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Care

Comment

Mental Health

Time

14 January 2025

4 min read

Why Blue Monday resonates despite the pseudoscience

The seasons of life actually need some meteorological awareness.

Rachael Newham

Rachael is an author and theology of mental health specialist.

A wrapped-up man sits and leans against a bare tree, as dark clouds give way to sun.

Isaak Alexandre Karslian on Unsplash.

Christmas cheer has long gone, the weather is grey and wet, bills are high and we’ve most likely already broken our New Year’s resolutions - January seems to have a lot to answer for!

So much so that the third Monday in January has actually been called “Blue Monday” - the most depressing day of the year.

It was developed using a mathematical equation taking into account all the elements of January misery - and the cure? Booking a sunny holiday.

It sounds like it makes sense, doesn't it? Don’t we all feel a slump in the dark cold days in the middle of January?

The problem is, ‘Blue Monday’ is based on some rather shaky pseudoscience concocted purely for a travel company to sell their summer holidays. In the equation, the units are undefined, and the formula can’t be verified making it effectively useless.

Despite this, the idea of Blue Monday has captured our imaginations and our attention - meaning that even though it is nothing more than a marketing campaign written way back in 2005 - the idea has stuck around because it makes sense.

And we like to make sense of our feelings, don’t we? If we can pinpoint a specific reason for why we feel low or unmotivated, we feel less alone. Perhaps that’s why the idea of Blue Monday has persisted for twenty years.

For some, the seasons can have a tangible effect on mental health, up to three percent of people live with ‘significant winter depression’ and gimmicks like Blue Monday risk trivialising the debilitation of Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Even for those of us who do not live with seasonal mental illnesses, we have different needs according to the seasons. Our energy ebbs and flows throughout the year - it’s natural to want to live at a slower pace during the dark winter months -many people find themselves sleeping and eating more when we have shorter days and longer nights.

Emotionally we will also have seasons where we experience life as vibrantly as spring and others when we want to retreat and feel the need to grieve our losses as the seeds hide beneath the ground away from the cold, waiting to bloom.

Author Katherine May writes about this in her book Wintering: “Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through.”

It’s something that both the Bible and the church year recognise, that we have to adapt to the seasons of life we’re living in. The writer of Ecclesiastes, sometimes thought to be King Saul, writes that “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens” and he goes on to include living and dying, planting and uprooting, killing and healing.

We can be encouraged that there is no specific day that is more or less depressing than any of the others, but also recognise the changing seasons that our emotions go through in the same way as the natural world does.

What matters is that we, lean into the season of life we’re in and not deny it. The church year allows us to do so through liturgy, as we cycle through Advent, Christmas. Lent, Easter and Ordinary time. There are opportunities to grieve our losses, celebrate our joys, learn lessons and practice what it means to be in community through every emotion. By going through these seasons and leaning into the meteorological seasons we give ourselves a chance to stretch our emotional muscles in mourning, rejoicing and simply working out how to navigate everyday life!

Paul, who pastored and wrote to many churches in their early days, told one church in Rome to “Laugh with your happy friends when they’re happy; share tears when they’re down,” and this I think is simple advice for us as we travel through the seasons of our lives and the year. All emotions - however uncomfortable they might be - need attention.

Blue Monday may be a marketing myth but recognising that we need to make space for all our feelings - the happy and the sad - can be just the reminder we need.

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Article

Comment

General Election 24

Politics

20 June 2024

4 min read

What small boats tell us about belonging

Do I belong to these politics? And do these politics belong to me?

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A grainy surveillance picture of an rusty boat overloaded with people

A small boat overloaded with migrants.

BBC.

Our son used to say that “home is where the dogs are”, as he was greeted by them. It’s a variation on “home is where the heart is”. Either way, it means that a sense of home isn’t just about place or geography, so much as family and, relatedly, the familiar.

If home were simply an address, candidates in an election campaign wouldn’t bother knocking on doors to meet people. To be familiar is to meet people where they are, circumstantially as well as literally on their doorstep.

To date, the solution to the refugee crisis has been to “stop the boats”, as if our principal concern is with rubber dinghies. We’ve still not addressed the people in those boats; we’re not familiar with them, their circumstances and motivations.

I’d hazard a guess that a common desire among those who flee persecution and mortal danger is something else associated with familiarity – a sense of belonging.

The refugee belongs nowhere, until she or he reaches a new and safe home. Indeed, all of us know we’re home only when we’re somewhere we belong.

Somewheres are rooted in place and community; Anywheres are footloose and and educationally privileged. To which I would add the global category of migrants, who are Nowheres.

This is Refugee Week (17-23 June) and Thursday 20 June is World Refugee Day. It’s theme this year is “Our Home”, which is why I started this column on the nature of familiarity and belonging.

Out of which arise two questions: Do I belong to this country? And does this country belong to me? The first is fairly straightforward in a practical sense – I have a British passport and pay my taxes here, so yes I do. The second question is more complex, more of which in a moment.

When it comes to sovereign governments, the questions move from first to third person. Do you belong to (or in) this country and does this country belong to you? Again, the first question is about paperwork. The second, however, becomes crucially about exclusivity.

Exclusive ownership reaches its abhorrent nadir in a BBC2 documentary this week titled Dead Calm: Killing in the Med?, which provides evidence that the Greek coastguard has been employing masked vigilantes to cast adrift landed refugees, including women and children, in international waters and, in some cases, to throw migrants overboard to their deaths. A story told alongside the capsizing, through incompetence or otherwise, of the rust-tub Adriana, in which more than 600 migrants drowned a year ago.

These are matters for international law. But it shows where treating migrants like cargo, rather than people, takes us. It’s a mindset that could start with repellent (in both senses) wave machines, as considered by a former UK home secretary.

None of which arises if the criteria of belonging are applied. Former Prospect editor David Goodhart famously wrote that a key electoral demographic could be defined in Somewheres and Anywheres. Somewheres are rooted in place and community; Anywheres are footloose and and educationally privileged. To which I would add the global category of migrants, who are Nowheres (see above).

The key here is having nowhere to belong. Former PM Theresa May talked of “citizens of nowhere” in 2016, but she meant globe-trotting tax-exiles and the like. I mean Nowhere people, with nowhere to go – and it’s toxic for all of us that there are so many of them.

This is where the question “does this country belong to me?” carries so much human freight (like a small boat, as it happens).

To belong is an atavistic human need. American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs places belonging and love as principal needs in his pyramid between basic physicalities (such as safety) and self-fulfilment at the apex. “Belongingness”, a sense of home, is vital for human stability.

This is where the question “does this country belong to me?” carries so much human freight (like a small boat, as it happens). Simply to repel refugees like they’re someone else’s problem is massively to miss a point, because they’re going to carry on looking for somewhere to belong. So they’re going to keep coming.

Maslow identified religious groups as one of those offering a sense of belonging. I would guess as much as two-thirds of the congregation I’ve looked after over the past decade came to church for that sense of belonging, which we’re called to offer to the despised and marginalised as well as the Somewheres and Anywheres.

Miroslav Volf has written here that “God created the world to live in it” and therefore, I contend, belongs to it. So we’re called to “live in more homelike ways”, which I define as a sense of familiarity and belonging. That’s the theology of it.

We are now facing the politics of it. Nationalism is not enough. We need leaders who can solve this at a global level, which is both a political and a theological imperative.

Perhaps a way of reframing my questions, in this Refugee Week as we ponder how to vote, is: “Do I belong to these politics? And do these politics belong to me?”