Something's happened to Sundays.

When I was younger, I used to dread the hours between 7am and 11am on a Saturday morning. 

The air was scented with Mr Sheen and skirting board dust as my mum, Chux in hand, would assign a flurry of jobs to every member of the family, directing us around the house until everything was sparkling and orderly. 

Once it was done, though, she'd sit back contentedly at the kitchen bench, and we'd all decide on the plans for the remainder of the weekend — as long as they didn't involve messing up the house we'd just scrubbed from top to bottom. 

Sundays, however, were a different story. Long, languid and filled with visiting friends or barbecues in the backyard, Sundays used to be sacred. 

It was this way for most people, right? Lionel Richie wasn't singing 'easy like Friday morning', after all.

But something has happened to our Sundays of late. 

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While Saturdays are still typically filled with errands, our 'day of rest' has been replaced by a creeping dread at the overwhelm that lies waiting in the week ahead, and as such, there's a niggling need to get out in front of it.

With the post-pandemic push to get workers back into the office — which leaves less time for life admin during the week — there are no real rest days anymore. It's just downtime that isn't really downtime, as we're plagued by the need to front-load our week.

The 'Sunday Scaries', as the phenomenon is known online, has been well-documented in recent years. Previously, the phrase referred exclusively to the hours before bedtime on a Sunday night. In 2024, we're handing over our weekends wholesale to the sense of doom. 

And so we meal-prep. And catch up on laundry that we neglected while we were working late. We take the kids to get new school shoes and we make lengthy mental to-do lists. Then, when Sunday evening rolls around, we let the creeping dread of the looming work week seep into our pristine twilight, and instead of lapping up the last few hours of our time off, we future-trip about how much we have to do.  

We open our inbox. Decide we should 'get a start' on the jobs that we know are waiting for us come Monday morning. Wrench our brains out of rest mode and throw them ahead of us into the week because we're all stretched too thin as it is. 

Recent mental health data paints a dire picture of the state of burnout in Australia, particularly for women. The 2024 State of Burnout report found that 42 per cent of women and 38 per cent of men were experiencing burnout, while research out of the UK found over two-thirds of Brits experience stress and anxiety on Sunday nights before the work week begins. 

Throw in a cost-of-living crisis and the ability to access our work emails any time of the day or night, and it's little wonder we've stopped being able to switch off at all. We've glorified productivity and demonised rest, and it's slowly killing us. 

And while none of us seem to know the answer to how exactly we can reclaim Sundays, it does feel really important that we try. Because more than simply the seventh day of the week (or the first, depending on who you ask), Sunday is a concept. It's a little sliver of time we carve out just for us — or at least, for the people we love — that deserves to be kept sacred. Not necessarily in a biblical sense, but in a middle finger to a world that wants to normalise being 'on' 24/7. 

Feature Image: Getty.