The psychologist Guy Winch’s research is absolutely clear: in any given week 7.26pm on a Saturday evening is the peak moment of human happiness. You’re well into the weekend but the best is yet to come.
However, I am talking to Winch on a wet Monday morning and that’s not so good. More men have stress-related strokes and, for men and women, more brain haemorrhages occur on a Monday than any other day of the week.
“Unfortunately, suicides on Mondays are more prevalent too,” he says.
Winch can help. His Ted talks on subjects such as “How to fix a broken heart” have amassed 35 million views. His podcast, Dear Therapists (co-hosted with Lori Gottlieb, who wrote the bestselling book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone), involving real case studies, is also hugely popular.
The psychologist Guy Winch
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The 64-year-old is based in New York but has given presentations on stress management in 10 Downing Street and for the US government.
“In the light of Covid the UK government had created all these useful channels for getting health messages across. I said, ‘Why not now use them to communicate what we know as regards ongoing issues: stress and burnout at work?’” he tells me.
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According to UK government figures more than 22 million working days were lost to stress, depression and anxiety in 2024-25. That’s more than half the 40 million working days lost in total.
In America Winch says 120,000 deaths annually are stress-related: that’s more than the death toll in the Vietnam War.
On a Monday morning that’s all just too miserable and stressful to think about. Winch asks if I am susceptible to the Sunday blues. That’s a hard yes. I’ve had them since my school days. Of course I don’t condone mass murder but whenever the Boomtown Rats song I Don’t Like Mondays (about a girl involved in a school shooting) came on I thought, maybe we need to start the week on Tuesdays.
Winch proposes some interesting strategies, such as dressing up nicely or going out for pancakes on a Monday morning, so as to ease yourself into the week with something pleasurable.
“If you start the week thinking ‘I hate my job and Mondays are terrible’ then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he says.
Winch has written a new book full of stress-busting tips called Mind Over Grind, which is organised over a working week. I have some bad news: Tuesdays are not much better. Winch says that analysis of social media posts suggests our emotional state is even more negative than on Monday. After all, we’ve survived one really hard day and there are four more to go till the weekend.
“And low mood means your coping mechanisms must work even harder to manage your stress,” he adds.
What are these coping mechanisms? One of the main ones is to be analytical and realistic about your situation. Are you really that stressed? Winch gives the example of his client Priya, who claims her job is stressful 90 per cent of the time. But under close questioning it turns out only four hours out of 50 are actually driving her nuts.
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“Being clear about specific stressors can open opportunities for recovery,” he says. “Rather than being overwhelmed by stress, even a very short restorative break can work wonders.”
However, Priya is a Gen Zer and a self-confessed “quiet quitter” — she won’t leave her job but is showing less commitment to it. The trigger for this attitude was being shouted at by her boss for getting the coffee order wrong. Are Gen Z stress thresholds lower than for older generations?
“I don’t like to see a whole generation as a homogeneous group but compared to boomers there is some evidence that young generations feel more vulnerable, not just to stress but emotionally in general,” Winch says. “Resilience is built through challenge and, unfortunately, some modern parenting avoids challenges. As a result we see some Gen Z employees coming into the workplace expecting much more direct mentoring, coddling perhaps, from their managers. But then there is also an attitude of: why should I invest my energy in this company when AI, climate change and economic uncertainty mean ‘who knows where we’ll be in ten years?’”
I have five children (three biological, two step) in their twenties and I fear one of them has quiet quit. How else could she possibly send me a text at 11am on a work day reading “get yoghurt”. Winch says quiet quitting is a fool’s game. “You might regain some mental bandwidth by not working your hardest but then do what with it? If you look for a better job, fine, but most quiet quitters don’t. They waste time while their peers climb the career ladder ahead of them.”
I don’t mind a bit of workplace hurly-burly but my stress peaks when engaging with faceless bureaucracies. Recently I’ve been trying to get an enhanced check from the DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) so I can volunteer. I tell Winch my experience has been Kafkaesque. He winces.
“That sort of language suggests you’ve already given up,” he warns. “But go on…”
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Near the end of filling in the fiddly and boring DBS online application I went to get my passport and the portal locked me out. Then it wouldn’t accept my password or a new one when I tried that. Then the applicant support email wouldn’t reply. An enhanced DBS check is supposed to ensure I’m an upstanding citizen but the process is actually turning me into a homicidal maniac.
“What exactly do you feel?” Winch asks.
“Really frustrated!”
He encourages me to add more feelings to my palette — such as aggravated, irritated, annoyed, bewildered and, yes, stressed.
“When you use more varied language to describe your state, you should experience an easing to it,” he says.
Next I need to reframe the aggravating process of logging onto the DBS portal not as something obnoxious but as a “nuisance”. A bit like the stock trader Tony, in Winch’s book, who comes to dread interacting with a particular colleague. Winch encourages Tony to reclassify this as a minor irritation, maybe even a challenge to rise to.
“Because something that’s seen as a challenge rather than a threat helps alter your body’s stress response,” he says. Under threat we secrete cortisol, a hormone that can cloud judgment. In the face of a challenge we secrete dopamine and adrenaline, which allow us to think more clearly and perform better. And then there is what Winch calls the Mind Whisperer Exercise.
“Instead of saying to myself, ‘I can’t handle this stressful thing,’ say ‘this thing will be stressful but I can handle it,’” he says.
Finally, when you are ready to tackle the stressful task, do it immediately without procrastinating. In my case, I contacted the school where I was hoping to volunteer and told them to sort it out. You must tackle stressful tasks immediately otherwise you are letting down someone very important: your future self.
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Winch’s research shows that we tend to see our future selves as strangers — that’s why we thoughtlessly inflict damaging things on ourselves by, say, smoking or drinking too much. We never really consider who he calls Tomorrow Guy or Next-Week Guy.
Winch suggests tackling stressful tasks without procrastinating
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“We sometimes dump a lot of stress on Next-Week Guy like he’s another person,” he says. Actually, not always. I’ve already been in touch with Next-Week Guy and told him to throw a sickie, get on the sofa and watch Netflix because of all the crap I’m planning not to do this week, but I take his point.
Winch is particularly instructive on the aftermath of stress — the dark rumination that often follows a bad day. Rumination also triggers a stress response and is associated with higher cardiovascular disease and cholesterol, not to mention elevated blood pressure. And that’s before you get to what Winch calls “rumination surfing” — going from one bad incident to another and succumbing to “emotional dysregulation”, a state in which one’s negative emotional state feels out of control.
Winch’s practice is in Manhattan. He won’t tell me exactly what he charges but says it’s “a little bit more” than the average $400-$500 per session many psychologists charge in the city. Just ruminating on that is stressful. However, he tells me about a single working mum client who also ruminates too much called Sally (Winch makes room for some reduced-rate sessions). She runs her life by spreadsheet (she wakes up at 5am for “light therapy” followed by a workout, cold shower, meditation, getting dressed and then cycling to work, where she starts at 7am). The trouble is, her immediate co-worker is inefficient and mendacious, so hitting the targets that would earn her a bonus is almost impossible. The language she uses while ruminating cannot be repeated in a family newspaper but she was clearly struggling.
“Constant rumination was damaging her mental health so I suggested the ‘memoir test’,” Winch says. “Sally’s overall problem is very real but individual incidents — would they make it into her memoir if she wrote one? Instead it was better for her to focus energy on long-term solutions like developing work relationships that bypassed this obstructive colleague.”
Winch has a second anti-rumination strategy: visualise each negative thought arising in your mind as a skunk jumping onto the sofa.
“Then kick it out,” he advises. “Say ‘no, no, no, you’re not coming in!’ out loud if you have to.”
Winch was born in London and got a scholarship to study at New York University but he burnt out one year after starting work.
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“I was working 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week and that was after six years of intense study,” he recalls. “I really had to learn restorative habits.”
One of the things that helped him was writing screenplays.
“Find something you love doing that puts you in a flow state,” he says. “Writing is work but it can be just as de-stressing as lying on a sofa.”
Obviously by the time his book ends on Friday things are looking up because 7.26pm on a Saturday evening is only a day away. And yet shouldn’t we aim to make this moment less of a panacea and all the other days a bit better?
“Exactly. Make Tuesday the day you spend an hour in the park, Wednesday the day you bring your favourite lunch in. Call your mum on Thursday. Curate your working week so there are less peaks and troughs. The grind is real but don’t let it own you.”
Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life by Guy Winch is published on February 10 (Headline £16.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members