Two writers went to the same doctor’s office on the same day. She told each one he didn’t have long to live.
“It’s awful,” said the first writer. “I’m right in the middle of a novel and she’s only given me six months to live. I’ll never get it finished. What about you?”
“It’s awful for me, too,” said the second writer. “She gave me three years to live.”
“Three years!” the first writer said. “Three years! What’s so awful about that?”
“I write short stories,” the second writer said. “And I’m fresh out of ideas.”
Ever have those trains of thought that just… wait, what were we talking about, again? Staying focused can be hard, especially in an age when there are tons of distractions around you. So, whether it’s something you don’t really want to have to pay attention to—like work; or something you do—like talking to a friend in a crowded bar—sometimes it’s just plain hard to concentrate on what’s happening right in front of you.
Jumping to other stimuli—like someone looking at you, or your phone buzzing—can give you a dopamine push, which is one reason it can be so appealing. But another is that, when multitasking is the norm, it’s hard to stop doing it. “We have trained ourselves to be constantly distracted and multitasking, so even though we may have a project in front of us, or we may be talking to someone, our minds have been trained to look to other things,” says Natalie Bell, a mindfulness coach based in Los Angeles.
Distractibility can run deeper than habit. “You might be distracted because you have sensory problems or visual processing problems or slow processing or memory problems, and you can also have biochemical problems,” says Kelly Dorfman, a clinical nutritionist. “If your chemistry is out of balance, then your brain doesn’t work.” What you’re eating and when can impact that chemistry. Skipping meals, eating irritants, and not eating nutrient-rich foods can make it harder to concentrate.
What’s going on around you and where you are right now as a person also matter. You might be more distracted in some environments, and less distracted in others. Or while working on certain tasks. Or while talking to different people. “It might have to do with something as simple as how much sleep you got, or what else is going on in your life. There are a lot of different factors. But being tuned into what your tendency is and what your current state of being is can go a long way to helping you make the adjustments you need to be able to focus on the things that are important,” says Natalie Houston, a productivity coach in the Boston area.
But it is possible to change your attention span. To get better at concentrating, start small.”Choose one point of focus or one task. Just choose one, putting all others to the side or shutting them down,” says Bell. If you’re working on one project, clear away materials that don’t have anything to do with it, like closing tabs, moving papers off of your desk, and putting down your phone. “A sense of more calm in the immediate visual environment helps you focus better,” says Houston.
Look at the rest of your environment, too: Does silence help you more? Or do you work better with ambient noise? Or maybe white noise? Or even music? How comfortable is your chair? Are you better at doing certain tasks in certain places?
You can also train yourself to be more mindful by focusing on your breath in your body. Set a timer for three minutes and keep your attention on your breath as it goes in and out, and bring your mind back to your breath when it inevitably wanders. “Learning to refocus attention by using that kind of mindfulness technique can really help you to train your attention back to focus on one thing,” says Bell.
If focusing on your breath doesn’t work, try turning your awareness to the soles of your feet where they touch the floor. Or to the sensations of where you’re sitting. Or to your hands, as they rest against each other. “Try to use a sensory experience to help focus attention while you’re in the middle of something,” says Bell. “Any sensation can help you ground yourself.”
Being compassionate with yourself helps, too. If you’re distracted because of something going on internally or something bigger happening in your life, be kind to yourself and remind yourself that’s what’s going on. “There’s a saying in mindfulness, name it to tame it. If you can name a difficult experience, your brain can begin to regulate that feeling in your body,” says Bell. Share with someone around you if that’s an option, but if it’s not, talk to yourself like you’re your own supportive friend. Or put a hand over your heart or give yourself a hug. “Be there for yourself. Physical soothing touch releases oxytocin and other opiates in your bloodstream to counteract stress. So this is really powerful neuroscience,” says Bell.
If you’re distracted because you’re just really busy right now, keep a notepad nearby to jot down thoughts, so your brain doesn’t have to worry about remembering them. That way, “your brain can just relax, instead of tapping you on the shoulder every 10 minutes saying, ‘Don’t forget,’” says Houston.
And don’t be afraid of getting distracted—because you’re going to get distracted. When that happens, notice it and gently bring your attention back. Remember, once you get used to mindfulness, it becomes way easier to practice it anywhere. “The more you do these practices, the more you train yourself to have that response. You need to remember that you can do these things,” says Bell.
But total mindfulness and balance are lies we tell ourselves in order to live. “It’s really important as an idea, and it’s also in some ways a fiction,” says Houston. Instead, “allowing for seasonal shifts helps us relax about the idea of feeling insufficient if we’re not living up to some kind of fictitious ideal of work-life balance that very few people really enact.”
After all, distraction is a capitalist construct. “We live in a world where the financial interests of large corporations put a lot of effort into keeping us distracted. When we’re distracted, we spend more time online, we spend more time in front of advertisements, we spend more time in various states of trance, meaning eating, drinking, shopping, consuming our ways into distracting ourselves from the harder questions in our lives,” says Houston.
Break out of that by finding joy in smaller moments of focus, and then building. “We need to recondition ourselves to find a certain pleasure in focused attention. Which actually there is,” says Bell. “What we get from focusing our attention is a sense of calm in our mind and body.”
This article was originally published on August 16, 2017, by NYLON.
At eighty-seven, I am solitary. I live by myself on one floor of the 1803 farmhouse where my family has lived since the Civil War. After my grandfather died, my grandmother Kate lived here alone. Her three daughters visited her. In 1975, Kate died at ninety-seven, and I took over. Forty-odd years later, I spend my days alone in one of two chairs. From an overstuffed blue chair in my living room I look out the window at the unpainted old barn, golden and empty of its cows and of Riley the horse. I look at a tulip; I look at snow. In the parlor’s mechanical chair, I write these paragraphs and dictate letters. I also watch television news, often without listening, and lie back in the enormous comfort of solitude. People want to come visit, but mostly I refuse them, preserving my continuous silence. Linda comes two nights a week. My two best male friends from New Hampshire, who live in Maine and Manhattan, seldom drop by. A few hours a week, Carole does my laundry and counts my pills and picks up after me. I look forward to her presence and feel relief when she leaves. Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.
Born in 1928, I was an only child. During the Great Depression, there were many of us, and Spring Glen Elementary School was eight grades of children without siblings. From time to time I made a friend during childhood, but friendships never lasted long. Charlie Axel liked making model airplanes out of balsa wood and tissue. So did I, but I was clumsy and dripped cement onto wing paper. His models flew. Later, I collected stamps, and so did Frank Benedict. I got bored with stamps. In seventh and eighth grade, there were girls. I remember lying with Barbara Pope on her bed, fully clothed and apart while her mother looked in at us with anxiety. Most of the time, I liked staying alone after school, sitting in the shadowy living room. My mother was shopping or playing bridge with friends; my father added figures in his office; I daydreamed.
In summer, I left my Connecticut suburb to hay with my grandfather, on this New Hampshire farm. I watched him milk seven Holsteins morning and night. For lunch I made myself an onion sandwich—a thick slice between pieces of Wonder Bread. I’ve told of this sandwich before.
At fifteen, I went to Exeter for the last two years of high school. Exeter was academically difficult and made Harvard easy, but I hated it—five hundred identical boys living two to a room. Solitude was scarce, and I labored to find it. I took long walks alone, smoking cigars. I found myself a rare single room and remained there as much as I could, reading and writing. Saturday night, the rest of the school sat in the basketball arena, deliriously watching a movie. I remained in my room in solitary pleasure.
At college, dormitory suites had single and double bedrooms. For three years, I lived in one bedroom crowded with everything I owned. During my senior year, I managed to secure a single suite: bedroom and sitting room and bath. At Oxford, I had two rooms to myself. Everybody did. Then I had fellowships. Then I wrote books. Finally, to my distaste, I had to look for a job. With my first wife–people married young back then; we were twenty and twenty-three–I settled in Ann Arbor, teaching English literature at the University of Michigan. I loved walking up and down in the lecture hall, talking about Yeats and Joyce or reading aloud the poems of Thomas Hardy and Andrew Marvell. These pleasures were hardly solitary, but at home I spent the day in a tiny attic room, working on poems. My extremely intelligent wife was more mathematical than literary. We lived together and we grew apart. For the only time in my life, I cherished social gatherings: Ann Arbor’s culture of cocktail parties. I found myself looking forward to weekends, to crowded parties that permitted me distance from my marriage. There were two or three such occasions on Friday and more on Saturday, permitting couples to migrate from living room to living room. We flirted, we drank, we chatted–without remembering on Sunday what we said Saturday night.
After sixteen years of marriage, my wife and I divorced.
For five years I was alone again, but without the comfort of solitude. I exchanged the miseries of a bad marriage for the miseries of bourbon. I dated a girlfriend who drank two bottles of vodka a day. I dated three or four women a week, occasionally three in a day. My poems slackened and stopped. I tried to think that I lived in happy license. I didn’t.
Jane Kenyon was my student. She was smart, she wrote poems, she was funny and frank in class. I knew she lived in a dormitory near my house, so one night I asked her to housesit while I attended an hour-long meeting. (In Ann Arbor, it was the year of breaking and entering.) When I came home, we went to bed. We enjoyed each other, libertine liberty as much as pleasures of the flesh. Later I asked her to dinner, which in 1970 always included breakfast. We saw each other once a week, still dating others, then twice a week, then three or four times a week, and saw no one else. One night, we spoke of marriage. Quickly we changed the subject, because I was nineteen years older and, if we married, she would be a widow so long. We married in April, 1972. We lived in Ann Arbor three years, and in 1975 left Michigan for New Hampshire. She adored this old family house.
For almost twenty years, I woke before Jane and brought her coffee in bed. When she rose, she walked Gus the dog. Then each of us retreated to a workroom to write, at opposite ends of our two-story house. Mine was the ground floor in front, next to Route 4. Hers was the second floor in the rear, beside Ragged Mountain’s old pasture. In the separation of our double solitude, we each wrote poetry in the morning. We had lunch, eating sandwiches and walking around without speaking to each other. Afterward, we took a twenty-minute nap, gathering energy for the rest of the day, and woke to our daily fuck. Afterward I felt like cuddling, but Jane’s climax released her into energy. She hurried from bed to workroom.
For several hours afterward, I went back to work at my desk. Late in the afternoon, I read aloud to Jane for an hour. I read Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” twice, the Old Testament, William Faulkner, more Henry James, seventeenth-century poets. Before supper I drank a beer and glanced at TheNew Yorker while Jane cooked, sipping a glass of wine. Slowly she made a delicious dinner—maybe veal cutlets with mushroom-and-garlic gravy, maybe summer’s asparagus from the bed across the street—then asked me to carry our plates to the table while she lit the candle. Through dinner we talked about our separate days.
Summer afternoons we spent beside Eagle Pond, on a bite-sized beach among frogs, mink, and beaver. Jane lay in the sun, tanning, while I read books in a canvas sling chair. Every now and then, we would dive into the pond. Sometimes, for an early supper, we broiled sausage on a hibachi. After twenty years of our remarkable marriage, living and writing together in double solitude, Jane died of leukemia at forty-seven, on April 22, 1995.
Now it is April 22, 2016, and Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year, at eighty-seven, I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. I was sick and thought I was dying. Every day of her dying, I stayed by her side—a year and a half. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last January I grieved again, this time that she would not sit beside me as I died.
You’re taught about history, science, and math when you’re growing up. Most of us, however, aren’t taught how to identify or deal with our own emotions, or the emotions of others. These skills can be valuable, but you’ll never get them in a classroom.
Emotional intelligence is a shorthand that psychological researchers use to describe how well individuals can manage their own emotions and react to the emotions of others. People who exhibit emotional intelligence have the less obvious skills necessary to get ahead in life, such as managing conflict resolution, reading and responding to the needs of others, and keeping their own emotions from overflowing and disrupting their lives. In this guide, we’ll look at what emotional intelligence is, and how to develop your own.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Measuring emotional intelligence is relatively new in the field of psychology, only first being explored in the mid-80s. Several models are currently being developed, but for our purposes, we’ll examine what’s known as the “mixed model,” developed by psychologist Daniel Goleman. The mixed model has five key areas:
Self-awareness: Self-awareness involves knowing your own feelings. This includes having an accurate assessment of what you’re capable of, when you need help, and what your emotional triggers are.
Self-management: This involves being able to keep your emotions in check when they become disruptive. Self-management involves being able to control outbursts, calmly discussing disagreements, and avoiding activities that undermine you like extended self-pity or panic.
Motivation: Everyone is motivated to action by rewards like money or status. Goleman’s model, however, refers to motivation for the sake of personal joy, curiosity, or the satisfaction of being productive.
Empathy: While the three previous categories refer to a person’s internal emotions, this one deals with the emotions of others. Empathy is the skill and practice of reading the emotions of others and responding appropriately.
Social skills: This category involves the application of empathy as well as negotiating the needs of others with your own. This can include finding common ground with others, managing others in a work environment, and being persuasive.
You can read a bit more about these different categories here. The order of these emotional competencies isn’t all that relevant, as we all learn many of these skills simultaneously as we grow. It’s also important to note that, for our purposes, we’ll only be using this as a guide. Emotional intelligence isn’t an area that most people receive formal training in. We’ll let psychologists argue over the jargon and models, but for now let’s explore what each of these mean and how to improve them in your own life.
Self-Awareness
Before you can do anything else here, you have to know what your emotions are. Improving your self-awareness is the first step to identifying any problem area you’re facing. Here are some ways to improve your self-awareness:
Keep a journal: Career skill blog recommends starting by keeping a journal of your emotions . At the end of every day, write down what happened to you, how you felt, and how you dealt with it. Periodically, look back over your journal and take note of any trends, or any time you overreacted to something.
Ask for input from others: As we’ve talked about before when dealing with your self-perception, input from others can be invaluable . Try to ask multiple people who know you well where your strengths and weaknesses lie. Write down what they say, compare what they say to each other and, again, look for patterns. Most importantly, don’t argue with them. They don’t have to be correct. You’re just trying to gauge your perception from another’s point of view.
Slow down (or meditate): Emotions have a habit of getting the most out of control when we don’t have time to slow down or process them . The next time you have an emotional reaction to something, try to pause before you react (something the internet makes easier than ever, if you’re communicating online). You can also try meditating to slow your brain down and give your emotional state room to breathe.
If you’ve never practiced intentional self-awareness, these tips should give you a practical head start. One strategy I personally use is to go on long walks or have conversations with myself discussing what’s bothering me. Often, I’ll find that the things I say to the imaginary other end of the conversation can give me some insight into what’s really bugging me. The important aspect is to look inwards, rather than focusing solely on external factors.
Self-Management
Once you know how your emotions work, you can start figuring out how to handle them. Proper self-management means controlling your outbursts, distinguishing between external triggers and internal over-reactions, and doing what’s best for your needs.
One key way to manage your emotions is to change your sensory input. You’ve probably heard the old advice to count to ten and breathe when you’re angry. Speaking as someone who’s had plenty of overwhelming issues with depression and anger, this advice is usually crap (though if it works for you, more power to you). However, giving your physical body a jolt can break the cycle. If you’re feeling lethargic, do some exercise. If you’re stuck in an emotional loop, give yourself a “snap out of it” slap. Anything that can give a slight shock to your system or break the existing routine can help.
Lifehacker alum Adam Dachis also recommends funneling emotional energy into something productive. It’s alright to let overwhelming emotions stew inside you for a moment, if it’s not an appropriate time to let them out. However, when you do, rather than vent it on something futile, turn it into motivation instead:
I recently started playing tennis for fun, knowing that I’d never become exceptional because I began too late in life. I’ve become better and have a very minor talent for the game, so when I play poorly I now know and I get down on myself. When up against an opponent with far more skill I find it hard to do much else than get angry. Rather than let that anger out, I take note of it and use it to fuel my desire to practice more. Whether in sports, work, or everyday life, we can get complacent with our skill and forget that we always have some room for improvement. When you start to get mad, get better instead.
You can’t always control what makes you feel a certain way, but you can always control how you react. If you have some impulse control problems, find ways to get help when you’re feeling calm. Not all emotions can be vented away. My struggle with depression taught me that some emotions persist long after the overflow. However, there’s always a moment when those feelings feel a little less intense. Use those moments to seek help.
Motivation
We talk about motivation a lot . When we’re talking about motivation as it relates to emotional intelligence, however, we don’t just mean getting up the energy to go to work. We’re talking about your inner drive to accomplish something. That drive isn’t just some feel-goody nonsense, either. As Psychology today explains, there’s a section of your prefrontal cortex that lights up at the mere thought of achieving a meaningful goal.
Whether your goal is building a career, raising a family, or creating some kind of art, everyone has something they want to do with their life.When your motivation is working for you, it connects with reality in tangible ways. Want to start a family? Motivated people will start dating. Want to improve your career? Motivated people will educate themselves, apply for new jobs, or angle for a promotion.
Daniel Goleman suggests that in order to start making use of that motivation, you first need to identify your own values. Many of us are so busy that we don’t take the time to examine what our values really are. Or worse, we’ll do work that directly contradicts what we value for so long that we lose that motivation entirely.
Unfortunately, we can’t give you the answer for what it is you want in life, but there are lots of strategies you can try . Use your journal to find times when you’ve felt fulfilled. Create a list of things you value. Most of all, accept the uncertainty in life and just build something. Fitness instructor Michael Mantell, Ph.D suggests that using lesser successes you know you can accomplish. Remember, everyone who’s accomplished something you want to achieve did it slowly, over time.
Empathy
Your emotions are only one half of all your relationships. It’s the half you focus on the most, sure, but that’s only because you hang out with yourself every day. All the other people that matter to you have their own set of feelings, desires, triggers, and fears. Empathy is your most important skill for navigating your relationships . Empathy is a life-long skill, but here are some tips you can use to practice empathy:
Shut up and listen: We’re gonna start with the hardest one here, because it’s the most important. You can’t experience everyone else’s lives to fully understand them, but you can listen. Listening involves letting someone else talk and then not countering what they say. It means putting aside your preconceptions or skepticism for a bit and allowing the person you’re talking to a chance to explain how they feel. Empathy is hard, but virtually every relationship you have can be improved at least marginally by waiting at least an extra ten seconds before you retake the conversation.
Take up a contrary position to your own: One of the quickest ways to solidify an opinion in your mind is to argue in favor of it. To counter this, take up a contrary position. If you think your boss is being unreasonable, try defending their actions in your head. Would you find their actions reasonable if you were in their shoes? Even asking the questions of yourself can be enough to start empathizing with another’s point of view (though, of course, getting real answers from others can always help).
Don’t just know, try to understand: Understanding is key to having empathy. As we’ve discussed before, understanding is the difference between knowing something and truly empathizing with it. If you catch yourself saying, “I know, but,” a lot, take that as an indicator that you should pause a bit more. When someone tells you about an experience that’s not your own, take some time to mull over how your life might be different if you experienced that on a daily basis. Read about it until it clicks. It’s okay if you don’t spend all your time devoted to someone else’s life, but putting in just some time—even if it’s idle thought time while you work—can be beneficial.
By definition , empathy means getting in the emotional dirt with someone else. Allowing their experiences to resonate with your own and responding appropriately. It’s okay to offer advice or optimism, but empathy also requires that you wait for the right space to do that. If someone’s on the verge of tears, or sharing some deep pain, don’t make light of it and don’t try to minimize the hurt. Be mindful of how they must feel and allow them space to feel it.
Social Skills
Summing up all social skills in one section of an article would do about as much justice to the topic as if we snuck in a brief explainer on astrophysics. However, the tools you develop in the other four areas will help you resolve a lot of social problems that many adults still wrestle with. As Goleman explains, your social skills affect everything from your work performance to your romantic life:
Social competence takes many forms – it’s more than just being chatty. These abilities range from being able to tune into another person’s feelings and understand how they think about things, to being a great collaborator and team player, to expertise at negotiation. All these skills are learned in life. We can improve on any of them we care about, but it takes time, effort, and perseverance. It helps to have a model, someone who embodies the skill we want to improve. But we also need to practice whenever a naturally occurring opportunity arises – and it may be listening to a teenager, not just a moment at work.
You can start with the most common form of social problems: resolving a disagreement. This is where you get to put all your skills to the test in a real-world environment. We’ve gone into this subject in-depth here , but we can summarize the basic steps:
Identify and deal with your emotions: Whenever you have an argument with someone else, things can get heated. If someone involved is emotionally worked up, deal with that problem first. Take time apart to vent, blow off steam on your own, then return to the problem. In a work environment, this may just mean complaining to a friend before you email your boss back. In a romantic relationship, remind your partner that you care about them before criticizing.
Address legitimate problems once you’re both calm: Once you’re in your right headspace, identify what the conflict is. Before you jump to solutions, make sure you and the other person agree on what the problems really are . Propose solutions that are mutually beneficial and be sympathetic to any concessions the other person may be unwilling to make (but be sure to stand firm on your own).
End on a cooperative note: Whether in business or pleasure, relationships work best when everyone involved knows that they’re on the same page. Even if you can’t end on a positive note, make sure that the last intention you communicate is a cooperative one. Let your boss/coworker/significant other know that you want to work towards the same goal, even if you have different views.
Not every type of interaction with another person will be a conflict, of course. Some social skills just involve meeting new people , socializing with people of different mindsets , or just playing games . However, resolving conflict can be one of the best ways to learn how to apply your emotional skills. Disputes are best resolved when you know what you want, can communicate it clearly, understand what someone else wants, and come to favorable terms for everyone. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that this involves every other area of the emotional intelligence model.
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Take a look at the picture above. In 500 words or less, write a story about the image. The challenge of flash fiction is to create a thought-provoking story within the tight word constraints of the writing form. The story can be any genre as long as it is based on the picture. Prizes: One grand-prize winner will receive $500 and receive a gold contest badge. Two runner-ups will receive $100 and receive a silver contest badge. Cost The cost is $6.95/entry. Writers can submit as many entries as they want.
To Alec Burks, a 30-year-old project manager at a construction company in Seattle, Sunday evenings feel like “the end of freedom,” a dreadful period when time feels like it’s quickly disappearing, and, all of a sudden, “in 12 hours, I’m going to be back at my desk.” It’s not that Burks doesn’t like his job—he does. But one thing that contributes to the feeling, he told me, is that “you almost have to shrink who you are a little bit sometimes to fit into that mold of your job description.” The weekend, by contrast, doesn’t require any such shrinking.
The not-exactly-clinical diagnosis for this late-weekend malaise is the Sunday scaries, a term that has risen to prominence in the past decade or so. It is not altogether surprising that the transition from weekend to workweek is, and likely has always been, unpleasant. But despite the fact that the contours of the standard workweek haven’t changed for the better part of a century, there is something distinctly modern about the queasiness so many people feel on Sunday nights about returning to the grind of work or school.
Regardless of whether people call this experience the Sunday scaries (Sunday evening feeling and Sunday syndrome are two alternatives), a lot of them undergo some variation of it. A 2018 survey commissioned by LinkedIn found that 80 percent of working American adults worry about the upcoming workweek on Sundays. Another survey by a home-goods brand found that the Sunday scaries’ average time of arrival is 3:58 p.m., though they seem to set in later than that for many people. (A cousin of the Sunday scaries is the returning-from-vacation scaries, which can fall on any day of the week.)
“This feeling, whether we call it anxiety, worry, stress, fear, whatever, it’s all really the same thing,” says Jonathan Abramowitz, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Psychologically, it’s a response to the perception of some sort of threat.” The perceived threat varies—it might be getting up early, or being busy and “on” for several days in a row—but the commonality, Abramowitz says, is that “we jump to conclusions” and “underestimate our ability to cope.” For most people, he reckons, the stress of Sunday is uncomfortable but ultimately manageable—and they end up coping just fine. (And just as with other forms of anxiety, some people don’t feel the Sunday scaries at all.)
“Low-grade existential dread” is how Erin Thibeau, a 28-year-old who works in marketing at a design firm in Brooklyn, describes the feeling she gets on Sunday afternoons and evenings. For her, the end of a weekend presents stressful questions about whether she has taken full advantage of having two days off. Those questions fall under two categories that seem to be in tension: “It’s a mix of ‘Have I been productive enough?’ and ‘Have I relaxed enough?’” she told me.
“In 19—whatever—52, some people hated their jobs and didn’t want to go back to work, but I don’t think this is about hating your job,” says Anne Helen Petersen, a senior culture writer at BuzzFeed and the author of the forthcoming book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. “I think the Sunday scaries are about feeling an overwhelming sense of pressure”—to perform well at work and thus pursue or maintain financial stability, as well as to keep up other everyday responsibilities, like cooking or child care.
“I don’t think there’s anything that’s timeless about [the Sunday scaries],” Petersen told me. “Burnout and the anxiety that accompanies it are so much about living under our current iteration of capitalism and about class insecurity.” From roughly the end of World War II to 1970—a period that’s often called the Golden Ageof American capitalism—Petersen says, “there were a ton of jobs that weren’t great, but the difference was that people were more secure in their class position … [Now] it’s this huge combination of not only ‘How am I going to do in my job?,’ but all these other things that I’m anxious about—‘If I lose my job, then I’m not going to have medical insurance.’” This goes some way toward explaining the need to make weekends both productive and relaxing—workers need to both get stuff done and also make sure that they’ve sufficiently recharged to get more stuff done during the week.
Work has changed, and so have Sundays themselves. One analysis of Canadian time-use data from 1981 to 2005 that tracked paid work, chores, shopping, and child care found that “Sundays became busier and behaviorally closer to weekdays than they were at the beginning of the 1980s.” “This change would probably become even more obvious,” the study’s author speculated, “if one were to go back to the older data sets, such as [one 1968 data set] from Washington, D.C., where Sunday meals at home occupied more than 90 minutes and shopping only 8 minutes.”
Given how work (side gigs included) has, for many people, bled into nights and weekends, Petersen says, “Two days is not enough—it’s just not … For people I know, myself included, Saturday is a catch-up day, and then Sunday is the only real day of leisure. So people, as soon as they start, they’re like, ‘It’s about to end!’ You’re so conscious of the fact that it’s so short.”
This is the economic milieu from which the Sunday scaries have emerged. It is responsible for the Sunday scaries–branded vegan CBD gummies, the how-to videos outlining “productive” Sunday routines for preparing for the workweek, and—perhaps most troublingly—the tweets from brands such as Starbucks, Mary Kay, and Malibu Rum about warding off the Sunday scaries.
The phrase itself hasn’t been around for very long. Kory Stamper, a lexicographer and author, told me that the first written usage of Sunday scaries she could find after searching around was in a hangover-inspired entry from 2009 on the website Urban Dictionary. Over the course of the 2010s, though, the scaries became less about the consequences of partying than the anticipation of the week ahead. A spokesperson for Twitter told me that use of the phrase has been “growing steadily” on its platform since early 2016, and that 90 percent of tweets that mention it come from people in the U.S.
One advantage of the term is that it is immediately graspable, but at the same time it is almost gratingly infantilizing, expressing genuinely uncomfortable emotions in the language of toddlers. (Multiple people I interviewed for this story disliked the term on these grounds, even as they noted its usefulness.)
“For some reason, we have a great whack of words that sound silly but describe unpleasant feelings or negative emotions: the heebie-jeebies, the screaming meemies, the collywobbles, the jitters, the creeps, a case of the Mondays, boo-hoo,” Stamper says. She notes that some of these terms are playful and sonically repetitive, and wondered if “we like these ameliorating terms because their humor makes it easier to talk about something we would rather not talk about at all.”
The phrase seems even more modern, and even more childish, considering the dangerous outcomes that many American workers used to fear on the job. “There are lots of stories, almost 100 years ago, of people dreading going back to the factory, whether it’s injuries or being yelled at,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “It was said that at the Ford Motor Company, the foreman knew how to shout ‘Speed up!’ in 15 languages.” Scaries doesn’t quite do justice to the awful work experiences that many people had back then, and still have today.
Whatever this feeling is called, and whatever economic conditions may be in place right now, people have probably been mourning the end of weekends in one way or another for as long as days off have existed. In the mid-19th century, when Sunday was workers’ only official full day off in England, many of them extended their break by skipping work on Monday, “whether to relax, to recover from drunkenness, or both,” explained Witold Rybczynski in The Atlantic in 1991. This habit, which scans as a symptom of a Sunday scaries–like feeling, was effectively formalized in some industries and was referred to as “keeping Saint Monday.”
Precursors to the modern Sunday scaries were detectable as long as 30 years ago. In 1991, The New York Times published an analysis of “the Sunday blues,” and while economic precarity was listed among the potential causes, the article presented a host of other possible explanations: an interruption of the internal biological clock’s usual weekday sleep cycles, caffeine withdrawal, hangovers, and, of course, a simple dislike of work (or school, or housework).
The proposed cures for this unease range from the micro to the macro. Some of the people I interviewed who experience the Sunday scaries have been implementing plans to thwart them. Erin Thibeau finds some success with what she calls her “Sunday Funday initiative”—a program that aims to “extend the feeling of the weekend” by strategically scheduling movies, museum visits, and walks in the park when the scaries typically set in. Maggie Lofboom, a 36-year-old who works in landscape design and as an opera singer in Minneapolis, says she cross-stitches and takes baths to keep the scaries at bay.
Sarah Savoy, a 35-year-old who works at a think tank in Washington, D.C., stumbled on an unexpected antidote: having young children. She used to get the Sunday scaries in her 20s, but they’ve since subsided. “Our older daughter is a terrible napper, so [on Sundays] from 2 o’clock on it’s survival parenting, just trying to get to the end of the day,” she told me. “One of the things I look forward to about the week is that we have a pretty set routine, which can fall apart on a weekend.” Of course, this pattern has produced its own weekly emotional cycle, with a feeling of stress that crests on Saturday mornings, when Savoy makes a household to-do list for the weekend.
Jonathan Abramowitz, the psychology professor, says that the most reliable way to banish the Sunday scaries, especially if they have escalated to the point of being debilitating, is to practice cognitive behavioral therapy, a means of revising mental and behavioral patterns that can be learned from a therapist, an app, or a workbook. “In the short term,” he says, “exercising, taking a walk, or doing some activity that you really enjoy on Sunday can take your mind off the scaries temporarily.”
When I asked Anne Helen Petersen what would cure the Sunday scaries, she laughed and gave a two-word answer: “Fix capitalism.” “You have to get rid of the conditions that are creating precarity,” she says. “People wouldn’t think that universal health care has anything to do with the Sunday scaries, but it absolutely does … Creating a slightly different Sunday routine isn’t going to change the massive structural problems.”
One potential system-wide change she has researched—smaller than implementing universal health care, but still big—is a switch to a four-day workweek. “When people had that one more day of leisure, it opened up so many different possibilities to do the things you actually want to do and to actually feel restored,” she says.
As a haver of the Sunday scaries myself, I would like to live in a world where there’s less to fear about Monday. At the same time, I suspect that there is an element of tragedy inextricable from the basic nature of weekends, which (not to get too glum about it) are like lives in miniature: That approaching expanse of leisure that one can survey on Friday evenings, no matter how well used, is followed within 48 hours by the distressing realization that the end of it is inevitable, and that what once seemed like so much time has been used up. On Sundays, we each reckon with the passing of time and die a small death. And that’s scary.
Trying to fill in my mystery history education, I finally read this novel. My tardiness is not a reflection on the novel, which I enjoyed. If you like private detective novels and the noir slice of life that it can portray, read this book. You may wind up feeling like the pink bug found on the 18th floor of LA police headquarters that Marlowe captures and sets free, or maybe you won’t, but you have to admire the use of telling details throughout the novel to help convey the story. There are a few things that were a bit overdone for me, and really it should 4.5 stars, but half stars aren’t allowed. For me, the use of metaphors was a bit heavy in the first half of the book. Their use settled down — at least so it seemed to me — in the second half. But, overall, the novel is good example of an author striving to bring his best skill and talent to a genre that at the time it was published (1940) that was considered by many to be less than a noble or worthy pursuit. I hope you read and enjoy the novel, too.
