How do you deal with the Sunday blues?

Plenty of singers — from The Mamas and The Papas with "Monday, Monday" to The Bangles with "Manic Monday" — have crooned about the challenges of the first day of the workweek.

You drag into the office, a little sleepy from staying up too late with friends on Friday night. Maybe you're still thinking about the projects you did around the house on Saturday, or a talk you heard (or possibly slept through) in church on Sunday. It takes awhile to slide back into "work mode" and fully engage your brain so you can handle the tasks at hand.

But have you ever had the stress of Monday seep into Sunday?

According to an article last year in the Guardian, a study by Mind, a British mental health charity, found that more than 26 percent of employees said "they felt dread and apprehension the day before they were due to go back to work after a day or weekend off."

The Guardian article continued: "The Sunday blues can be seen as a snapshot of the pressures people are under in the economic climate, says the charity, which commissioned the survey as part of a campaign designed to persuade employers to improve working environments and for employees to 'reclaim their lunch breaks'."

I confess that I have occasionally suffered a case of the Sunday blues.

For example, when the Deseret News was still an afternoon paper, I was the associate business editor. I had to get up before 5 a.m. every day so I could get to work on time. On Sundays, the knowledge of that early wake-up looming ahead used to really stress me out. Sometimes I had trouble sleeping Sunday night, because I was so worried about snoozing through that early Monday alarm.

On a positive note, that meant I was always so tired by Monday afternoon that I never had trouble getting to sleep the rest of the week!

However, my problems were minor compared to those of some people quoted in the Guardian article. One woman who responded to the survey said, "I was a City headhunter and my employer was horrendous. Sunday nights were a nightmare; I used to be physically sick sometimes and have panic attacks on the train to work on Monday morning."

I asked people on my Facebook journalist page if they ever had the Sunday blues.

One person, Laura, wrote that she always did. To deal with it, she would first try to ignore it, which only worked half of the time. If it didn't work, she wrote, she would try to engross herself in something that made her forget everything else in life.