I dislike Sunday nights. I always have. Tonight, I did a quick search just to see if I am alone in the contempt I hold for the first evening of the week. As it turns out, the answer to that question is a resounding no -- not by a long shot. If you search on "why do people get depressed on Sunday nights?" you will find no shortage of discussion, threads and articles on the subject. In fact, Sunday Night Blues actually has its own Wikipedia page and is defined as: "an acute condition affecting nine-to-five workers and students... characterized by anxiety about the week ahead and a sense of helplessness and depression." This apparent condition is also referred to as "Sunday night depression" or "school bus blues." While it seems, for the most part, to be attributed to a lack of zeal for one's job or an aversion to a study-filled week, what I find to be particularly intriguing is that some people admit to feeling down on Sunday nights even when they don't have to work on Mondays. Try and figure that one out.
In reading through various posts, I came across one piece of advice on how to remedy the Sunday night blues. The advice is as follows. On Sunday night, write a letter to yourself to be opened on the coming Friday. The letter should consist of two paragraphs, the first of which should paint a vivid mental picture of the negative emotions that you're feeling that Sunday evening. The second paragraph should be a motivational reminder to yourself of how precious the weekend is and that you need to live it as if it were your last. After a brief analysis of the idea, a few minor red flags jumped out at me. The first hiccup in the operation is my inability to comprehend why I would ever want to begin my weekend with a reminder that it will most certainly end with an overwhelming feeling of general unpleasantness. And this feeling, of course, will stretch over a period of 3-5 hours, only to be relieved by an eventual (usually Advil PM-induced) loss of consciousness. The second problem (significantly more troubling than the first) is that, if I were to set out on Friday night trying to live the weekend as if it were my last, there is about an 85 percent chance that it actually would be. So for those of us who choose not to write letters to ourselves to be opened a few days later, how do we escape the Sunday night blues? We may never know.
And by the way, this is Labor Day weekend and I just realized that, as I'm writing about being depressed because it's Sunday night, it is actually Monday night. God help us... Sunday night is spreading...