EP57 The Sunday Night Anxiety Spiral

It’s Sunday night.

The kids are finally asleep, the house is quiet, and you should be relaxing…

but instead, your chest feels tight and your mind won’t stop racing.

You tell yourself, “Tomorrow will be fine.”

But deep down, you know this feeling too well – the pit in your stomach, the mental checklist, the quiet panic whispering,

“You didn’t rest enough. You’re already behind.”

That was me, too.

For the longest time, Sunday nights were my undoing.

I’d stand in the kitchen – half scrolling through emails, half packing lunch boxes –

and feel the weight of a new week pressing down before it even began.

It wasn’t that I hated my life or my work.

It’s that my body never felt safe enough to rest in it.

The Truth About Sunday Anxiety

Most moms don’t actually get a weekend.

We just change locations.

Saturday becomes a blur of sports bags, grocery runs, and birthday parties.

Sunday turns into meal prep, laundry, and mental planning for the week ahead.

By the time evening comes, our bodies haven’t rested – they’ve been performing calm all day.

So when the house finally goes quiet, all that suppressed tension rises to the surface.

That’s the spiral.

It’s not weakness or overthinking – it’s your nervous system finally exhaling,

saying, “I never got to rest.”

Why Your Body “Time Travels” into Stress

Here’s what I’ve learned: anxiety is never about what’s happening now.

It’s your body trying to protect you from what it thinks might happen next.

Your brain remembers the last Monday you woke up already tired,

the meeting that left you tense,

the endless to-do list that made you feel like you could never catch up.

So by Sunday night, your body starts preparing early –

releasing the same stress hormones, tightening the same muscles,

bracing for another round of survival.

You haven’t even lived Monday yet,

but your nervous system is already there.

It’s not an overreaction.

It’s a prediction.

What Your Anxiety Is Trying to Tell You

If your body could speak clearly on Sunday nights,

it wouldn’t say, “I hate my job” or “I can’t handle this.”

It would whisper:

“I’m exhausted.”

“I’m tired of holding it all together.”

“I need predictability, not pressure.”

“I want to feel safe slowing down.”

Anxiety isn’t your enemy – it’s your smoke alarm.

It’s not there to hurt you; it’s there to alert you.

And the problem is, most of us don’t stop to listen.

We try to silence it with more planning, prepping, or productivity.

But what the spiral really needs is the opposite:

not control, but care.

How to Interrupt the Spiral

Here are a few things that helped me:

• Name it.

  Say to yourself, “This is my nervous system preparing for the week.”

  Naming it turns chaos into awareness.

• Get out of your head and into your body.

  Dim the lights, stretch, or breathe slowly.

  Not to “fix it,” but to show your body what calm feels like again.

• Close the mental tabs.

  Write everything down – your brain can rest once it knows things are captured.

• Create something to look forward to on Monday.

  A favourite coffee, a podcast, a quiet five minutes before everyone wakes up.

  It reminds your body that the week ahead isn’t all pressure – there’s still joy waiting.

These small shifts won’t make the spiral vanish,

but they create moments of safety that teach your body it doesn’t need to brace for life anymore.

The Reframe

The biggest change for me came when I stopped seeing Sunday nights as a warning

and started seeing them as feedback –

a quiet dashboard light saying, “Something needs to slow down.”

It’s no longer the night I dread.

It’s the night I listen.

And when I do, Monday feels lighter –

not because my to-do list shrank,

but because my body isn’t fighting to survive it anymore.

If Sunday nights have been heavy for you,

please remember this:

you’re not weak or ungrateful.

Your body has just been handling too much for too long.

You don’t need to push through the spiral.

You just need to pause with it.