The Lebanese Monday blues

There is a universal dread that settles in on Sunday evening, a tightening somewhere between the chest and the stomach, an unwillingness to check the time, a low hum of anxiety that has nothing to do with anything that has actually happened yet. Long dismissed as mere complaining, this feeling has a name, a body of research behind it, and a place in psychological literature: the Monday blues.

A measurable phenomenon

Researchers have spent years testing whether the day of the week genuinely shapes mood. An experimental study at Emporia State University found that people tend to be more depressed on Mondays than on Fridays, lending empirical weight to what office workers have grumbled about for generations. The effects extend beyond mood. Research examined by the University of Melbourne, under what has informally been dubbed "Mondayitis," found that heart dysfunction, including chest pain, heart attacks, and abnormal rhythms, is disproportionately likely to occur on Mondays, a pattern researchers group alongside other high-stress triggers like cold weather and major sporting tournaments. Other work has tracked measurable spikes in stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline at the start of the week, with elevated levels persisting even after the workday ends, evidence that the body begins anticipating stress before the mind consciously registers it.

Workplace data reinforces the pattern. A widely cited Gallup poll found that roughly 70 percent of employees describe themselves as disengaged from their jobs, a disengagement that concentrates itself most visibly at the start of the week. A separate survey of more than 2,000 respondents found that 70 percent had experienced Sunday Scaries regardless of whether they were actually happy in their jobs, suggesting the anxiety is less about the work itself than about the abruptness of the transition.

Not every researcher agrees the picture is so stark. A large-scale study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, drawing on hundreds of thousands of interviews, concluded that daily mood is largely flat between Monday and Thursday, and that cultural myths may exaggerate how much the day of the week actually shapes how we feel. What may be happening instead is a "weekend effect", moods genuinely lift on Friday and Saturday, and Monday simply marks the return to baseline, which by contrast feels like a fall.

The Lebanese Monday

The emotional whiplash between Friday night and Monday morning is universal, but it may be especially pronounced here. Lebanese life is culturally built around presence, long Sunday lunches that stretch into evening, impromptu gatherings, a weekend rhythm oriented entirely around family, food, and each other. It is not an exaggeration to say that Lebanese people take leisure seriously; it is one of the country's enduring characteristics, even and especially through hardship. That intensity of living is precisely what makes the return to routine feel so jarring. The contrast the research describes between a "happy weekend day" and "a work day" is amplified when the weekend itself is lived so fully.

We must not forget the particular Monday cruelty of traffic. A weekend spent lingering over dinners that start at 9 p.m. and end well past midnight does not negotiate with an 8 a.m. alarm, and so the average Lebanese Monday begins with a squint at the ceiling, and a private, doomed promise to "sleep earlier next week." That promise rarely survives. Car horns replace birdsong; the quick breakfast you grab is half eaten. In its own chaotic way, it is a very Lebanese kind of poetry, a people who refuse to let the weekend end a moment before it has to.

Layered onto that is a more local reality. Lebanon's Mondays arrive against a backdrop of uncertainty, unstable institutions, and a general sense of provisionality that has defined daily life for years. Where international research points to workplace disengagement and anticipatory stress as drivers of the Monday blues, in Lebanon those same pressures are compounded by broader anxieties about the simple logistics of getting through a week.

Seen this way, the Lebanese Monday blues is a fairly rational response to a lived contrast, a weekend defined by warmth and presence, followed by a week defined by unpredictability. The science suggests the feeling is real, if perhaps not unique to any single day. However, the Lebanese experience of it carries a weight of its own.