Snippet

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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Essay

Attention

Comment

Feminism

15 March 2024

5 min read

Sarah Everard: she was 'exactly like us'

An anniversary of anguish deserves the miracle of our attention.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Sarah Everard.

BBC/Everard Family.

This week, three years ago, we’d been shut in our homes for nearly a year and things were anything but normal. I don’t know about you, but when I think back to those locked-down days, it’s all a bit of a haze, those weird weeks tend to blur into one.

Except this week, that is. This week, three years ago, was a wholly different story.

We, the public, had just learnt that Sarah Everard, a thirty-three-year-old woman in South London, had been abducted, raped and murdered by Wayne Couzens, a serving police officer in the Metropolitan Police. And the news of this heinous crime took our breath away. Do you remember it? How you felt when you learned what had happened to Sarah? I can remember the anguish of hundreds of people ringing out from Clapham Common, reaching every corner of the country. I can remember that, legal or not, nothing seemed to quell the outrage that was drawing people to the vigil being held there. All that grief, it had to go somewhere.

The anger that night was so visceral, it feels like it’s still in the soil of the Common. The fear, so palpable, it still lingers in the air. And at that point, we didn’t even know the half of it. ‘She was just walking home’ - That’s the sentence, isn’t it? The one that haunted those days, weeks, and months.

Three years on and we’re no closer to coming to terms with what happened. Not really. In the wake of the recent Angioloni Inquiry, which concluded that Wayne Couzens should never have been allowed to become, let alone remain, a police officer, the BBC released a documentary that follows DCI Katherine Goodwin’s story as she led the investigation. From first seeing the bulletin of a missing young woman, to hearing the ‘whole life’ sentence come down on Couzens – viewers are walked through the whole thing, step by step. What led up to Sarah’s death, and what followed it. It’s something that we should all see, even though we’ll immediately wish that we hadn’t.

Because it would be hard to unsee the grainy footage of Wayne Couzens standing next to a handcuffed Sarah on the side of a busy road, abducting her while his hazard lights flash, all of it so sickeningly hidden in plain sight. It would be harder still to unhear the victim statement from Sarah’s mum, who admitted that every night, right at the time of the abduction, she silently screams ‘don’t get in the car, Sarah. Don’t believe him. Run!’.

All of it, it’s just so hard to know.

The details are hard to think about, and harder still not to think about. But that’s the point, I suppose. I remember what philosopher Simone Weil wrote,

that ‘capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle… it is a miracle’.

I’m just not used to a ‘miracle’ making me feel so nauseous. In theory, Weil’s words are beautiful, in reality though – they ache.

I don’t tend to acquaint a feeling of utter helplessness with the miraculous. Where my understanding runs dry, my answers falter, and my tears flow – those aren’t the places I expect to see anything of any use, spiritual or otherwise.

But Weil goes on:

‘…it is recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specific from the social category labelled ‘unfortunate’, but as a man (or woman), exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.’

Sarah Everard – her memory, as well as the people within whom her memory is most vivid, and her loss most keenly felt – deserve the miracle of our attention. Then, now, and for many years to come. We continue to grieve her, the woman who never made it home, as if we each knew more of her than her name. And that’s a beautiful thing, a human thing, a sacred thing. Because Sarah was more than her name, and she was more than her death. And so, she must be grieved as such, with our eyes fixed on the beauty of who she was, and the tragedy of who she will never be.

And it’s tricky, because you can’t tidy up lament, can you? There’s no silver-lining, nothing to polish. You can’t put a neat bow on despair or grief.

And then there’s Weil’s ‘exactly like us’ line to grapple with. And grapple with it, we do. The knowledge that it could have been any of us is ever-present. As a woman, I feel it every single day. If male violence against women is a spectrum - 1 being a wolf-whistle as we walk down the street, and 10 being death – the truth is that most of us will only ever face experiences that sit on the lower end of that scale. And yet, we are ever aware that 10 exists and that we could encounter it at any point. So, we are on the lookout for it. We are alert, always.

Sarah walked home a specific way that night; not the quickest route, but the best lit.

That’s what we all do. ‘Exactly like us’, indeed.

Lament; I suppose that’s what this feeling in my stomach is. And maybe yours too. It’s a feeling that goes beyond the rage I feel toward the monstrous perpetrator, and the institutions that failed to stop him, and so many others. It’s a kind of wordless grief that things are the way they are, agony that we live in a world that hurts this much, despair at how things could have been so different. I felt all this three years ago, when I heard about Sarah’s death. And I felt it last night, when my sister walked home from my house in the dark with her hood up so that she was less distinguishable as a woman walking alone.

And it’s tricky, because you can’t tidy up lament, can you? There’s no silver-lining, nothing to polish. You can’t put a neat bow on despair or grief, and you can’t pull yourself out of it by your own bootstraps. And that’s not to be defeatist, or to relinquish our responsibility to enact justice and fight for change. On the contrary, lament is rooted in the knowledge that things can be, and should be, better. But to try and find a way to solve the outrage we feel when it comes to the death of Sarah Everard is to completely misunderstand it, and ourselves, and reality.

Bad things hurt.

So, although writing this piece has been hard, I’m at least comforted in the knowledge that it was supposed to be a hard piece to write. And that the queasiness I feel and the tears that are threatening my professional resolve are the evidence of some kind of miracle that I don’t fully understand.