Sunday You is delulu (and cannot be trusted)
Why your best plans fall apart by Wednesday, and what to do about it
I’m writing this from a hotel room in Santa Marta, Colombia after 4 spectacular days of Carnival in Barranquilla last weekend.
And somewhere between the last night of carnival and checking into this hotel, I made the most spectacular plans for this week:
Write from my stunning hotel room, inspired by the view of the Caribbean sea.
Gym every morning.
Eat well.
Catch-up on work calls and emails.
Research for my upcoming newsletters.
Batch my podcast’s episodes production.
Because the party is over and I finally have a nice quiet room and a good wifi connection, so obviously THIS was going to be the week I got on top of EVERYTHING.
You know how this ends...right?
I’ve done maybe 20% of that list and I’m not really sure what happened to the other 80%.
So why am I telling you this? Because you probably do the same thing, just with different scenery.
Maybe yours is Sunday evening, planning a beautiful week that falls apart by Wednesday.
Maybe it’s the 1st of January, buying a gym membership and a juicer and genuinely believing you’ll actually use both.
Maybe it’s the first Monday back from holiday, convinced you’ll keep that rested, relaxed energy going (narrator: they did not keep that energy going).
Same move every time.
You feel calm, rested, optimistic, and you make plans from that place.
Then real life shows up and the person who actually has to execute those plans is tired, stressed, and one minor inconvenience away from a meltdown.
I’ve started calling these two people Sunday You and Wednesday You.
You know Sunday You, right?
That’s the version of you that meal-preps in matching containers, sets a 6am alarm with genuine optimism, and goes to bed at 10pm because they “listen to their body.”
Sunday You is full of energy and has a morning routine that involves sunlight and gratitude and probably a smoothie with something green in it.
Sunday You is, and I say this with love, totally made up.
Wednesday You is the one actually reading this right now. Wednesday You ordered Uber Eats again, has 999 unread messages they're pretending don't exist, and has a gym bag that’s been packed since Monday and hasn’t left the floor.
Wednesday You said “I’ll just have one” and didn’t, said “I’ll go tomorrow” and won’t, and is currently toggling between this newsletter and their phone.
Wednesday You has a quiet but persistent sense that everyone else is somehow managing this whole “being a functioning adult” thing better than you.
(They’re not, by the way. They’re all ordering takeaway and ignoring the gym bag too. They’re just not posting about it.)
There’s actually research on this.
A behavioural economist called George Loewenstein studied something called the hot-cold empathy gap, and the finding is almost comically simple: when you’re in a calm, rested state, you are genuinely incapable of predicting how you’ll behave when you’re stressed, tired, or emotionally spent (reference).
Not “bad at predicting.” Incapable.
Your brain literally does not have access to that information.
Which means every plan you’ve ever made from a place of calm was written by someone who has absolutely no idea what your actual life feels like when things get hard.
Sunday You is delulu. And they cannot be trusted.
Or maybe your Sundays aren’t even the optimistic kind.
Maybe yours come with the “Sunday Scaries” instead.
Because Sunday You isn’t just making plans out of hope. They’re making plans to survive. They’re thinking “if I can just get this week right, if I can just be disciplined enough, I’ll feel better.”
And when Wednesday You inevitably can’t keep up with that, it doesn’t just feel like a skipped gym session. It feels like proof that you can’t even hold yourself together.
But it’s not proof of anything, except that you were designing your life for the wrong person.
The problem was never that you’re not trying hard enough or not doing enough or that something is wrong with you. The problem is that Sunday You keeps writing cheques that Wednesday You can’t cash.
And Wednesday You is dealing with quite a lot, actually.
They’re tired. They’re carrying a full workload plus everyone else’s emotions plus that thing they said in a meeting three weeks ago that they’re still randomly cringing about when they wake up with a stress headache at 4am.
They don’t need a more ambitious plan. They need a plan that was actually designed for them.
I know, I know, “but Noemie, if I lower the bar I’ll just do nothing.”
I thought that too. For years. While changing precisely nothing, because the bar was so impossibly high that I couldn’t even start, so I’d just lie under it scrolling my phone and feeling guilty about not clearing it.
Here’s what actually happened when I made things smaller: I did them.
I know, groundbreaking.
Not because I suddenly found discipline. But because the gap between “where I am” and “what I need to do” went from terrifying to boring, and boring turns out to be the whole secret.
Nobody’s making a podcast about “person does 10-minute walk instead of skipping gym entirely.”
But it works.
And 6 months later you look up and realise you’ve changed more from the tiny boring stuff than you ever did from Sunday You’s magnificent plans.
Your experiment this week
(And yes, this one’s a bit confronting, you’ve been warned).
Think about one thing that keeps not happening. The thing you keep putting on the list and keep not doing.
Got it?
Ok now be honest with yourself: is that a Sunday You plan or a Wednesday You plan?
Because if it only works on a day where you’ve had enough sleep, nothing stressful happened, and you somehow have unlimited energy and willpower... that’s not a plan. That’s fan fiction.
Make it small:
“I will walk for 15 minutes” small
“I will cook one meal this week” small
“I will go to bed before midnight twice” small
“I will answer that one email I’ve been avoiding” small
Not because you’re not capable of more (you are!), but because Wednesday You deserves a plan they can actually follow, even on their worst day.
And a thing that actually happens will always, always beat a beautiful thing that was supposed to happen but didn’t.
You can build from small. You can’t build from guilt.
Last week I wrote about the voice that tears you apart when habits break.
This week I want you to consider that maybe those plans were designed by someone who doesn't have to live your actual week.
They were Sunday You's plans. And Sunday You doesn't live here.
Much love,
Noemie x
P.S: If this hit home, reply and tell me: what’s one thing on your list right now that’s clearly a Sunday You plan? I read every reply.
P.P.S: This concept is one piece of something I’ve been quietly building. A framework for people who are done letting Sunday You run the show. I’ll tell you more soon.