I've had jobs where Sunday night felt fine. I've had jobs where the moment Sunday afternoon rolled around, my stomach started tightening. A slow, creeping feeling I came to call "the Sunday squeeze."
I dismissed it for years. Told myself it was pre-Monday tiredness, something everyone experienced. I convinced myself the feeling was the universal human response to the weekend ending.
I was wrong. It wasn't normal tiredness. It was a signal. My body knew something my rational mind was refusing to accept.
Thomas Erikson, author of Surrounded by Idiots, describes company culture as "how your stomach feels on Sunday evening." Not the mission statement on the wall. Not the values your HR team spent an offsite creating. Your gut, Sunday night, before sleep.
It's the simplest career health test I know. More reliable than any employee engagement survey.
Tired vs. Dread
There's an important difference between Sunday night tiredness and Sunday night dread.
Tiredness is normal. You've had a weekend. Your body is winding down before another week starts. A mild reluctance to see Monday arrive is standard human stuff.
Dread is different. Dread is when you open your calendar app and feel a knot forming before you've read a single entry. When you think about a specific colleague and your shoulders climb toward your ears. When you're lying in bed wishing Monday would somehow not come.
Research from the University of Queensland found around 25% of workers report difficulty sleeping on Sunday nights because of work-related worry. One in four people, lying awake, dreading what morning brings.
The number should be zero. It isn't.
The Dread Is Data
Your body is trying to give you information. The question is whether you're willing to listen.
When the Sunday squeeze shows up, it's usually pointing at one of a few things:
A specific person. Sometimes the dread isn't about the work at all. It's about a colleague, a manager, or a dynamic you'll have to deal with when Monday hits. Your nervous system knows what your rational mind is still making excuses for. If thinking about a specific name tightens your chest, pay attention to what your body is registering.
The workload. If you're mentally scrolling through tasks at 10pm on a Sunday, your brain is telling you something's out of control. Not "a bit much." Out of control. People don't mentally rehearse a workweek unless the structure around them is genuinely broken.
A values mismatch. This one is trickier to identify. Sometimes the dread is vague. You're unable to point to a specific person or problem. Everything seems "fine" on paper. Except your stomach disagrees. Formless dread is often the feeling of spending your days in work misaligned with who you are. When what you're asked to do contradicts what you stand for, your body keeps score even when your mind refuses to.
The key thing to understand: your Sunday night feeling isn't a mental health problem to manage. It's a diagnostic signal giving you an honest readout. Treat it like one.
If You're a Leader, It Gets More Complicated
Here's what makes this test especially important for anyone in a leadership role.
When leaders experience anxiety, it spreads. Research on emotional contagion shows stress radiates through a workplace, and it travels fastest from the people at the top. If you're a manager walking into Monday carrying Sunday's dread, your team will feel it... even if you never say a word.
Think about the best leader you've worked for. Did they walk in every Monday looking like they were marching to their own execution? No. They had energy, presence, a sense of forward motion. It was contagious.
Now think about the worst. Did they bring in Sunday's weight? Did you feel it before they'd even opened their mouth?
If you lead people and you're dreading Monday, you owe it to them to ask why. Not to hide the feeling. To investigate it honestly.
Are you in the right role? Are you in the right culture? Are you carrying a workload no one person should be carrying? These aren't rhetorical questions. They deserve honest answers.
When a leader suffers in silence and pushes through, the team suffers too. The mask slips. The dread spreads. Your job isn't to project confidence at all costs. It's to fix what's broken.
When Sunday Feels OK
I want to say something about the flip side of this, because it matters.
I've had stretches of my career where Sunday night felt fine. Not ecstatic, not euphoric, but genuinely OK. Calm. Ready.
Those stretches shared a few things in common: - The work was hard, but I believed in it - The people around me were honest, and I was honest with them - I knew what I was responsible for and had the tools to do it - The culture didn't ask me to leave my values at the door
The feeling of Sunday-night-OK is worth aiming for. Not perfection. Not a dream job. Something more fundamental: doing work worth doing, with people worth working alongside. When you find yourself in a stretch like this, notice it. Name it. Don't take it for granted.
What to Do With the Signal
If your Sunday nights are tight, resist the urge to rush to solutions. Diagnose first.
Sit with the feeling and ask: what, specifically, is feeding this? Write it down if you need to. Is it a person? A meeting you're dreading? A structural problem nobody wants to name? A decision you've been putting off?
Once you've named it, you have options. Some problems are fixable from where you stand. A conversation you've been avoiding, a boundary you've let slip, a workload you've never pushed back on... these are areas where you have real room to move.
Some problems aren't fixable from inside. If the culture is genuinely broken, if the values on the wall have nothing to do with how decisions get made, if the person making your Sundays miserable has no interest in changing... you won't solve it by working harder or waiting it out. What's left is to stop pretending it's fine.
It sounds harsh. But pretending costs you more in the long run. And your body is going to keep sending the signal whether you listen or not.
The Sunday test doesn't care about your rationalizations. It only registers what's true.
Start Using It
I've gotten better at running this test regularly. Not only when something feels off, but as a habit. Every Sunday evening, a quick check-in: how does my stomach feel about tomorrow?
When it's OK, I take a moment to notice. To appreciate the situation I'm in and the people I'm working with.
When it's not OK, I don't let myself brush it off. I ask why. I write something down. I commit to addressing one thing in the coming week.
Your gut has been paying attention to your work life a lot longer than your conscious mind. It remembers patterns. The moments when things didn't sit right. The broken promises. The culture on days when no one was performing for visitors.
It's not dramatic to take it seriously. It's practical.
What does your stomach say right now?