Why Am I Still Tired After the Weekend?
It's Monday morning and you're tired before you've opened the laptop. Not ill, not hungover, just tired in a way that two days off should have sorted out.
On paper it was a good weekend. Dinner with friends on Friday, brunch on Saturday, the gym class you'd been meaning to get back to, then visiting friends on Sunday. And somewhere in the middle of it you checked Slack, read an email from a client, and spent most of Sunday evening thinking about the week ahead.
So why does it feel as though you never stopped?
If you've typed "why am I still tired after the weekend?" into Claude or ChatGPT, there's a good chance nothing is wrong with you. More often than not, the issue isn't how much time off you're getting. It's what that time off is actually doing for you.
I spent 25 years in corporate, a lot of it in senior roles, and for much of that time I lived with chronic stress and anxiety and kept climbing anyway. These days yoga and proper rest time is how I restore myself. But I know how easy it is to fill every free hour and still arrive at Monday feeling flat.
Rest and recovery aren't quite the same thing
Psychologists Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz have studied how people recover from work for many years. Their work makes a useful distinction: what matters isn't only the activity you do in your time off, it's the experience that activity gives you. A long walk might leave one person refreshed and leave another turning over a work problem the whole way round.
They set out four experiences that help people recover from work:
Psychological detachment: switching off from work, not just physically but in your head.
Relaxation: time that's low in effort and free of tension.
Mastery: doing something a bit challenging that isn't work, where you learn something or get better at it.
Control: deciding for yourself what you do, and when and how you do it.
In 2018, researchers Andrew Bennett, Arnold Bakker and James Field pulled together the research on these four experiences in a meta-analysis covering 54 samples and more than 26,000 people. The first key finding was that detachment was more strongly linked to lower fatigue than relaxation or control were. And control was more strongly linked to vigour, the feeling of having energy for things, than detachment or relaxation were.
Why a full weekend can still leave you tired
None of this is a reason to stop seeing friends or cancel the city break you've booked. A good social life is one of the things that keeps you going. The point is to look honestly at what your weekend is made of.
Your weekend may run on everyone else's diary. Between friends, family, plans you made weeks ago and the jobs that didn't get done in the week, there can be very little time that's yours to decide about on the day. It ends up feeling like a second working week, just with nicer food.
Work is rarely totally switched off. You might not open the laptop, but you glance at your phone on Saturday morning, see something from a client, and that's where your head stays for the next couple of hours. Even if you don't reply, you've gone back to work.
Relaxation gets squeezed. When the weekend is the only time to see people, exercise, shop and catch up on life admin, the properly low-effort time is usually the first thing to go.
And mastery can turn into another target. The gym class becomes something you're behind on, rather than something you enjoy getting better at.
Five things that help
You don't need a different life to recover better. You need a few deliberate changes to how the weekend is put together.
1. Keep one block that's yours to decide on the day
Pick a half day, Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon, and don't plan it. When it arrives, you decide what to do with it, whether that's a walk, a film, a long lunch or nothing at all. This is control in its plainest form, and in the 2018 analysis control was more closely linked with having energy than detachment or relaxation were.
2. Give work a clear finishing line on Friday
Before you log off on Friday, set your status on Teams or Slack to say when you'll be back, then sign out of both on your phone rather than just closing them. You're not aiming for a perfect digital detox. You're making it easier for your head to leave work as well as your body, which is where detachment actually happens.
3. Notice what pulls you back in
For one weekend, keep a note of the moments your head goes back to work and what set each one off. A notification, a conversation, a quiet half hour on Sunday evening. You can't change what you haven't noticed, and it may turn out to be a few predictable moments rather than the whole weekend.
4. Put something in that's challenging and has nothing to do with work
A class you've never tried, a new recipe, a language app, a new cycling route. It should stretch you a little, and it shouldn't matter how well you do. That's mastery, and it gives your mind something absorbing to do that isn't work.
5. Protect a stretch of proper rest
Something low in effort with no target attached. A walk with no step count, a bath, an hour reading on the sofa. For me it's yoga. If it has a number attached to it, it's probably not going to totally relax you.
Use the extra hour
The clocks go back on Sunday 25 October. That extra hour is about the only time all year that turns up with nothing booked into it. Rather than letting it disappear into email on Sunday morning, make it the start of the block that's yours to decide on.
What to expect
Don't judge it on one weekend. Changing how your weekends work takes a few goes, and some weekends will be full whatever you do. What you're looking for is a Monday that starts with a bit more energy, and a Sunday evening that doesn't feel like the start of the working week.
You don't have to keep working the way you always have
Just because this is what you've always done doesn't mean it's what you always have to do. Life is too short to spend so much time stressed out and anxious about work, and a weekend that actually restores you is a good place to start.
If you'd like more practical ideas like these, The Stress Shifter comes out every Monday, written for senior women who want to feel more in control at work and enjoy the rest of their lives. You can subscribe here: https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/1133989/138990043105592365/share
And if you'd like to talk through what would make the biggest difference for you, you're very welcome to book a discovery call with me here:
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