Sundays Are The Worst – Sunday Neurosis

By Anupum Pant

Are Mondays really that bad?

It’s fair to assume that readers read through my website when they find “free time”. And assuming it is their free time, I can also assume that they are usually happy during those times. So, is it safe to assume that Sundays are days when I can expect most people to read these articles? Is Sunday the best?

Logically, the most amount of free and happy time a working person could have, should be on Sundays. However, AweSci experiences the least amount of traffic on Sundays (and Saturdays).

People think that Mondays are sad because on Mondays they need to go and toil at the workplace after a nice long break. According to most surveys, Mondays and Tuesdays are the most “blue days” of the week. And still, traffic on this website gushes during these weekdays. So, how do people find enough free time to go through a website that publishes long texts filled with trivia, on tedious Mondays? Is Monday really the worst day of the week? Deriving happiness from visitor metrics, it certainly isn’t a bad day for me. What do you think?

Sunday Neurosis

Sundays are actually worse. In a huge survey that included 34,000  people, well-educated people reported that they had lower life satisfaction values on weekends. On the other hand, people who were less qualified reported that there wasn’t a much difference in their life satisfaction level when compared with a weekday.

There may be a hundred ways to explain why Sundays are bad for the well-educated masses, but I prefer to explain it with a term coined decades ago by an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl. The term was “Sunday Neurosis“. According to him:

Sunday Neurosis refers to a form of anxiety resulting from an awareness in some people of the emptiness of their lives once the working week is over.

According to him, Sundays are the days when educated people find enough time to introspect about how empty and meaningless their lives are. Such complex thought patterns aren’t commonly seen among the less educated masses.

As a result, on Sundays, these people tend to get involved in short-term compensatory behaviours like avoiding mentally taxing activities, bingeing on food and drink, overworking, and overspending etc. Which of course could land them into big trouble in the long-term – like depression.

You, the people who come here to read science are most definitely well qualified people. So, please don’t trouble yourself on Sundays. On Sundays well-educated working individuals should remind themselves that being anxious about things is going to take them nowhere. Worrying is for Mondays.

So the next time whoever tells you, Mondays are the worst, ask them to read this. And tell them, they think Mondays are the worst because they probably aren’t very well-educated.

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