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Care

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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

Music

Sustainability

17 October 2024

4 min read

What’s the point of celebrating the harvest?

We reap what we sow: a once young man’s guide.

George Pitcher

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

A soot stained burnt-out harvester sits in a recently harvested field.

A burnt-out harvester, Lonesome Farm, Oxfordshire.

Nick Jones.

I plan next week to visit a small nursery school, called Young Haymakers, for their Harvest celebration where toddlers to five-year-olds will sing songs about tractor wheels going round and round, with vigorous manual actions as they shake, shake, shake the apple tree.

We’ll have a Harvest snack at tiny tables, a prayer and then they’ll give me the Harvest gifts from their families for those who may be hungry.

It is, of course, a delight, one of the happiest duties of a parish priest and I’ll miss it terribly as I hand it over to a new Rector. But, while I take nothing away from the sheer joy of thanksgiving of these children for the fruits (and vegetables) of this harvest and for those who farm them, I can’t help but wonder what Harvest, as a festival, really means for grown-ups.

The metaphor has been just too rich to avoid this season. We reap what we sow – and we witness that from Ukraine to Gaza and Lebanon, from Sudan to a United States that teeters on the brink of self-destruction as the world’s beacon of democratic values.

One might add to this sorry list the longer-term grim gathering-in from the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, a failed harvest of biblical-scale abomination as we destroy our planet’s natural capacity to host us. Truly, we have sown a wind and, in so many areas of human endeavour, we look like we reap a whirlwind (literally, in the case of weather crises such as Hurricane Milton).

There are prophetic voices that cry out in our human wilderness, from those who foresee the demise of the US at the hands of a shallow nationalism to those few on the political stage who predict an all-out war in the Middle East as the only possible conclusion to the escalation of revenge attacks between Israel and its neighbours.

The ancients saw famine and failed harvests as judgments for their sin, their divergence from the divine will. It’s unlikely that our world is going to accept such culpability any time soon. To do so would require a humility that we have lost, along with losing our religion.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation.

Setting aside the reaping of whirlwinds from millennia ago, I’m going to invoke a popular folk song from a little over half a century ago. I do so because, in 1972, we lived in a more innocent world, before we knew how industrialisation could destroy our human species and when a western hegemony in democracy was taken for granted. Little did we know the precipice on which we were perched.

The song is by the folk-rock colossus Neil Young and is called, appropriately enough, Harvest. It is, lyrically, one of his more obscure works and to listen to it now is to struggle to get past a strangulated hippy voice that verges on self-parody.

But it repays the effort. Young’s lyrics are infused with religious reference and imagery, but no claim should be made for his affirmation of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, we’re entitled to view art through the prism of what informs us and, as such, Harvest yields its fruits. Young may well be singing about his lover, but it’s in love that all truth is explored.

Listen to it. Young’s Harvest opens with the lines “Did I see you down in a young girl’s town/ with your mother in so much pain?” Through a scriptural lens, this sounds like the pain of incarnation, the sharing of Mother Mary’s agony in visceral human experience.

It continues: “Will I see you give more than I can take”; for the confessing faithful, we’re at the foot of the cross here. “Will I only harvest some?”; we can, all of us, only harvest a little of the mystery of that event. “As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp?”; of course we will – time is finite. “Or fuse it in the sun?”; an uncanny pre-echo of climate change worthy of Nostradamus.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation. But it’s also true that we should be careful of where we look for prophetic voices.

For Young, the Harvest is indeed a cruel and painful event, which we can only understand in part. We do indeed reap what we sow, but there may be purpose to be found in that. And the Harvest is indeed bitter, but in it we may glimpse a plan: “Dream up, dream up, let me fill your cup/ With the promise of a man”.

Or, okay, it’s just a song, harvesting a good deal of cash for its writer and singer. I’m no big fan of Young. But it might just have told me more about the Harvest than singing All Things Bright and Beautiful.