The last time I remember being shit scared of Monday was when I had an impending deadline, my internet connection was all wonky, and my will to cough up even a single sentence had gone down the drain. My weekend, on the other hand, was great: it included a fancy dinner at a new downtown restaurant, watching reruns of my favourite sitcom, and drowning in lo-fi music with a friend I hadn’t seen in over a decade.
This is a tightrope that we’ve all had to walk at some point or another. Maybe even every week in some cases. Often, you could have everything in place, all the work sorted before the promise of a nourishing weekend, and yet the looming shadow of a Monday will find a way to get to you, flaring up your anxieties. The culmination of this unnecessary stress and anxiety is unfortunately likely to be burnout.
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But is the root of it all in the very institution, so to speak, of Monday? Something sinister about the way the first day of the week is structured, a sad orgy of the worst that capitalism has to offer. It has already been immortalised in any number of songs including “Monday, Monday” by The Mamas & The Papas, “Rainy Days and Mondays” by the Carpenters, “I Don’t Like Mondays” by The Boomtown Rats and “Manic Monday” by The Bangles.
As with all things work and relationships, TikTok seems to provide the solution.
Or so claims TikToker Marisa Jo Mayes, who is credited for coining the term ‘bare minimum Monday’ which was the result of her own experiences with burnout. Not surprisingly, the hashtag #bareminimummondays has gone past four million on TikTok, with people sharing their own tales of burnout and the many demonic ways that Monday has their lives in a stranglehold.
The bare minimum life
In an interview with New York Post, Mayes explained that she had turned to self-employment after the corporate grind led her to burnout. Things didn’t change because she was a self-dubbed perfectionist — overcommitting, taking on more than she could deliver, stretching a particular task till its perfect conclusion. The “Sunday Scaries” followed — the dreadful, sinking feeling of facing the Monday after chock-full of to-dos. Her work ethic went for a toss, she’d wake up late on Mondays, and nothing really worked.
This was when she formulated a burnout prevention strategy: Bare Minimum Mondays, which advocates getting by the most dreaded day of the week by doing the bare minimum at work — nothing more and nothing less. It seemed to have worked for her. It seemed to have also done wonders for other TikTokers who have posted about it, of gaining autonomy, of really just letting go.
But what really is the source of the dreaded Monday, in the first place? According to neuropsychologist Jasdeep Mago, it’s a pattern we have been all too accustomed to since we were school-going children.
“We are raised with the thought that Monday is fundamentally bad. You will have classes, you need to wake up early and get on the school bus. We’ve all felt it. All of this just gets heightened in an adult job, particularly a job you don’t like. It could be too much work, or you might love your boss and colleagues, but the work itself might be stressful,” she said.
Mago added that it’s the same sinking feeling one gets at the thought of returning back to work after a much-deserved vacation, the horrific contrast of sinking your brain in reams of boring office documents when the beach tan is still fresh on your skin.
The “Bare Minimum Monday” strategy, however, may not always work. Meher Jadwani, a 30-year-old entrepreneur who runs her own beauty platform, said that it would never work for her because while it’s great in theory, a Monday remains a Monday.
“People will still schedule sending their emails to you on a Monday morning. For me, navigating Monday works better when I start with an easy task, so that’s an easy check off my to-do list. This is followed by a difficult task that I need to wrap up before lunch. I will not get to my lunch till I wrap up that difficult task because I know my energy will slump after lunch,” she said.
This strategy of alternating between easy and complex tasks, and finishing one of each before lunch, works wonders for Jadwani. She clarified that it’s imperative to also have something pleasant to look forward to on Monday mornings that’s not work-related. Now that she has her own startup, Jadwnai said she has the liberty of participating in a short pottery session every Monday morning before work — this helps harmonise her thoughts because pottery demands focused attention, and playing with clay is fun.
A deeper problem
For a wide cross-section of Monday-affected folks, the underlying issues could be much deeper, almost independent of Monday itself. In this sense, blaming it all on the institution of Monday might be hanging the wrong prisoner, shifting the blame on something that is really innocent.
“Maybe your work makes you feel unappreciated, the uncertainty or the toxicity of work and how you will cope, or the work makes you feel like you’re going away from the purpose of your life, then it’s really not about the Sunday Scaries or Monday,” said psychiatrist Nahid Dave. “Often, it could be about the weekend itself, where you might feel that you didn’t have enough fun, and you just wasted it lying down on your bed.”
Arvind, a 24-year-old HR manager who preferred to share just his first name for fear of retribution from his former employer, had skirted the issue of just how “fucked up” his boss was under the garb of just another dreadful Monday. He told VICE that he would “really like to shake everyone and request them” to look at their jobs because you’re ideally not supposed to dread going to work unless you are being blackmailed to do a job or you have a manic debt to pay.
“In no civilised state of affairs can your job be the reason for your nightmares,” he said. “I realised only two years later that my boss would gaslight everyone in his team. He would invalidate our opinions, wilfully embarrass us in front of juniors, and break our self-esteem to the point where we would doubt ourselves every day. Now, can I just ignore everything and blame it on poor Monday? At some point I really need to be able to take accountability for why I’m feeling something that cannot be normalised.”
In cases where the job is not killing your will to work, but it’s really just the anxiety of a Monday, neuropsychologist Mago said that a lot of it also boils down to the narrative of how one is talking about it.
“Yes, there is pressure, but you need to tell yourself that it’s nothing you haven’t handled before,” she advised. “Secondly, a lot of people get stuck in what I call the freeze loop, and are basically unable to act. You also need to focus on organising the day better or even asking for help from your colleagues. Ultimately, give yourself something to look forward to at the end of Monday, anything that sparks joy, from a coffee at your favourite café to reading your favourite book.”
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