For most people, the Sunday reset is an essential part of their weekly routine. It is marked for catching up on lost sleep, meal prepping, and lining up work outfits, with ideally enough time left for a hair mask and a long shower. One goes to bed feeling organised, triumphant and ready to take on the week. Then Wednesday arrives and it all goes south.
For Mumbai-based marketing manager Avya Sharma, Sundays would come with dread about the week ahead. Over the last three months, she has tried to change that by creating a routine that helps her feel more prepared. She meditates as soon as she wakes up, spends about 20 to 30 minutes resetting her room and laying out work clothes, prepares snacks for the week and fits in a longer self-care routine.
“Monday morning usually goes pretty well because I’m starting fresh and I have a little checklist in my head that I can just start ticking off,” she says. By mid-week, however, something shifts. “I definitely notice a drop in energy, especially mentally.” This mid-week slump is familiar enough to all of us. But, if your carefully planned week is beginning to unravel midway, is it even worth all the effort on Sunday?
Saket Agarwal, co-founder of Bengaluru-based wellness platform Noww Club, highlights the gaps: “We treat the entire week as one thing that needs to be reset on Sunday. But recovery, planning and emotional regulation are three different systems, and need attention at different points.” He describes weekly planning as something usually created by “the calmest, most optimistic version of you on Sunday evening, and then handed to a more tired and reactive version of you to execute a few days later.” Anyone who has scheduled five workouts, home-cooked dinners and several early nights while feeling particularly motivated on a Sunday will recognise the problem.
NCR-based psychologist Rachna Khanna Singh says the Sunday reset can also become another extension of the productivity culture. Instead of allowing rest to be valuable on its own, we begin to feel that we have to earn it by finishing the planning, ticking off the self-care checklist and managing household chores. It means Sundays can be devoid of rest in its true sense.
Meal prep and sleep
Food is usually one of the first things to go awry when the week gets busy, which explains why Sunday meal prep sounds so sensible. The problem is when it turns into a chore. “Resetting has become a competitive sport,” says Delhi-based nutritionist and gut health expert, Gargi Sareen. “Three proteins, two grains, stacking containers, and colour-coded labels for them look impressive on Instagram, but it’s basically a second job you’ve assigned yourself on your day off.”
Instead, she says, spending ten minutes, twice a week is enough. Wash some greens, cook rice, millet or oats, and boil or marinate a protein. Instead of preparing complete meals, make a few things that can be assembled differently depending on the day. “A prepped component like cooked rajma, roasted veggies, or a marinated protein can turn into four completely different meals.” It also accounts for something Sunday planning rarely does: you may simply not want the Thursday lunch that you bookmarked.
Sharma has found that making a few snacks works better for her than attempting anything elaborate. She keeps roasted makhana, peanuts and chana ready because stress can masquerade as hunger on a busy workday . “There are so many triggers during the day, whether it’s stress, boredom, wanting something comforting after a long call or just seeing someone else order something. Sometimes you’re not even eating because you’re hungry, you’re eating because you need a break,” she says.
Also, lost sleep can’t be ‘caught up’ on the weekend. A long Sunday lie-in may feel like recovery, but sleep actually works better when it is not wildly different from one day to the next. Sleep researchers also recommend reasonably consistent bed and wake times.
It doesn’t mean that you need to turn bedtime into another rigid rule. Mumbai-based Ruchi Khanna, co-founder of the wellness festival Human Upgrade Fest says, “Life takes over sometimes, and that’s fine, but we should prioritise consistency as that helps us to be more functional. The time between 10pm and 2am is very important for the regulation of your circadian rhythm. It allows you to wake up fresh because one gets the deepest sleep during this time.”
The other trap is the coffee break that gets more frequent in the second half of a hectic day or the week. Khanna cautions against leaning increasingly on caffeine when exhaustion builds because it can feed into poorer sleep and add to the need for another pick-me-up the following day.
Make Wednesday easier
Sharma says the biggest improvement to her week came when she stopped following her Sunday plan to the T. “Not every day has to be as structured as I planned it on Sunday. I can move a few things around, take it a bit easier mid-week, have a longer shower, or just give myself some time to do nothing,” she says. Now, she deliberately takes a rest day from exercise around the middle of the week, because that is when she knows the crash is most likely to arrive.
Agarwal notes instead of one grand weekly recovery ritual, a short daily check-in to take stock of what is feeling depleted is more useful. Singh calls these moments “pockets of purposelessness”. Ten minutes drinking coffee without scrolling, listening to music without answering messages at the same time, or going for a walk that has not been converted into a phone call. “We are so accustomed to multi-tasking that even leisure can become productive,” she says. “Sometimes the most restorative thing we can do is allow one experience to be enough.”
This is the part of the Sunday reset that needs rethinking. The week is planned as though the person who wakes up on Monday will have exactly the same energy on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Then we are taken aback when a bad night’s sleep, an unexpected work call or a tough day knocks everything sideways. Sharma says, “Once one thing goes off, there’s a tendency to think, ‘Okay, this day is already gone,’ and then give up on the rest of the routine too.” Now she moves things around instead.
Agarwal says, “Recovery has to be distributed through the week to actually support us through it.” Perhaps a reset doesn’t have to be assigned to one day after all.
Anushka Patodia is an independent journalist from Mumbai.