Are the ‘Sunday Scaries’ Hurting Your Firm? What You Can Do About It

Summary: Sunday nights are when the dread of the upcoming workweek begins. If law firms take steps to ease the problem, they can improve both the lives of their attorneys and the work they get from them.

• Anxiety at the office comes home with attorneys. And when legal staff can’t disconnect from their work at home, they come back to the office in worse shape than before.
• Anxiety and stress damages work performance
• Diminished performance and stress at work results in costs to employers.
• Law firms can reduce stress through a system of work programsg and support.

What the Hell Are the ‘Sunday Scaries’?

If leaving the office on Friday brings a sudden rush of euphoria, an anxious Sunday evening often follows; in this version, the attorney or employee can expect various degrees of anxiety, stress, anguish, worry, dread, and despair. It may start as a drizzle in the early afternoon and by twilight turn into a full deluge.

Such is the horror of Sunday Scaries and Monday Blues: Good evening, dread; so we meet again.

A bad Sunday is not the mental health day of the week you need

Sunday night is the new Monday morning. This version of workplace creep can range anywhere from the mildly dripping discomfort to the redlining panic attack. And it doesn’t affect just some, it haunts many: According to a survey, 39% of respondents reported themselves as sufferers—more than half say they’re overwhelmed by work on a daily basis. And Sunday Scaries is not a condition to be easily assuaged with a bit of stretching, lavender oil, and a fidget spinner. It’s an “anticipatory stress event” that only imagines a stressor on the horizon. It’s a form of chronic workplace stress that has gone unmanaged—a beehive soon expected to be kicked. This feeling of dread can impact nearly any type of person at any time and can easily scale up when we aren’t able to prioritize our heavy workloads.

Unmanaged pre-work stress is one effect. There are others. Stress can affect productivity and how work gets done or not. Working weekends to try and catch up can exacerbate the problem. But it’s more than stress from workloads: it can be difficulties with supervisors, feeling unhappy about the quality or amount of work, and conflicts with other co-workers. All of it adds up to a kind of job creep and anticipatory anxiety that can lead to work burnout—and turnover. (See what turnovers can cost.)

What happens when you don’t manage the unmanageable

Dreading Monday anxiety: How stress affects those who work

While we may marvel at how clutch players like Michael Jordan or Kawhi Leonard could win games at the last second, the idea that stress can improve performance is mostly untrue. Research consistently shows the opposite —more often stress causes people to make more mistakes—mistakes that cost money and reputations. And it affects the mistake-maker too: an accumulation of stress on an individual damages health in irreversible ways. Stress has been called the body’s most dangerous toxin and among its collateral damage is decreased work performance. What we think and feel and for how long is what determines both our health and our ability to do good work.

Here’s what unmanaged stress can do:

• Stress causes brain damage: High levels of stress hormones wrecks all kinds of havoc on our gray matter including memory, adrenal burnout, as well as disabling the brain’s ability to manage our fear and anxiety.
• Stress damages the heart: It increases stress hormones, constricts blood vessels, makes the heart work harder, increases the thickness of arterial walls, raises blood pressure, and the incidence of heart attack.
• Stress damages the cells and body: It damages the cells’ mitochondria where the body’s energy factories are. Evidence also suggests that higher stress levels cause lower bone mineral density and more physical pain.
• Stress damages the gut: Otherwise known as the “second brain,” the gut produces 95% of the body’s serotonin. When stress ties up the guts, serotonin levels are affected and this can cause depression, migraine headaches, changes in sleep patterns, and more.
• Stress promotes disease: It weakens the body’s ability to resist disease, reactivates latent infections, and generally cripples the immune system. It also ruins teeth and gums.
• Stress affects sex: It can affect mood, your ability to stay in the mood, body weight and testosterone levels, desire, and impotence. It also increases production of cortisol which affects the libido and erectile function.
• Stress increases aging and weight: Research at the University of Miami found that in stressful situations, people eat 40% than normal. Research at University of California, San Francisco found that it also creates factors so that new cells can’t grow as quickly which causes premature aging.

A LinkedIn survey looking at more than 1,000 full-time, part-time, and self-employed adults found that for those dreading the working week:

• 60% were worried about their workload
• 44% were concerned that professional and personal tasks weren’t being balanced well enough
• 39% were fixated on projects they hadn’t finished

What stress does to the work

Employers lose billions of dollars weekly due to workers’ stress-related disengagement and poor performance. Worry occupies 70% of the workforce’s minds. This worry can translate into:

• Being less productive: 41%
• Being less engaged: 33%
• Preparing a job search: 15%
• Being absent more: 14 %

What can employers do?

For their part, employees have lots of ideas about how law firms can relieve work-related stress: higher salaries, flexible work arrangements, more paid time off and other perks and benefits.

It’s hard to imagine that the solution to stress would be found in an additional 10%-20% salary. As most stress is related to impending or anticipating dread, appropriate solutions might seem to lie in the here and now, not the hereafter.

Attorneys and legal staff become more engaged in their work when their objectives are aligned with those of the firm. For attorneys unsure of why they go to work, Sunday afternoon will be the time when those feelings start to peak.

And it’s not all about the boss: Support need not always come from a supervisor. A network of colleagues that can bounce ideas off of each other and support each other through challenging days is even better. Attorneys who have at least one friend at work will miss work less often, stay at their jobs longer, and be more engaged.

Below are five strategies that law firms and organizations can use to help legal staff better handle stress and overcome their Sunday Scaries.

1. Assess workloads

Where is the line between high associate productivity and a killer pace? We know that heavy workloads are a primary cause of stress and supervisors can help their legal teams by meeting regularly with them both individually and together to get a sense of ways to improve assignments and schedules and prioritize responsibilities.

Bringing in temporary help to reduce heavy workloads or provide help and support on specific projects, especially when a team member is out on vacation or maternity leave, etc. is one way to reduce stress and anxiety.

Also, stress and the Sunday Scaries can also happen to team members that don’t feel challenged by the legal work they’re given. Though the root causes can be different, the dread can be the same.

For law firms and employers, research shows that:

• Monday is most often cited as the most productive workday
• 75% claim that their highest productivity is before lunch
• Biggest productivity distraction: chatty coworkers
• For those 55 and older, a preference for working in an office with nearly half preferring to work in a private office with a closed door; for those 34 and younger, working in an open office work environment was preferred with telecommuting being a close second choice—less with those 35-54 and even less with those 55 and up

2. Model work-life balance

If the environment of a law firm requires attorneys to be always on, legal staff does not have the opportunity to disconnect once they leave the office. Leadership sets the expectations for when attorneys need to be available. Lowering expectations for off-the-clock-responses can help create a culture where staff can spend less of their weekends dreading the work ahead.

If and when possible, encourage teams to schedule emails, when they can, to arrive during work hours. This way, others won’t also feel the urgency to respond during off hours. This should also include holidays and PTO. This allows your teams to better disconnect from work without the guilt of thinking they’ve let the sender down.
Of course, the best work-life balance modeling comes from managers and partners who take time off themselves. We know that those can take the time for vacations, and even disconnecting over the weekend, are typically happier and more productive.

3. Focus priorities

Overwhelming workloads aren’t the only anxiety inducer; so are uncertain priorities. Defined goals can create transparency into the highest priorities and the focus for the week ahead. Not only does uncertainty create anxiety, but knowing where the focus should be helps reduce individual anxiety and ensures that everyone is working toward the same objective.

4. Make sure your legal team members know about available resources for help

If your law firm offers any sort of wellness programs or resources that can help with stress relief, make sure all of your attorneys know. Wellness programs can be as simple as chair or foot massage sessions, subsidized gym memberships, or even a wellness room where staff can rest and recharge or even just take a personal call away from their desk.

Most of all, legal managers need to know about and be able to recommend available resources including employee assistance programs or mental health benefits. Managers should be the first line for supporting their legal teams.

5. Curing cases of the “Mondays”

Give attorneys reasons for not dreading Monday and being excited about starting their week. Cater breakfasts, provide bagels or donuts, and even avoid scheduling meetings on that day. This gives your attorneys and staff an opportunity to ease into the week. But also know that good Monday mornings are only a Band-aid at best. Celebrations only go so far. No amount of forced jolly is going overcome someone’s disconnection from the work they’re doing. If you hate your job, no donut is going to undo that.

What can attorneys do to ease their own Sunday blues?

• Start Monday on Friday: Clear your desk, tidy up the workspace, get to unanswered emails, and make a to-do list for Monday
• Drain your anxiety: Go for a long run, work out, go for a hike, ride a bike, do yoga or pilates, whatever. Tiring your anxiety, and body, weakens your anxiety.
• Periodic housework works: Don’t leave all of your domestic work until the weekend. Spread it out during the week if you can
• Sunday fun: Good distraction can be great therapy. And there’s no reason why you can’t make big plans for a Sunday night, and if you’re facing Sunday Blues, all the more reason for the schedule adjustment. When you’re out or even in with friends or family, it’s far more difficult to dwell on negative feelings. Make enjoying your weekend a new habit.

About Harrison Barnes

Harrison Barnes is the founder of BCG Attorney Search and a successful legal recruiter. Harrison is extremely committed to and passionate about the profession of legal placement. His firm BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys. BCG Attorney Search works with attorneys to dramatically improve their careers by leaving no stone unturned in job searches and bringing out the very best in them. Harrison has placed the leaders of the nation’s top law firms, and countless associates who have gone on to lead the nation’s top law firms. There are very few firms Harrison has not made placements with. Harrison’s writings about attorney careers and placements attract millions of reads each year. He coaches and consults with law firms about how to dramatically improve their recruiting and retention efforts. His company, LawCrossing, has been ranked on the Inc. 500 twice. For more information, please visit Harrison Barnes’ bio.

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