The 8 Stages Of Your Sunday Anxiety

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When it comes to days of the week, Sundays are the best and the worst. Hopefully you woke up at a decent hour and didn’t spend the day languishing in bed, marinating in the sins of a weekend that flew by. Sundays don’t follow normal human operating procedure. Meals don’t have set times. You’ll eat when you want to eat. The slate is clean. You don’t have to go anywhere. But the blissful ignorance of Sunday soon comes crashing down as you start watching the hours and minutes melt off of the clock and Monday starts rustling from its deep slumber.

Welcome to the horrifying reality of Sunday anxiety. It washes over you in eight stages.

Bliss

No alarm clock, but your biological clock starts ringing any time from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. You are fully awake at this point, but it’s Sunday. Roll over and fall back asleep. Yeah, you’re a touch hungover, but it’s Sunday. You have a full day to do as you please. There’s nothing to be done except maybe some laundry. Laundry is a passive activity. Maybe I’ll throw a non-discrimitory, heaping pile of clothes into the machine and pick clothes out of the dryer whenever I need them. Maybe I’ll hook up with some friends for brunch, and maybe I won’t put on pants until the sun starts to set. There’s all the time in the world.

Worry

It is now two in the afternoon and you’ve slept away half of the day. What happened while you were sleeping? Good Lord, you missed the entire first half of your NFL team’s game. You forgot to set your fantasy team’s lineup and there’s no way in hell Martellus Bennett can save your ass on Monday Night Football. What else might have you missed? Did your mom call? Shit. She did. Did your boss email you? No, but maybe he wanted to. Just sleeping precious life away. OH GOD, WHAT HAVE I MISSED?

Regret

Son of a bitch. Feeling like such an idiot. No way in hell you’re falling asleep before two in the morning tonight. Probably should have set an alarm for 11 just to be safe, but you didn’t. You wanted that precious sleep. Didn’t even get in a full REM cycle. Everything closes at five on Sunday. Are all of your friends doing cool shit without you? No missed calls, but still. They probably knew you were being a piece of human garbage and decided to not invite you to brunch and a movie. That would’ve really hit the spot. Such an idiot. Netflix, NFL Red Zone, and self-loathing it is.

Hunger

Food. Can’t screw that up. Sustenance will stave off the crippling anxiety that is beginning to mount and will probably get those shakes under control. Food that can be delivered is preferable, but four dollars in delivery fees? Is that really what convenience costs these days? Domino’s has that four dollar carryout special, but that requires you to put on real clothes and possibly shower. You better just sit there and think about how much you want food instead of doing anything about acquiring said food.

Reverse Hunger

Have you ever been so hungry that you’re nauseous? Have you ever been so hungry that you’ll literally eat anything, even Long John Silvers? Have you ever been so hungry that the sheer thought of the aftermath of consuming Long John Silvers makes you want to hurl the contents of last night’s drunk food binge onto your coffee table? Then you have reverse hunger. You are so hungry that your body is mad at itself for not consuming food for so long that it is rejecting the sheer notion of nurishment. What an asshole.

Real Hunger

The time has come. The standoff between your stomach, your body, and your wallet has come to an end. You need food or else you will die. That is a basic fact of life. Now, how much nutrition value that food has is neither here or there–you just need a food baby. Order a ten dollar Dinner Box from Pizza Hut and resign yourself to the humiliation and contrition that comes with consuming the entire thing throughout the course of the day. You have vanquished your hunger with a mighty blow. Delicious processed meat and plastic cheese have won the day. You are now free from the bondage of hunger.

Panic

You have slaked your body’s thirst for food and everything is okay now. But it isn’t, because it’s 7 p.m. and the most you’ve accomplished today is 30 seconds of human interaction with the overly inquisitive pizza delivery boy. Bang up job. Precious seconds tick off the clock. Your Sunday night television viewing schedule does enough to distract you, but at the same time, when it’s all said and done, it’s 10 p.m. and you have to be up for work in roughly eight hours. You didn’t even have time to wind down from your long day of doing absolutely jack. The weight of having to be back at your job begins to crush your soul and you begin to break. Your world is spiraling out of control. Abandon all hope. You might not sleep tonight. You are going to die some day. You will not see the light of morning. All is lost.

Exhaustion

You fall asleep halfway through an episode of “The Office.” It is done. Another Sunday has come and gone. You submitted to its cruelty and fleeting bliss. The weekend was over in the blink of an eye and you awoke from your dream state with your alarm blasting. Can’t wait to do it again next week.

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Brian McGannon

What do I love? I love happy hour, a good golf tan, and getting moderately drunk during dinner.

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