“I don’t like mondays” (I don’t like mondays), sang the Boomtown Rats. “I don’t want Sunday afternoons”, intones Joaquín Sabina in his well-known “Contigo”. They talk about what for some time now – the media are somewhat to blame for naming names – have agreed to call “Sunday great”.
What is it? Well, nothing that hasn’t existed all your life, although now it is given more relevance, people talk and reflect more on that downturn that usually appears on Sunday afternoons, after lunch, when thinking that Monday is already here. (With all that that means).
“It is something that has always been there, that occurs among people who have a tendency to suffer anxiety about leaving the weekend and entering the week. It kind of scares them,” explains the Oviedo psychologist Tania Quirós Casaprima. “It’s simply the transition from the pleasure of the weekend to the responsibility that comes with the week from Monday to Friday.”
The “domingazo” is a phenomenon that does not understand age or profession. Because, as the psychologist points out, this anguish and anxiety about returning to the routine occurs in both students and workers. “It is a feeling of insecurity, anguish, about going back to class, to work, to stress…”, adds Quirós. There is no fixed reason: “It is the fear of facing something you do not want.” And what you don’t want can be many things: a lot of workload, a complicated job, an uncomfortable company or classmate or with whom you don’t get along… “The truth is that you don’t hear anyone say ‘what Well today is Monday'”, sums up the psychologist.
The small downturn because Monday arrives, and that weekend that seemed eternal on Friday ends, is nothing serious until it starts to be because it becomes chronic. “Of course, it can lead to depression,” warns Tania Quirós. Remedies? “Not anticipating what may come, knowing how to manage time. Finding the reason for that anguish and trying to fix it. Thinking about why you feel like that and addressing it. Otherwise, you run the risk of it becoming chronic.”
Another piece of advice is to make plans for Sunday afternoon that help put Monday on track more easily. For example, leaving some work to do for those hours that serve as a transition. The experts also advise not to put too many expectations on the weekend when one arrives on Friday afternoon, as this generates more stress, more anxiety to enjoy free time and, in the end, one has not rested or ends up disappointed. Tania Quirós points out that, despite being something of a lifetime, there are now more cases of Sunday slump, rather it is more verbalized. Perhaps because of the contagion effect or the fashions “the subject is talked about more”.
Another professional colleague, psychologist Pedro Vega, opines: “There is a certain perversion on the part of psychology when we touch on these issues, psychologizing everything that happens in everyday life.” The specialist speaks not only of Sunday, but of other issues that affect and disrupt the existence of the human being: “I consider that these issues of Sunday, post-vacation syndrome, eating habits, clothing, the organization of schedules and routines for activities , etc., are overdetermined by covering biological/emotional needs and by cultural parameters. And of course they have their psychological reading of how they affect human functioning and their degree of well-being, but they are things that have a more complex depth and that need one more reading as historical processes of construction of values and social needs”.
Pedro Vega is not so sure that this certain obsession with the Sunday slump is a contemporary phenomenon: “It was already established in the Jewish religion, from which Christianity has sucked, with the myth and the rite that he rested on the seventh day” . And he adds: “The culture of well-being has given value to not only seeking satisfaction at work, but also in the management of leisure and well-being. All of them conditioned by a bourgeois social model that has been universally imposed, making us devout worshipers of the calf of gold”.
And he concludes: “Human beings have entrusted this task to religions since time immemorial. These are our sacred cows that tell us what is good and bad to do, and consequently largely define how integrated and satisfied we feel.”