Why your Sunday dread matters

The Simplicity Protocol Issue 2

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For the first time in years, the Sunday scaries came back.

The mild form: hoping the internet would go down so I wouldn't have to work Monday. Wishing for some existential threat to intervene and rescue me from the morning ahead.

By Sunday night, I had a knot in my stomach. Tightness in my throat. A crankiness that settled in and didn't lift until Tuesday.

I'd taken on the client opportunistically. Good money. Work I knew I could do. And… early morning leadership calls that fell right when I'd normally be walking Pierce to school.

Here’s the kicker: I'm trained to recognize these patterns. I help other people navigate this exact territory. But I still fell into it. We all get in our own way sometimes.

I tried to optimize it away.

Better morning routines. Earlier sleep on Sundays. I enrolled Mike in the plan to handle Pierce's morning so I could be ready for 7:30 am calls. All the productivity hacks were simply Band-Aids on a festering wound.

My body knew in January. My brain didn't admit it until March.

That's when my quarterly planning process caught what I'd been ignoring. I'd stopped speaking up in leadership meetings. Stopped asking questions. Stopped reinforcing priorities. Just quiet. Withdrawn. 

This is my not-self pattern. An old one from earlier environments. If I'm checked out in a team meeting, something's wrong.

The concept is universal even if the specific pattern isn't: when you're acting out of character, that's an important signal.

By April, I'd stopped billing the client. I didn't even want the money anymore. That's how misaligned the work had become. By May, I had fully offboarded.

The math: I walked away from $10,000 extra a month.

The revelation: I’d rather have the time and peace. 

Sunday dread was my body disagreeing with Monday through Friday before I had to live it.

The catastrophizing was clarity trying to break through.

Here’s what I eliminated: 

• The client
• Any future collaboration where I can't fully express my boundaries
• The fear of running out of money
• The belief I needed more money to be happy
• Saying yes when I want to say no or maybe

For the second half of that year, I declined everything that wasn't my core business. Every opportunity. Every side quest. No, but thank you for thinking of me.

Try this experiment this week:

Set a timer for 20 minutes. Pull up your calendar for the week ahead.

Go below the neck. Put your attention in your heart, your gut. Not your brain's logical assessment.

Reflect: If you had full omnipotence and authority, which meetings would you delete immediately? Which commitments would you cancel?

Apply Derek Sivers’ "Hell yes or no" rule for this. Your heart and gut know the answer before your brain can rationalize it.

Whatever you wanted to delete first is the data. That's your body flagging what’s misaligned.

Cancel it, decline it, or just quietly stop doing it this week.

Sometimes the insight alone can save you months of optimizing the wrong problem.

This connects to my article on Body Wisdom as Business Data if you want to go deeper.

With aloha,
Marissa

P.S. What are you noticing in your own Sunday evenings? Hit reply. I read everything.

P.P.S. Notice the pattern? Every week I'm going to ask you to eliminate something. The Simplicity Protocol is about doing less of what depletes you.