'll take the PR6 self-assessment [CONFIRM: bundled or $50 separate], and you'll get a 1:1 call with me to walk through your results. The group stays small, because the conversation is where most of the value lives.

We work the six domains with tools you can use. You'll leave with something for the next Sunday afternoon.

Register here

One question

My student was right and I was slow to admit it. Rest was never a reward I had to earn by finishing everything first.

What would it take for you to decide what your Sunday is for?

Dr. Donita Brown is an Assistant Professor of Management and Vice Chair of the College of Business at Lipscomb University, and the founder of Management Minute. She holds a DBA and an MBA and is certified as a resilience and habit coach.

Sources

Bennett, A. A., Bakker, A. B., & Field, J. G. (2018). Recovery from work-related effort: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(3), 262-275.

Chandola, T., Ling, W., & Rouxel, P. (2025). Are anxious Mondays associated with HPA-axis dysregulation? A longitudinal study of older adults in England. Journal of Affective Disorders. doi:10.1016/j.jad.2025.119611

Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204-221.