Sunday Night Insomnia: Look Beyond the Sunday Scaries

As the weekend winds down and the workweek looms, many people experience what's colloquially known as the 'Sunday scaries'—that sense of dread and anxiety before Monday. People often tell me that they struggle to fall asleep on Sunday night as a result. This can be a really lonely and distressing experience, and a hard way to start off the week. While many people blame the Sunday Scaries for their trouble falling asleep, there’s more to it. It’s worth looking a little further back in time at other weekend habits, to understand the role of things like sleep pressure and social jetlag. This knowledge will help you to shorten the time it takes to fall asleep on a sunday night, and start the week feeling much more at ease.

The Role of Weekend Habits 

Most working adults (and school students, for that matter) will stay up later on a Friday and Saturday night. This is usually due to social commitments or taking advantage of more freedom on the weekend. Sunday morning sleep-ins are also a common way to start a slower, more relaxing day. 

Although its lovely, sleeping an hour or more past our usual wake-up time disrupts our body’s internal clock. This misalignment is known as social jetlag, and mimics the effects of actual jetlag - where our internal rhythms are out of kilter with our external commitments. It is the same as traveling to a timezone that is 2 hours behind us. One in three of us experiences a social jetlag of more than 2 hours on a weekend (i.e., travels from Sydney to Perth and back again, every weekend).

As well as disrupting our internal rhythms, there is the less appreciated but more important issue of our sleep pressure system. The body has a natural drive to sleep that builds from the moment we wake up. This pressure to sleep accumulates across a day and usually reaches a nice high point around 16 hours after we wake up. Our sleep pressure also depends on what we are doing - if we are doing more active and strenuous activities, sleep pressure will build faster. By napping or having a low-activity day, sleep pressure builds more slowly. 

Let’s put these two things together - if you are someone who wakes at 6am and likes to sleep 7 to 8 hours, your usual bedtime is around 10pm. Let’s say on a Sunday you sleep in until closer to 8am. This would mean you probably have adequate sleep pressure around 11pm or midnight (though that depends what time you went to bed on Saturday night). Then, you enjoy a lazy morning, perhaps even a short afternoon nap, meaning you have accumulated less sleep pressure than you usually would on a busy weekday. The evening rolls around and you put yourself into bed at your usual time of 10pm. Your body clock is a bit confused and your sleep pressure isn’t high enough yet. In terms of falling asleep quickly, the odds are now against you. 

The Vicious Cycle of Anxiety

So as we’ve learned, when bedtime rolls around on Sunday, the lack of sufficient sleep pressure combined with a shifted internal clock can result in difficulty falling asleep. But then what happens? You’re lying there awake, perhaps thinking about what’s happening in the upcoming week, and all of a sudden there’s that “oh no” moment - you’re not asleep yet. You check your phone (which you really shouldn’t do, by the way), and it’s 11pm. This anxiety causes a physiological response that is completely counterproductive to falling asleep - adrenaline surges and your heart races. The more you worry about not falling asleep, the more anxious you become, and the less likely you are to sleep. This vicious cycle usually continues until your sleep pressure becomes much higher and overrides this anxiety. 

So what to do about it?

If reading this makes you want to minimise social jetlag and wake up at your usual time on a Sunday, then go for it. But if you love a slower morning on a Sunday, there’s still plenty you can do without you setting yourself up for a disturbed night, and a lousy Monday. 

Whatever you do, break the cycle. 

Firstly, don’t let the cycle keep perpetuating itself by sleeping in on a Monday and skipping the gym, or your intentions to go into work or uni. Get up at your usual wake time. You might be a bit more tired, but you’ll have adequate sleep pressure by Monday night. 

Go to bed later.

Go to bed later. This one seems counterintuitive but its actually borrowing from some key approaches we use for people with insomnia. Hundreds of research studies agree that staying in bed, tossing and turning, makes the problem worse. It’s much wiser to stay up until you feel sleepy. If you’re not convinced, read on.

Plenty of research now shows that lots of next-day tiredness in people with insomnia is driven by their frustration and anxiety in the night, often more so than the quantity and quality of their sleep. So why not conserve energy and do something relaxing, enjoyable, or even productive to see the weekend out?

Let’s build on that. If you’re feeling a sense of dread about the week ahead, what can you do to lessen that? Figure out what’s driving the dread and solve for it. For example, if you’re feeling anxious because it’s a busy week ahead, you can use these hours productively. Plan your meals (cook, meal prep, do an online grocery order), pack your bag for the next day, do a “brain dump” of all the things on and plan to start Monday morning well. 

If you’re feeling a little frazzled and burned out, plan to inject some moments of enjoyment and rest during the week. Research some enjoyable books or podcasts you can listen to during the commute, block out some time in the calendar for helpful self-care activities, text one friend who can fit in a quick lunch or coffee at work (or respond to any friends you’re leaving hanging!). 

If you’re annoyed that you didn’t get around to your life admin you’d delegated on the weekend (Decluttering? Donating old clothes? Matching up all the tupperware lids with their bottoms?) - do it now!  Put on some headphones and listen to some great music or a podcast while you potter.

There are countless things you can do to use the nervous energy of Sunday Scaries to make your work week easier. Sure, you could sit and meditate in the hope that you’ll be zen enough to nod off - and if that works, go for it. But there are plenty of other options, and some of them may actually address the cause of the dread. 

In the morning.

As mentioned, get up at your usual wake-up time. If you sleep in again you are just kicking the social jetlag can down the road. 

Then, make sure you get lots of natural light outside. Aim for at least 15 minutes somehow. Getting morning sun rays into your eyes will help to realign your body clock to its earlier time, and boost your mood. This will promote falling asleep faster on Monday night.

And finally, don’t fall victim to the nocebo effect. You may have heard of the placebo effect, where positive expectations can lead to positive outcomes. The nocebo effect is the opposite—if you expect something negative to happen, it can actually cause that negative outcome to occur. Avoid carrying around the burden of a bad night of sleep. Any additional anxiety or frustration we carry about our bad night just creates more tiredness. 

Trust me. 

For some people, it can be a little anxiety-provoking to purposefully stay up late on a Sunday night. Most people with sleep problems will also spend extra time in bed in the hope that they can “catch” extra sleep. I promise, it doesn’t work. It’s much better to get nice and tired and smoosh your sleep into a smaller window of opportunity. Remember that the anxiety of tossing and turning is a massive cause of next-day tiredness, so don’t risk it. And I am sure you will find a great way to spend the extra weekend time you’ve just made. You may wake up on Monday with a little more sleep pressure (which you won’t really feel until the afternoon or evening anyway), but in return you have given yourself a clean house, a pre-planned outfit and packed bag, and a clearer head. 

Finally, if these tricks don’t seem to work, or your difficulties with sleep are happening consistently a few nights per week, get some help. There are plenty of wonderful books, self-help courses, and psychologists who are trained in managing insomnia and sleep problems.