They waited 6 days for it to come. It’s Sunday. It’s the weekend. Employees can sleep in and can pretty much do what they want. Then why don’t they like it?
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A report says nearly one-third of workers surveyed by Adecco UK said they don’t like Sundays because they dread the upcoming workweek so much. Office Angels reports that 72 percent of British workers spend over 3 hours worrying about work on weekends.
Unsurprisingly, another survey by National Opinion Poll (NOP) for Stressbusting found that Sunday night was the most difficult night to get to sleep for one-half of respondents (49 percent)—three times more difficult than any other night of the week.
Why? It’s the prospect of starting another stressful week at work. Stress in one of the biggest causes of insomnia according to Peter Freedman, coeditor of stressbusting.co.uk. And if they do fall asleep, adrenal stress can have these fretful employees waking up several times a night.
Having a few stiff drinks to relax or to fortify oneself for the coming workweek is another contributing factor, since alcohol is known to disrupt sleep.
Ironically, Monday is the night when respondents reported they have the least trouble getting some shut-eye (only nine percent), probably because they are so exhausted from making it through another workday and facing 4 more in a row.
Why is work so awful? In the Adecco survey, one-third (33 percent) of respondents classified their workplace as unhappy. While over one-half (57 percent) of respondents said that heavy workloads make them anxious, nearly one-third (29 percent) cited tension caused by office politics as the culprit.
“Overall, getting the blues is common, but it is unacceptable for this to begin to affect quality of life,” says Alex Fleming, managing director at Adecco UK. “It’s worrying that so many workers spend their weekends and holidays full of anxiety and dread about their return to work on Monday morning because of their fellow team members.”
Unfortunately, 28 percent of workers admit that they fear going into work so much that they have called in sick—bet it was on a Monday!