Slow Sundays: A Gentler Take on the Sunday Scaries

A quick note before we start: I first wrote this post years before I was diagnosed with ADHD and Autism. Reading it back now, it practically screams it. It was all “prep harder, plan more, optimise your Sunday so you can tick everything off on Monday.” I don’t do most of that anymore — I work from home now, and so my Sundays look and feel different. But the Sunday Scaries themselves haven’t gone anywhere, and I still talk with clients about versions of this all the time. So here’s the updated, more grounded take.

You know the feeling

It’s Sunday evening. You’re getting ready for bed, and there it is — that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach.

You know what’s coming tomorrow.

Monday.

The Sunday Scaries (or Mondayitis, if you grew up in Australia like I did) are that creeping anxiety that shows up as the weekend winds down. The Conversation has a good piece on why so many of us feel it.

And if you’re Neurodivergent, there’s a decent chance you feel it more than most.

Why Sundays hit Neurodivergent brains harder

The standard advice treats the Sunday Scaries as a planning problem — get organised enough and they’ll disappear.

But for a lot of us, the dread isn’t really about being ‘disorganised’. It’s about what the week ahead is asking of us.

A few things that tend to make Sundays heavier for ADHD, Autistic and AuDHD brains:

None of this means you’re doing it wrong.

It usually means your brain is doing exactly what it does — and that some of the dread is actually useful information about your week and your capacity, not a character flaw to fix.

• Anticipatory anxiety. Our brains are very good at running ahead and simulating everything we need to do and those things that could go wrong on Monday, in vivid detail, at 9pm on a Sunday (or 3am if you also have a perimenopausal brain!).
• The weight of holding it all. Everything you need to remember for the week — deadlines, appointments, other people’s schedules, the thing you said you’d do that you regret committing to now — tends to land all at once. That’s a genuine executive-functioning load, and it’s exhausting.
• Transitions are hard. Going from the relative flexibility of a weekend back into the structure and demands of a workday is a big gear change, and Neurodivergent brains often feel transitions more sharply.
• Demand sensitivity. For some of us, the moment something becomes a “have to,” everything in us resists it. And the looming week is one big pile of “have to.”

The shift: from optimising Sunday to protecting it

Here’s where I’ve changed my mind since the original version of this post.

The old advice — meal prep, plan your outfits, time-block your whole week on Sunday afternoon — can absolutely help.

But it can also quietly turn your one genuine day of rest into another list of demands.

If you spend Sunday “getting ready,” you never actually stop to pause. And for a Neurodivergent nervous system that’s already running hot, that’s the opposite of what you need.

So the reframe I offer clients isn’t “optimise your Sunday.” It’s “go gently.”

Slow Sundays

I’ve borrowed this term from a client of mine, who spends his Slow Sundays with his family. I love it!

A Slow Sunday is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a deliberate decision to do less. Not to prep, not to catch up, not to “make the most of it” in a productive sense — just to rest, potter, be with the people (or dogs) you love, and let the day be soft.

The point isn’t to earn a good Monday.

The point is that rest and retoration are allowed to be the whole point.

What a Slow Sunday looks like is up to you.

A nature walk, curling up with a good book on the couch, catching a movie at the cinema, a slow cook-up, a nap, a day with no plans and no phone.

Do the version that restores you — not the version you are told is ‘restful’ on Instagram.

If you do want to ease the friction

Protecting Sunday and softening Monday aren’t mutually exclusive. The trick is to pick one or two low-effort things, not build a whole system.

A few you might find helpful:

• Take a few decisions off future-you’s plate. Deciding what you’ll wear, or batch cooking dinner for the next few days isn’t about being organised for its own sake — it’s about not spending your morning’s and evening’s limited executive fuel on small decisions that can really pile up.
• Give your keys, phone and glasses a home. One consistent spot for the things you are always scampering around the house looking for. (Back when I commuted, I arrived at work without my laptop… more than once.)
• Do the one annoying task that’s looming. If there’s a single thing quietly generating most of the dread, handling it on Sunday can buy you a much calmer night. Just one — not the whole list.
• Brain dump. Break the loop and get those thoughts out of your head. Get a ‘Sunday braindump’ notebook where you can quickly jot down everything that is on your mind. Alternatively, talk out your worries into the voice notes on your phone.
• Build in breathing room to your Monday morning. Ten quiet minutes with a coffee (or tea!) before your day kicks off can soften the transition far more than jumping into emails first thing.

Notice the difference: none of this is about squeezing productivity out of your weekend. It’s about lowering the load so Monday morning-you has a little more space.

One Last Thought

The Sunday Scaries don’t have to ruin your weekend, and the solution isn’t to ‘hustle’plan’ and organise them away.

Sometimes the answer is to rest properly (whatever rest looks like for you), reduce a couple of real friction points, and treat the dread as a signal worth listening to rather than a problem to out-organise.

If Sunday nights are consistently rough, that’s worth paying attention to. It might be telling you something about your workload, your committments and priorities, your week, your job or your capacity.

And that’s worth getting curious about.