Picture it: it’s Sunday night. You get dinner with your friends, you laugh and gossip about all the news, and then someone says, “I’m gonna go finish some work.” A hush falls over the crowd. A few things unite every college student regardless of school, major, or plans post graduation. We all want to be employed someday, move out and leave our mark on the world. We all want the curve to go our way and to wake up to an email from a professor that your 8:30 is canceled. Specifically though, we all experience the Sunday Scaries. 

The Sunday Scaries are a well-documented malady that seem to pass through each college dorm beginning around 5 p.m. on a Sunday. It comes in waves, first affecting one student before they remind the rest of the week’s impending deadlines, thus infecting the others. Symptoms include general stomach aches, stress eating and a sense of existential dread that yet another week in our lives is about to begin. Factors like hydration and time management can increase or decrease the seriousness of the affliction. 

While there is no known cure for the Sunday Scaries, several factors have been shown to reduce the severity of the illness. First, don’t leave everything for Sunday night. Fighting off the much less serious illness, Saturday Scaries, can strengthen your immune system. With less to do on Sunday, the disease holds less power over you. Second, take it one day at a time. Nothing due on Friday needs to be completed by Monday. Nothing due on Tuesday needs to be completed by Monday. Prioritize and the Sunday Scaries cannot defeat you. 

A central element of the Sunday Scaries is the inevitable feeling that our weeks go by in the same pattern, with little variance until we graduate from this schedule and move onto the next. The only solution to this problem is to embrace the monotonous elements of our situations and work to change them. Spice up your eating locations, workout routines and conversation buddies. Send an acquaintance a meme with no context. Find happiness and joy in your Sunday nights, however they may be.