Waking Up to the Working Day Ahead: A Diary Study on the Role of Flow in Linking Morning Anticipatory Appraisals to Recovery

In this diary study, we investigated how employees’ morning anticipatory appraisals relate to their flow experiences at work and their subsequent recovery after work. Drawing on transactional stress theory, we explored how four types of morning anticipatory appraisal—positive, challenge, threat, and hindrance—predict daily flow at work, and whether flow, in turn, is associated with energy in the evening and affective rumination at bedtime. A total of 102 employees completed three daily surveys across ten consecutive working days. The results from multilevel mediation analysis revealed that morning anticipatory challenge and positive appraisal were positively related to daily flow, while anticipatory threat appraisal was negatively associated with flow. Flow, in turn, predicted lower affective rumination at bedtime and mediated the effects of morning anticipatory appraisals on this outcome. Contrary to expectations, flow was not significantly related to evening energy levels and did not mediate the effects at the within-person level. In conclusion, our results suggest that morning anticipatory appraisals formed before the working day are meaningfully related to employee well-being by shaping the likelihood of experiencing flow at work and the extent of work-related rumination at bedtime. In doing so, this study advances stress and recovery theory by identifying flow as a key mechanism linking early-day cognitive expectations to evening recovery outcomes, and by highlighting the anticipatory phase as a promising target for interventions aimed at improving employees’ day-to-day functioning.