It is one of the most repeated sentences about work, and it turns out it’s not true. Here’s what the research says.

Most people would call this normal. Everyone hates Mondays. That’s life. It’s said so often it sounds like a fact about the calendar.

Researchers at Stony Brook University and Gallup tracked the daily mood of about 340,000 Americans. Monday scores came out the same as Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Monday itself was not worse.

Source: Stone, Schneider and Harter (2012), The Journal of Positive Psychology, 7(4).

But when asked to look back, people remembered Monday as worse than it had been.

Lead researcher Arthur Stone: “Despite our global beliefs about lousy Mondays, we conclude that this belief should be abandoned.”

So Monday is not the problem. The belief about Monday is the problem.

Source: Stone, Schneider and Harter (2012), The Journal of Positive Psychology, 7(4).

The body keeps the belief, even after the job is gone. The “Mondays suck” belief carries on long after people are done working on Mondays.

In 2025, a University of Hong Kong team followed 3,511 adults aged 50 and over. People who felt anxious on a Monday had 23 percent higher cortisol two months later.

Retired people showed the same pattern as people still working.

Professor Tarani Chandola called Mondays a cultural “stress amplifier.”

Source: Chandola, Ling and Rouxel (2025), Journal of Affective Disorders, 389.

On an anonymous forum, a user asked: Do Sunday scaries ever go away? In their mind 1.6m was enough to retire. 36 years old, and already worn down.

Research would answer: no, they don’t. Because they were never actually the problem.

So if Mondays aren’t the problem, why does this belief still exist? Three things keep it locked in place.

The first is existence & longevity bias.

Psychologists Scott Eidelman and Christian Crandall found that people judge things as better and more right simply because they exist, and the longer something has been around, the more right it seems.

Later research found that a motivation to seek change removes that effect.

Source: Eidelman, Crandall and Pattershall (2009), Journal

💜 Abi