Harry dreads Sunday nights. He says that weekends are just not long enough – he never gets to everything on his “to-do list.” If he’s spent any time having fun – which is the point of weekends, isn’t it? – he’s usually too tired on Sunday to force himself to catch up on the paperwork he brought home from work. He’s prepping to run a marathon, but it’s really hard to get all of his workouts done during the week, so he puts off some of the longer runs for the weekend. And on Saturday he puts it off till Sunday…and by Sunday night, still not having done a full workout, he’s tired and frustrated with himself. 

Sound familiar? Sunday nights are hard for lots of reasons. For one thing, they stir up old feelings from schooldays – long after we leave the education system, our bodies and psyches bring up childhood fears about unfinished homework and tests we’re not prepared for. For another, like Harry, we can’t figure out where the time went and what happened to all our good intentions – the paperwork we were going to catch up on, the errands we were going to run, the book we were going to read, the friends we were going to see? Oh yes, and what about all of the fun and relaxing we were going to do?

If you suffer from Sunday Night Blues or its sibling the Sunday Night Anxiety Attack, take heart. That feeling of dread, of a weekend wasted or tasks not done doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the wrong job (much as you may wish you didn’t have to go there on Monday), wrong relationship, wrong college, or wrong life. It may simply mean that you are misreading your own thoughts.

There is a solution to the Sunday night problem – one that doesn’t require you to become more organized or learn to use your time more efficiently. It’s as simple as revising your daydreams.

Say what?

I’ve been working with these “wandering thoughts” (as one group of researchers has dubbed them) for many years. In a book I wrote in the late 1990’s,  I talk about how paying attention to your daydreams can put you in touch with your creativity. But recent studies have shown that daydreams – which, by the way, can range from tiny thoughts about what we might eat for lunch to complex stories about falling in love or changing the world – are also much more than that.

According to a group of neuroscience researchers, we all daydream something like a third of our waking time! Anything we do that much must serve some sort of purpose.

Although we’ve been trained to think of these thoughts as bad, as interfering with our ability to carry out the tasks we’re trying to concentrate on, a study conducted at Dartmouth University suggests that our brains are hardwired to produce them and that they are necessary for healthy psychological functioning.

These researchers have hard evidence that daydreams help us do two important things:

1 – they help us to know what we are thinking

2 – they help us prepare for future activity

Years ago Yale professor and psychologist Dr. Jerome Singer described daydreams as “internal monologues” – that is, they are ways that we talk to ourselves. But what will help make your Sunday nights more manageable is that the stories and pictures in these conversations are often not accurate pictures of what really needs to happen.

Here’s an example:

On Thursday morning, thinking about the upcoming weekend, Harry starts to daydream. First he thinks about his week, then the marathon he’s sort of training for. Although our internal conversations are never this clear, this was the general idea of his thoughts:

You know, the marathon isn’t that far away. You need to get in shape.

I know, I know. But I just don’t have time right now. This job is taking all the stuffing out of me. I’m lucky if I can get home in time to get a decent night’s sleep. I’ll make up for it this weekend. I’ll run Friday night, then again Saturday and again Sunday. And Sunday I’ll do a long run.

OK. But you know, you also need to get those statistics for your boss.

I know. I’m planning to do that this weekend, too.

Yeah, but what about the big football game you wanted to watch with the guys?

Oh, maybe I’ll take my iPad and pull the stats up during commercials.

OK, but that means you can’t have more than three beers. After four you’ll be too wasted to do any work.

I know, I know. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.

If any of his friends had been privy to Harry’s thoughts, they would have laughed out loud. In fact, if Harry had been able to actually hear himself, he would have laughed as well. “Dream on,” he might have said. “You can’t possibly do all of that.”

What Harry was actually doing was imagining what he wanted to get done over the weekend. If he had made one simple change, he might have arrived at Sunday night without that sense of panic and doom that makes so many of us miserable at the end of two days off.

Here’s the deal: No matter how realistic our daydreams may seem to us, they are, by definition, not real!! Problems occur when we see them as an unchangeable fact instead of a discussion between parts of ourselves with different wishes, different ambitions, different goals. And then, when we (or life) don’t live up to what we imagined, we become upset, frustrated, depressed and/or anxious.

So, instead of taking your Thursday and Friday daydreams about the weekend literally, try actually talking to yourself about what you can reasonable expect to do. And then imagine doing even less! We all need some time for rest. We need to recuperate from whatever we have been doing during the week, whether it’s a job or a jobhunt, schoolwork, childcare, or housework or volunteer activity. So, much as you might like to try to catch up on everything you didn’t get done during the week, it’s better to give yourself some time to not do anything on the weekend.

Then, when Sunday comes and you start to worry about all of the things you should have done, remind yourself that that was in your daydreams. What you did was as much as you could accomplish. And if one of the things you got done was some relaxing, you’ll be better off in the coming days at work. And that’s not a bad thing at all.