Surviving the blues

Or what I really think about Blue Monday

This is the first proper article I’ve written this year. You’ve had two podcast episodes drop so far, and I’ve been a little distracted setting those up. Anyway, happy new year. Did you know that yesterday was Blue Monday? It passed me by with a whimper, if I’m honest, but I thought it an appropriate subject to talk about today.

So what is it? Apparently, the third Monday in January has been deemed the most depressing day of the year. We’re cold, trying to recover from the personal economic crisis of Christmas, it gets dark early, and there’s a general sense of ennui hanging in the air like a supermarket’s in-house brand perfume. Is that the latest eau de despair you’re wearing?

The idea for Blue Monday was created by the psychologist Cliff Arnall in 2004 after Sky Travel asked him to work out the best day to book a summer holiday.

He even created a formula to calculate it (which, to be fair to Cliff, was self-admitted pseudoscience):

Where*:

• W is weather

• D is total personal debt

• d is monthly salary

• T is time since Christmas

• Q is how long is took for us to fail our New Year’s resolutions

• M is our level of motivation

• Na is how intensely we feel the need to take actions.

*Please excuse the absence of SI units.

When we examine it, there’s clearly no credence to the idea of Blue Monday whatsoever. However, what’s interesting about it is that, if we choose to believe it, then so shall it become true. Where our thoughts go our energy flows, right?

It’s a great example of how giving an idea weight enables it to have an impact on our perception. I pay so little attention to ideas like Blue Monday that they don’t even appear on my radar. But what if we did? What if we spent the whole weekend dreading the idea that the coming Monday was going to be the most depressing day of the year?

What we’ve done is created a bucket load of suffering for ourselves. Through an ethereal and admittedly unfounded concept created for a travel channel marketing campaign in the mid-noughties, we’ve gone and allowed ourselves to feel as though it’s the most depressing day of the year. We’ve made it that way through the power of will and perception.

How about we weaponise this idea in the opposite direction? There’s a great quote by the comedian George Carlin where he describes popular culture as “garbage in, garbage out”. What he’s referring to is that the information we consume and hold on to has a direct impact on our state of thinking.

If we exclusively read all of that shit on Instagram and other popular media outlets that we all deep down know to be about as nutritious as snorting a line of dust from the back of a CRT television, then our mind’s going to be full of that shit.

Instead, let’s fill our minds with information that’s going to feed and sustain us. Find something that you’re interested in and read a book about it, or watch some YouTube videos on it. Listen to people that inspire and uplift you.

This week, go out and feast upon what’s going to enrich your character and support you in your purpose until your belly is full.

Much love
David

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