Stop Letting Sunday Scaries Run Your Weekend - Episode: 128
The Sunday Scaries can show up any day of the week.
You're home with your family, but your brain is already in next week. You're there and not there - all at the same time. And it all comes at one: less patience, sneaking off to get work done, an easy conversation with your partner turning into an argument. This solo episode breaks down three steps to keep next week's to-do list from taking over your weekend with your family.
Listen on your preferred platform:
In this episode:
- The words that signals you're more overwhelmed than you realize
- How unspoken stress shows up in conversations with your partner
- Why a solid plan doesn't always quiet the anxiety
- Joe Dispenza's Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself and the idea of focusing on the feeling instead of the how
- The difference between visualizing and daydreaming
- How athletes rehearse what could go wrong, and why you should too
Mentioned: Episode 56 (What's On Your Calendar) and Episode 96 (A Tool to Prioritize Your Day)
Takeaways:
- When you keep calling your month "crazy," "busy," or "nuts," that's overwhelm talking.
- Get everything out of your head and onto paper.
- Picture what you have to do already finished, and feel what that's like.
- Rehearse how you'll handle the hard moments before they happen.
- Telling your partner what you're carrying can turn an argument back into a conversation.
Don't just plan your month. Picture it finished, feel it, then go do the work.
Stop Losing Your Temper Road Map
This roadmap will teach you how to have more patience.
To give your kids more time and attention.
Anger isn't your fault, but it is your responsibility.
Learn how to manage it so it doesn't get the best of you.
Welcome And Life Updates
SPEAKER_00 0:04
This is the Durable Dad Podcast. I'm your host, Tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community, and most importantly, your family. Alright, what's up? Episode 128. We are moving and grooving over here. It is September 8th, so I'm recording this one a little early because getting ahead of stuff. I'm going to Ireland next week with my parents, celebrate my dad's 70th birthday. Training right now, kind of in the final stages because we're going to Yosemite at the start of October. So that 20-mile hike with 10 guys is coming up pretty quickly here. And Craig and I, who we run these adventure trips together, are getting ready to launch our next one, our first one for 2027. So that's happening later in the month in September, in between these two trips. So all that going on, plus getting these podcasts out, plus coaching my one-on-one clients and family stuff. Brenda, the girls and I just got back from two-night camping trip in a tree house out by the river. It's only like 30 minutes away from our house, but it felt like we were worlds away. There's just been a lot of rain lately, and everything was very lush, and the bugs weren't too bad, and campfires, and it was just nice to wake up and be outside. So it was kind of a slow camping weekend with the family leading into all of the craziness that I've coming up. And that word crazy, we're going to talk about a little bit in the podcast. But all
A Backyard Talk Turns Tense
SPEAKER_00 1:52
of this stuff that's happening, I've been managing it pretty well, except for a few moments here and there. And one of those moments was last weekend, Saturday before we went camping. Brenda and I were having our mom and dad coffee time sitting out in the backyard under our big tree. Beautiful, chill morning. And we started talking about how we want to teach our girls about money and about our family's finances. And at some point in the conversation, it started to go sideways. I was trying to explain what I wanted to do, and Brenda said that I cut her off, which I probably did, but I didn't admit it. I just kind of pushed through what I wanted to say, and then she wasn't really listening to me, even though she said she was listening to me. And we got to a point where we didn't call an official timeout, but Brenda kind of did. She said something like, I'm too frustrated to keep talking about this. She stood up, started walking away, and she was just like, Let's just end it for now. And I was like, Yeah, good. I feel like I want to throw this coffee mug across the yard. And that's where I was in that moment. And she was walking away as I was saying it. So I don't know if she even heard that, but we went about our morning for a little bit. I started packing for camping. Maybe 20, 30 minutes after that argument, we walked by each other, and Brenda was like, Hey, can we sit down and talk for a second? And she had a slight grin on her face. And I actually laughed a little bit and was like, Yeah. So it's already a little bit lighter than it was before. But she said something like, We both felt like we weren't listening to each other, and the other person wasn't being understood. And I was like, Yeah, let's just move on. That was something that we can talk about later. And she was totally cool with it. And as we were getting up and going back into packing, I told her, Hey, I just want to let you know that I'm already thinking about work next week and if I'm gonna be able to get everything done. And I just realized that it's a short week, it's a holiday on Monday, and my to-do list, I can just see it in my head, and I think I'm feeling a little more overwhelmed than I realized. And when I said that, she said, okay, that's actually really helpful to know. We talked a little strategy, and I bring this up because I had been carrying that overwhelm with me all morning. And it snuck into that coffee time argument that we had. I think we all do this. It's the weekend, we are with family, but our brain is thinking about what we have coming up in the next week or the next month. Some people call it the Sunday scaries. What projects do we have to do? There's a vacation coming up, school's starting soon. For me, this past weekend, my brain kept asking, How am I going to get it all done? And the problem is that when our brain does this, we aren't present and we have a hard time enjoying the week and enjoying the people that we're with. And if we don't manage our brain, we start to become the grumpy dad that doesn't smile much, doesn't have fun, and in the middle of the weekends, we're sneaking away to try to get some work done, or we're having a nice conversation with our partner under a tree, and it turns into an argument because this underlying overwhelm is running the show.
Catch The Overwhelm Early
SPEAKER_00 5:45
So what do we do about it? And the first thing that we do, if you're a listener to the podcast, you might guess this one is that we catch it. The first thing we have to do is create awareness that our brain is worried, spinning, anxious. For me, I noticed over the last week or two that I had been saying, I've got a crazy month coming up. I mentioned that word crazy before. When we describe our day or our week or our month as crazy or really busy or nuts, those are signs that there might be some overwhelm or anxiety to check in on. And a little bit of overwhelm, a little bit of anxiety, no big deal. But if we're continuously telling ourselves crazy, busy, nuts, our brain's gonna get worked up, our fire inside, our energy is gonna be worked up, and it's gonna be harder to be present and enjoy the day-to-day moments. So that's the first thing you do. You gotta catch yourself. And then the second is you
Map It Out On Paper
SPEAKER_00 6:56
map it out. You gotta get all of the things you need to do, all of the thoughts in your head out onto a piece of paper or type it out on a computer. And I've talked about getting this stuff out of our head and different productivity techniques before. So you can go check out those episodes, episode 56, it's what's on your calendar, or you can check out episode 96, a tool to prioritize your day. I talked about the Eisenhower Matrix. The one that I used most recently as a mind map, I actually posted about it on social. So you can go find me on LinkedIn or Instagram post probably like one or two weeks ago about how I mapped out my September and what I had to do. So sometimes those two steps are enough. You notice it, you map it out, you're feeling clear, you can get after it with focus, with some calm, enjoy your weekend because you know you got everything set up for yourself the following week.
Visualize The Feeling Of Done
SPEAKER_00 7:57
For me, that was not the case. I mapped it all out, I put it on my calendar, but I was still feeling overwhelmed. And I've been reading this book called Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza, and started to apply some of what he was teaching in the book to my next month. His work is all about creating life rather than just reacting to what's in front of us and recreating our past. There's real research behind his work and his methods, but if I were to just break it down, I think I would say his work is all about not focusing on the how, but focusing on the feeling. So for me, I wrote down the how, I put it on my calendar, I know how I'm gonna attack my month, but I was still feeling overwhelmed. My brain was still telling me I don't have enough time, this is gonna be really hard, I'm not gonna get it all done. My body was still feeling anxious about it all. So Dr. Joe would say, don't focus on the how, focus on the feeling. So that's what the third step is gonna be. And the way that we focus on the feeling is that we visualize what we have to do being done. I looked at my calendar and I thought about everything I was gonna accomplish and experience in the next month and a half. Not just what had to happen and the steps to get there, but what it was gonna be like to complete the projects. Seeing myself close my computer down after an awesome day of coaching, picturing myself at the airport with my parents and getting onto the flight for Ireland, picturing landing in Ireland and the meals and the jokes and the conversations. So creating the images of all of these projects experiences completed and feeling what it's gonna feel like when they're completed. Visualizing isn't just about describing the scenes. If you're just gonna imagine what everything looks like, I've heard someone say that's just daydreaming. But visualizing also incorporates the feeling part of it. So I imagine all these things and then I start asking myself, what's the feeling when I wrap up a day of coaching calls? What's the feeling when I finish this podcast, edit it, send it to my podcast producer? That feeling is lighter, it's excited, it's accomplished, there's a little calm there. For the Yosemite trip at the beginning of October, when I was visualizing it, I can picture everything pretty easily, but when I think about how I'm gonna feel when the whole group's together for the first time, I'm gonna feel excited, maybe a little nervous, a lot of love when we're hiking up the mountain for 3,000 feet. How tired am I gonna be? What is it gonna feel like to sweat and to push when we're done with the hike? What's it gonna be like when we're hugging and high fiving? Like those emotions, I start to conjure those up and they're uplifting, they're expansive. And as I'm doing this, it starts to give me more purpose right now. When I was done visualizing, I thought, like, yes, like I'm looking forward to this month. I've got some pretty sweet stuff on the calendar, and I want to show up for everyone. Now, I still have to go execute. You don't just visualize and then lay on the couch and hope it all happens, but I've already noticed that I'm moving through my day with less urgency, and I'm still knocking stuff off my list. This podcast I wasn't supposed to record until tomorrow, so I'm a little bit ahead of the game in some areas.
Mental Rehearsal And Next Steps
SPEAKER_00 12:22
And this third step, this visualizing, that tool can be used in all areas of life. Our brain is a very powerful machine, and if you use it to visualize the correct way, it can really create some amazing things. And there's a bunch of literature on athletes and doing mental rehearsal before their events or their games, and you don't have to just do the positive stuff. When you're visualizing, athletes visualize what might go wrong. And when we're in the moment planning ahead, we can think about how we want to navigate the things that might go wrong. One guy that was training for a marathon, he visualized cramping towards the end of the race. And he noticed that at first, when he thought about cramping, he got kind of pissed, kind of frustrated. He also imagined what he wanted to do. If he started cramping towards the end of the race, he would want to smile, stop, start stretching, and then carry on. That kind of mental rehearsal is going to create the type of experience that you want. I did a visualization last week with a guy that was presenting to some new investors. So, the tool of visualization, you can use it in a bunch of different areas. If you want to try it out, go on to Spotify or go onto YouTube and just search perfect day visualization. And I bet you'll find a five or 10-minute guided practice that you could try out and mess around with it. That's what this podcast is about. That's what I think life is about. Trying out new things, not just staying in your day to day status quo and expecting life to change. We actually have to do something different. That's what I got for you guys today. Hope you have an awesome one, and I'll catch you next time.
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