Blue Monday

What the day is

Blue Monday is held on the third Monday in January, so the date moves each year. It is described as the most depressing day of the year, and it is worth being direct about where that claim came from.

Origin and background

It was created in 2005 for a press release issued by a travel company. The release presented a formula that supposedly combined weather, debt, time since Christmas, failed resolutions and motivation levels to identify the year's low point, and attributed it to an academic. It was public relations, produced to sell winter holidays to people told they were at their most miserable.

The formula does not work as mathematics. It adds and divides quantities that have no units and no agreed way of being measured, so the result is not a number that means anything, and adjusting the inputs produces whatever date is wanted. The psychologist whose name was attached has since repeatedly disowned it and asked people to stop repeating it.

The reason to say so plainly is not pedantry. Presenting depression as a calendar event trivializes an illness that does not run on a schedule, and it can leave people who feel fine wondering what is wrong with them, or people who are genuinely unwell assuming that what they have will lift by Tuesday.

Some of the underlying material is real. Seasonal affective disorder is a recognized condition, light exposure in winter genuinely affects mood for many people, and January carries real financial pressure after December. None of that produces a single worst day, and treating it as a marketing hook rather than a health matter is how the day has mostly been used.

How to take part

• Get outside in daylight, ideally in the morning, which is well supported for winter mood.
• Check on someone who has been quiet since the holidays.
• Treat persistent low mood as something to raise with a doctor, not as a date on a calendar.
• Notice which brands are marketing at you today and what they are selling.
• Correct the claim when you see it repeated, which is most of what this day needs.