Monday stress doesn’t retire when we do
- Giulia Mondaini
- Nov 5
- 5 min read
I’ve never found Mondays particularly stressful.
Over time, I’ve learned to manage my energy more intentionally, and as a freelance journalist, I’ve picked up strategies that work for me. For instance, if I work over the weekend, I try to keep my Mondays lighter, a way to ease back into the week and protect my mental balance. But if I worked in a company or had an office role with fixed hours, that kind of adjustment would be much harder to put into practice.
My interest in how work affects mental health started during the pandemic, when conversations around wellbeing became more urgent and visible. Companies began offering psychological support to employees, and mental health, long treated as a private issue, finally entered the workplace agenda.
Remote work, for instance, made it easier to see just how closely mental health is tied to the way we structure our time. The pandemic didn’t just change where we work, it accelerated a cultural shift.
We started talking much more openly about stress, realising just how many people are affected by it, and how often work is a major cause. For many, a sense of discomfort even begins on Sunday, just thinking about the return to work on Monday, a day often loaded with meetings, deadlines, and expectations of high productivity.
Maybe the stress we associate with Mondays isn’t just about facing a new workweek. Maybe it’s something we’ve internalised over years of repetition, a pattern that’s harder to break than we think.
But how deep does this pattern go? One study tried to find out, and the results were surprising: even after retirement, Monday remains the most stressful day of the week.
A study of over 3,500 adults aged 50+ found that those who felt more anxious on Mondays had 23% higher cortisol (a stress hormone) levels than those who didn’t report a difference in stress among weekdays.
“Feeling anxious on Mondays is correlated with long-term biological stress responses,” says Tarani Chandola from the University of Hong Kong, who led the study. He answered my questions over email, keen to explain the broader implications of the findings.
“The fact that this persisted suggests that the biological consequences of feelings of anxiety on Monday over the life-course do not go away when people retire,” he says.
His team analyzed data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, a long-running national study that, since 2002, has tracked the health, social, and economic wellbeing of adults aged 50 and over in England. Participants were interviewed and completed questionnaires with questions like, “Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?” and answers were rated on a sliding scale from “not anxious at all” to “very anxious”. By examining hair samples, the researchers also measured fluctuations in the participants' levels of cortisol, a hormone released throughout the body in response to stress.
Since cortisol accumulates in hair over time, it provides a cumulative record of stress exposure lasting weeks or even months, making it a reliable indicator of long-term or chronic stress. The team then compared these cortisol levels with reported feelings of anxiety on different days of the week.
Chandola has been studying cortisol responses to work-related stressors for a long time, and it’s well established that our cortisol levels follow a diurnal rhythm. Cortisol levels peak about 30–45 minutes after waking up in what’s called the cortisol awakening response, helping the body prepare for the day’s demands. After this peak, cortisol gradually declines throughout the day, reaching its lowest levels around midnight and during early sleep. While cortisol levels fluctuate significantly throughout each day, hair samples measure cortisol that has accumulated over several weeks or months. Chandola wanted to investigate whether a similar pattern exists in response to weekday compared to weekend stressors – and the results surprised him.
Participants who reported feeling anxious on Mondays had hair samples with cortisol levels 23% higher than those who didn’t report a difference in stress among weekdays. “It is important to remember that stress is not just a feeling or emotion, but has biological and physiological consequences,” says Chandola.
Interestingly, this effect persists beyond work. Even some retirees reported feeling anxious on Mondays and had higher average cortisol levels compared to retirees who felt anxious on other days or not at all.
Chandola thought that retired people would no longer show this pattern of higher cortisol levels and feelings of anxiety on Mondays. “The fact that it persists suggests that the biological consequences of Monday anxiety, built up over the course of a lifetime, don’t simply disappear after retirement,” he says.
This challenges the common belief that "Monday stress" stems solely from workplace pressures, suggesting instead that the stress associated with Mondays is internalised and persistent. In other words, the stress is not just a reaction to immediate job demands but becomes embedded within a person's psychological or emotional state. This means individuals may carry feelings of anxiety or tension related to Mondays even outside of work or after retirement, reflecting deeper patterns of how they process and hold onto stress over time.
In order to understand the study better, I reached out to Christopher Engeland from Pennsylvania State University. He is an expert on how stress, age, gender, and hormones affect immunity, inflammation, and health. He was not involved in the study but still confirms these findings. "If Monday is indeed the most stressful day of the week and if stress on this day is particularly linked to problems in the body’s stress response system, then these findings have important implications for both stress and health research and for the timing of potential interventions,” he says.
The findings are intriguing, Engeland points out, particularly given that the same effects were observed regardless of employment status.
Most stress researchers treat Monday like any other weekday, says Engeland, and findings like these could help better tailor our understanding of high-stress moments throughout the week instead. "Interventions aimed at reducing stress, like mindfulness, meditation, yoga, exercise, expressive writing might work better if they are scheduled for Mondays," says Engeland, or if extra care is taken to not skip or miss these stress-reducing practices on Mondays.
Realising that Monday stress might come from patterns we’ve absorbed over time makes me more mindful about protecting how I start my week. Noticing how I feel, and taking it seriously instead of brushing it off, feels like a small but meaningful way to take care of my well-being. If stress can shape our biology so deeply that it lingers into retirement, then learning to break these cycles becomes more than just a matter of comfort, it's an investment in long-term health. Finding ways to recover from years of long-standing stress might be the first real step toward change. Perhaps reimagining how we begin our weeks could be one of the simplest, yet most powerful, ways to ease the hold that stress has on us.