014. Sunday Routine for A Successful Week & How To Beat The Sunday Scaries

Lifestyle

Oct 1

How would a CEO combat the Sunday scaries?

Let's talk about helpful tips to tackle anxiety and take back your Sundays using your CEO mindset. Whether you're feeling overwhelmed by work, struggling with burnout, or simply dreading the week ahead, use these tips to overcome stress and set your week up for success.

In today's episode, we cover the following:

Why do we have the Sunday scaries (2:45)

Approaching Sundays with a CEO mindset (6:00)

Ideas for a Sunday routine (8:46)

Creating a fight or flight OR rest list (16:48)

What if this is chronic? (20:09)

Hot Stock Tip: CBD tincture (23:13)

Transcripts

Amber F. (00:05)
Hey, Rich Girls, welcome back to the Old Money podcast. Happy Sunday. It's your host, Amber Frankhuizen. I'm coming at you with a bonus episode, a little amuse-bouche, if you will, a little taste something to wet your appetite, but also something to really get you through the day if you're like me and you're suffering from The Sunday scaries. I want to share one major tip that's been really helping me deal with my anxiety, and also just walk you through a menu of different options where you can pick what feels best for you to combat the Sunday scaries. So I hope that at the end of this podcast episode, you're feeling a lot better, a lot more confident, and a lot less anxious. Now it's fall, it's back to school, it's football season. And what I'm finding, because my man is addicted to football, so it is on Thursday, Mondays, Sundays, and sometimes Saturdays if the college games are good, that Sundays are such a fun day for me personally because I get to lean into my self-care. I get to work on my projects. I get to work. I get to spend time at home. I'm such a homebody.

Amber F. (01:09)
But also, when Justin's occupied watching football, it leaves me a lot of time to think. And I get really, really restless, especially on a day where I'm supposed to be resting. And I feel this itch to work or produce or consume, and I get really, really uncomfortable. So recently, since football season has started actually, my anxiety on Sundays has gone through the roof. Now, I've actually gotten this question a few times on social recently because there's a lot of new listeners here that I might not personally know. And they ask what I've done for work or what I do now. And I used to work in a private real estate development company in San Diego. And I was always stressed. I was in a constant state of stress. It was a very high pressure job. It was very visible. I was also very young and really trying to navigate not just the work, but the politicking and the investors and the other teams. It was just a lot for me. And that's when probably my anxiety was at its worst. But now I own my own company and I still feel anxiety. What is that about?

Amber F. (02:10)
And I realize in myself that I've really contributed to having a lot of the same thought patterns about my need to be always working and always on that have contributed to me continuing to feel this anxiety. But not only that, nobody's immune from Sunday scaries. Even if you work for yourself or you work for somebody else or you don't work at all, it's very normal to at the end of a vacation or a couple of days off to get this uncomfortable feeling about anticipating what's to come. Now, Sunday scaries can manifest in a lot of different ways. You could, for example, feel a sense of dread or doom. You could feel angry. Do you get hot in your body? Are you resentful of the work? Do you feel controlled? Actually, just as an aside, that's how I get. I get hot and itchy and almost angry in a way that my schedule will be so packed that I won't have any time for myself. I'm either on calls with clients and I'm nervous about them for some reason. And that's so stupid because I have the best clients in the whole world that I always have great conversations with.

Amber F. (03:12)
But I don't know, I get anxious and strange. But anyway, those are the emotional feelings, but they can also manifest as physical symptoms in your body. You could have an upset stomach, a headache. You could feel restless, irritable. You could not sleep. That's what I'm going through right now. And there's so many things that causes these Sunday scaries. It could be a sign of overwork or burnout. It could be that you work in a toxic work environment, and you're not looking forward to dealing with a boss that's always cutting you down Monday through Friday, right? You might be feeling in over your head. Do you feel overwhelmed or unprepared? And that really could be for somebody working or somebody who's a stay at home mom, for goodness sakes. Are there so many things that you feel like you have to get done, but you just don't have enough time? That's a feeling I think a lot of us can relate to. And it also could really deal with just the amount of free time or free space that we have in our brain. So we all know being on TikTok late at night is not good for us.

Amber F. (04:14)
It's blue light, it disrupts our sleep, and it's a lot of dopamine and a lot of activity for our brain to take in when we're supposed to be winding down. But it might not be your fault that you're addicted to TikTok at night before you go to sleep. Because what's been studied now is that a lot of people are almost rebelling against being available all day and having so many tasks that they need to get done that when they finally get to bed and they finally have their own time with their own space with no one else that they have to answer to, they want to indulge. And indulging in a passive activity that's entertaining, that's keeping us engaged like TikTok is a rebellion against having the rest of your day be scheduled out. And so we're seeing a lot more people have problems sleeping at night. I read a great article about this recently, but we all have a ton of demands and schedules and things that are weighing on us, and it's in our best interest to shake it off. And the reason this fits into the old money podcast or conversation in general is because it's about living well.

Amber F. (05:16)
And that means living well on Sunday, that's one-seventh of your life a whole day. And you want to spend it anxious? Nobody does. So we want to take control of that day acutely and make sure that we are feeling good on Sundays. We are feeling good with our own time. We want to be living well and making the most of our Sundays so that we are prepared for the week, but also enjoying our time. And secondly, I want to, if this is something that's chronic for you, help you identify if it's you, if it's the environment, and what to do to fix it because nobody should be having a Sunday that's ruined by anxiety every single week. And that might take changing your situation internally or externally. So we're going to explore that today. Let's jump right into it. This is my highest level of self that's taking care of myself on Sunday. And what I mean by that is it's the most fully expressed CEO version of Amber. Because if I mean to become the most badass CEO and leader of my team, I need to embody those qualities, those habits, those thought patterns now because I can recognize that it's highly unlikely, let alone impossible, for me to become the best version of myself, the best leader of myself if I'm continuing to allow myself to be in these habits that don't serve me.

Amber F. (06:33)
And the habit is the anxiety. So I want to try to take care of that. Now, I want to just say, I'm not a doctor. I know that generalized anxiety disorder and just overall anxiety can be treated with a mental health professional. I'm talking more so about acute Sunday scaries that are related to the week ahead. And so with that, the CEO version of Amber looks at Sunday scary to Amber and says, What do we need to do, babe, to fix this to make you feel good? And sometimes, and I don't know if you can relate, I feel like there's too many things to deal with right now. Like, oh, my God, I have got finances, health, fitness, relationships, all these different things that are competing for my attention. And while all of these different categories of your life are important, they're not all urgent. And one of the things that I like to put into practice is this wheel of life thinking. This is something that I got from Tony Robbins at Unleash the Power Within, which I went to in Dallas a few years ago. Yes, I walked on the Coles, I did the whole thing.

Amber F. (07:28)
And the Tony Robbins wheel of life looks at all these different categories as if they were a wheel. Actually, if you go online and you google Tony Robbins's Wheel of Life, you can take a quiz where it will give you a wheel. But essentially, this wheel is these categories. And if you had, let's say, like concentric circles, 10 concentric circles, and then you split up these circles into eight different categories. You drew four lines. You have eight pieces of pie. Now you have these circles in there. And what you would do is you would basically color in a rating from between zero and 10 about how you feel about these different categories. So some of the categories are career, health, love and romance, family. You have personal growth, environment, recreation. So all of these different categories. And maybe I'm feeling really shit about careers, so I put a two out of 10. But I feel pretty good about health, so I'm going to put that as a seven out of 10. And what you notice is that a wheel doesn't really spin very well unless all of the different categories are balanced so that you're at about, let's call it a five or a seven or an eight or whatever it might be, so that your wheel can roll, so your life can roll because you have to tend to all of these categories and make sure that you're healthy, but you also have balance with your relationships and also with your work in order for things to flow so you can get some momentum.

Amber F. (08:46)
So as opposed to figuring out how to fix all of these things at once, you look at the categories that are the lowest and we're going to find out some ways to take action items on them. So, for example, if health or physical body is something that you want to improve on, my menu on a Sunday. And again, I say it's a menu because I don't like a routine. I don't do the same thing every Sunday. I have these options and these different ideas that I can pull from. But some of the things that I do are I restock my supplements. I do a mini meal prep. I have at least some hard boiled eggs in the fridge. For us, we get meal deliveries. I've talked about this before with Cook Unity. I'll put the link in the show notes. It's like having a personal chef deliver food to your house every Sunday. And if it's a week, we're not doing it, I'll do an Instacart order. But I also book my workouts for the week. So I get into my schedule. I go into the Orange Theory app or whatever, and I book where I'm going to work out, my pilates class, whatever needs to happen, it gets scheduled.

Amber F. (09:38)
And then the workout or the body that I do on this day is going to be very gentle. So stretching. I'll get in the Normatec boots in our house. I'll maybe go to the sauna. Maybe I'll do a yoga session very gentle. This is not a day where I'm doing a lot of output or high energy intensity. I'm letting my body rest to this day. So for me, just pushing the car on the track, as I like to say, or touching this touch point on the wheel of my life makes me feel like I've done something to contribute to improving that area of my life. In my relationship area, I make sure that I sync my calendar with my partner. So Justin and I, we share a car, for example, we're a one car household. That's one of our old money mentality things. We don't want to spend extra money when we both basically work from home all the time. So we have one car. We make sure that we sync. So I know when Justin's workouts are if I have a client meeting and we need to adjust or we need to make sure we have fun plans on the horizon.

Amber F. (10:33)
All of those things. We just take five minutes to sync on that makes us feel really connected and close and aligned. And it also helps avoid any conflicts that could come up later on down the line because we didn't communicate early enough. The other thing is work. That's a big one. So probably your Sunday scaries have something to do with work. So I don't recommend working all day on Sunday, but I definitely recommend blocking out your schedule. I usually do it for about two weeks at a time. So when I have my schedule for the coming week, I'll put some additional blocks in my calendar for work blocks or projects that I want to execute on. Then the following week, I proactively block off at least a day for deep work for myself. Then I also look at what my top three to five things are going to be for Monday. This is the Ivy Lee method, and it's identifying the top three to five goals, outcomes, not tasks, but outcomes that you're going to get done on Monday. And the reason I like doing this on Friday or Sunday night is because sometimes Monday morning rolls around, and I'm already reeling still from having my Sunday scaries, and it takes me a long time to get motivated and started, and it makes me feel like I start off on a slower foot.

Amber F. (11:44)
So having my three to five things on Monday, I'm knocking those out before I even go into my office with my team. So we have a team meeting that starts at 10 o'clock in the morning on Monday. I've already gotten my three hardest things done Monday before I get into the office because I've defined them and I can take action on them right away. The other thing that I do is I look at my schedule. This is the CEO tip for you. And I plan out my outfits for the whole week. I do not do a plan for outfit for one day. I look at where I need to be, where I need to go, and I literally just group things on hangers in a special place in my closet where I can just pick each day out and it's done. By the way, the whole style situation, I have got the formula it is coming to you ASAP because I don't think I've dressed better recently with less effort. It's been a big game-changer for me. I finally got my pieces, so I'm excited to share that with you. Anyway, and then also on home, I'm getting my chores done as best as possible in the morning, and I'm also scheduling things in my calendar.

Amber F. (12:45)
Now, I know some of you are in the baby phase, the toddler phase, and things like laundry are constantly ongoing. Number one, I have major sympathy for you. Number two, this is the season. It will not always be this way. And I say that also because I'm not a parent, so I have a lot of extra awareness around when I'm talking to women who have children because I just don't know what that's like yet. But I do know things about what it's like to work in a hyper competitive work environment. I do know what it's like to work 100 hours a week trying to start a business and get it off the ground. I've been there, and it can be really uncomfortable. But the thing that helps me is taking control of my time and allowing myself to be unapologetic about my rest time on Sundays specifically, but also throughout the rest of the week. So really getting ahead of that and acting proactively versus feeling burnt out and then having to cancel things will help you feel a semblance of control, which often the feelings of feeling out of control is what can cause Sunday scary.

Amber F. (13:44)
So taking control of yourself, of your life, of your schedule hopefully can help combat that. Now, I haven't even gotten to my big major thing yet that has changed the game for me, but I wanted to drop a couple more items in your self-care menu. First of all, the wind-down ritual at the end of the day, some journaling, some tea, some Shilajit, some adrenal tonic, all that stuff. I'm doing some stretching on the yoga mat. I already told you guys that we have the Normatec boots at home, such a game-changer and such a good gift for your guy if he's into fitness or anything like that. I got these are Justin for Christmas last year, and I basically got them for myself because the Normatec compression boots are so incredible for muscle recovery, lymphatic drainage, just feeling better, especially after you work out. If you have delayed on set muscle soreness, it is a game changer. But honestly, I'm obsessed with them. They're so soothing and therapeutic. Anyway, switching gears. One of the things I want to say too, as it relates to physical activity, I'm not a big sit down, be quiet, breath work person when I'm anxious.

Amber F. (14:43)
When I'm anxious, I have to move it out of my body. I have all these big emotions, and I need to get these emotions in motion and shake them out. So if I'm feeling anxious, I will literally dance around in my room. I will shake my body out very hard until I feel like that anxiety is gone. And I'm paying a lot of attention to my body and how I feel with this anxiety, and I get very tense and tight. I also do a lot of walking. I don't know if you have a dog or not, but I think that dogs are the key to Sunday scaries because they're so fucking sweet and they force you to go on big walks. I have a very athletic dog that I'm dragging around the neighborhood, but I still drag her around that neighborhood and I walk and I talk to myself, I journal it out. When I am feeling stuck in my own stuff, I like to go serve or take care of others. And even if it's my dog, it makes me feel a lot better about my situation. And sometimes when I'm on these walks, I like to talk to my future self.

Amber F. (15:41)
And I'm not talking about coastal grandma, Amber, who's 85 years old, it's going to be okay. I literally talk to the Friday version of myself. If it's Sunday night and I'm feeling stressed, I will walk through my calendar in my head as Friday me and tell me that it's going to go fine. And I basically visualize everything that I'm worried about going really well. And one of the things I worry about is feeling exhausted or feeling overwhelmed and identifying that like, Hey, you might think now that you feel overwhelmed on Monday after work, but if you take care of yourself now and you have control of your day and you have momentum going in, you will feel less overwhelmed on Monday. And by Friday, this is how things are going to look for you. On Thursday, that really big meeting, let's script it. Let's walk through some of the things you're going to talk about. I literally have these crazy conversations with future me that just lives five days in the future, and it really helps me calm down. However, the thing, this is the thing you all. This is the thing that has been changing my game on the anxiety because we've talked about I have really high cortisol.

Amber F. (16:48)
And cortisol is the... Not serotonin, the hormone, sorry, that gets released in your body when you're stressed because you're in a state of fight or flight. We've talked about the nervous system before in financial fight or flight. But when you're in fight or flight, your body is ready to respond to anything. And I recognize now I am in a state of fight or flight because I'm afraid of my phone ringing or I'm afraid of getting a challenging Slack or text or a problem that I have to solve because it feels like a lot. And so what I've done on nearly a daily basis is I've taken a notebook, an actual notebook and a pen, and I've written two columns. So I draw a line down the middle of the page, and I have two columns. One of them says fight or flight, and then one of them says rest. And I go through not just the things that are on my mind, but the list of clients that I have, the list of open projects that we have, and I will put them every single thing I can think of, in one of the two categories, either fight or flight, meaning this thing is stressing me the fuck out and it's making me have a fight or flight response, or rest.

Amber F. (17:53)
And that thing is okay right now. It's the clients taken care of, the projects in motion, the things have been delegated, whatever it is, if it's in a state of rest, even things like my relationship with Justin or our dog or our rent is paid or the bills are done or I took care of my money date this month, anything that can go in the rest category out of this wheel of life or projects for work, whatever it might be, the rest list usually is pretty long if you let yourself think about all the things that you can be at rest about. Then the trick is for me on this fight or flight side is that everything that's on there, I'm allowing myself to just get into a state of rest about it once per day. So, for example, if I have an outstanding issue with a vendor and we're negotiating something back and forth, what's going to get me into state of rest today is to make sure that I do my part by sending the email or following up or attempting resolution again or whatever it is that I have to do that day in order to move the needle forward.

Amber F. (18:50)
Now, I'm not in any conflicts with any vendors, so this is just a bad example. But maybe somebody is asking you for a refund and you're working through that. Well, what can you do one thing per day that will allow you to move that thing into the rest category? Even if it's a conflict with a friend or conflict with a family member, it can be in your fight or flight column and you can choose to move it to your rest column without doing anything about it. So not everything has to be actioned on. If it's on your mind and it's bugging you and it's something that's making you feel anxious or stressed, acknowledge it and then decide to move it to that rest column. I will physically cross things out of the fight or flight list, and then I move them over to that rest side so that at the end of the day, even if I'm just acknowledging the thing, I'm moving things actively in my brain from fight or flight to rest. And it really helps me calm down because I've put everything out on paper. I love a second brain, you know that.

Amber F. (19:45)
And then it's not my problem. It's out of my hands. Jesus, take the wheel. I don't need to be stressed about it anymore. So with those being my top menu items for self-care on a Sunday of combating the Sunday scaries and all the different things that you could do to really treat yourself like the CEO of your life that you are, I'll leave you with one last thought, which is what to do when this is a chronic issue of Sunday scaries. Number one, I've mentioned this before, but if you are experiencing anxiety all the time, you need to see a doctor, a health care professional, a therapist, a psychologist, anything like that because we're not meant to go through life on our own, and it's totally okay to get help and reach out to people. And the reason I say that is the number one thing to do is because what I see a lot of online is people saying, I have Sunday scaries, my work culture is super toxic, and I don't know if I should keep working there. And people say, get a new job. But here's the thing. If you trade your pain, you decide that what you have right now is so toxic that you need to find something else without healing or working on your inner circumstances, it may be very likely that you repeat the same choices or have the same experiences whether your environment changes or not.

Amber F. (20:59)
And that's what I want to save you from, this trading your pain. You think something else is going to be good for you, but your mindset, your circumstances internally, they haven't adjusted. And like I always say, you don't get to change the circumstances and then become the person that you dream of. You have to be the person you dream of so that your circumstances will change. It's not the other way around. And the reason that we know this is because of the things that we repeat in our lives when we don't heal them. For example, if you have family trauma when you're young and you become accustomed to that, you're familiar with it, your brain likes familiarity. So even if it's not great for you, if it's familiar, your brain will say, Let's stay here because it's safe. Or maybe you're the type of person who dates the same type of partner all the time. You're like, Oh, my gosh, it's just like the last guy. It's just like the last girl I dated. And it's because you're attracting the same thing over and over again. So you might think that getting into a new relationship will change the dynamic, and it will.

Amber F. (21:57)
But if the dynamic within you hasn't changed, it's something that we need to look at first because we're the common denominator in all of our problems. So when I say working on yourself now, you're here listening to this podcast implementing some of these habits and tips with me. I'm doing this along with you. And I'm always striving to improve myself so that I can have a better quality of life. I can have more relaxing Sundays with teas and scones and good books to dive into and no Sunday scaries. But the reality is life is hard and we have to navigate it together. So as we talk about the bigger picture, is this a season or is this chronic? Is your big question to journal on? And if it's chronic, what about it is chronic? Is it chronic in the way that I'm responding to things? Is it chronic in the way that other people are showing up for me in my life? Because if we want the circumstances to change, we can really control our own circumstances more than we can control anything else. And I want to tell you from living it myself that when you become the person you want to be, everything around you changes.

Amber F. (22:58)
And so that, for me, starts with habits. It starts with starting the week off in a really positive, strong place. And it really does mean not having as much anxiety as I have. I know this is an Amuse-Bouche, so I'm not supposed to give you a stalk tip, but I'm going to tell you my stalk tip and the thing that has been helping me as well. And I'm not drinking a ton right now. By the way, don't drink yourself too numbness on Sunday. You're going to pay for it on Monday. And I love a kombucha. I love a sparkling water and a glass of... Or a wine glass, rather, so that it feels elevated. But here's my real tip is that I have been taking CBD, like Tinksher, a 30:1 ratio. So 30 points or 30 parts CBD to one part THC. So it has no psychoactive effects. I don't feel anything. My gosh, you guys. It's been such a game-changer for my anxiety and just my overall inflammation. My face has really gone down in size. It's crazy. So I'm addicted to it. I'm taking a drop or two a day. And the one that I'm using is by Papa and Barcley.

Amber F. (24:01)
It's super affordable. I got it at a local dispensary. It made a huge difference for me. And just doing something ritualistic as well to gently take control of that anxiety. So I'm wishing you a really happy Sunday, a productive Sunday, a productive week ahead and a reminder that the habits that we implement today, the ways that we take care of our self, our mindset, our bodies, our environments, internal or external, that's what creates the wealthy life that we're after. That's what creates the feelings of richness that we're after, that good life, girl. So enjoy your Sunday, and I will talk to you on the next episode. Bye-bye. Feeling rich? I hope so. Thank you for joining me on this episode of Old Money. If you have questions you want answered, email me at oldmoneypodcast@gmail. Com or hit us up on social. We are at Old Money Podcast and I am at your service. If this episode spoke to you, inspired you, helped you, if you took a single note, it would mean the world to me if you could please just take a minute to write and review the podcast. And if you're not doing so already, subscribe.

Amber F. (25:07)
And if you have friends who like getting rich, please share this episode with them, even if it's just on your Instagram story. And I'd love you more than Jeff Bezos loves Amazon Prime. Thank you so much and I will talk to you on the next episode. Remember, I'm not your lawyer, I'm not your tax professional, and I'm not your financial advisor. The content presented in this podcast is intended to entertain, educate, inspire, and support listeners and their personal and professional development and does not constitute business, financial, or legal advice. In addition to that, this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services.

Resources

Get clear on your priorities: Tony Robbins' Wheel of Life

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The content presented in this podcast is intended to entertain, educate, inspire and support listeners in their personal and professional development and does not constitute business, financial, or legal advice. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services for which individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services related to the episode.

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