Blue Monday or “sad Monday” is the third Monday of each January. It is supposed to be this way because several adverse conditions come together: we are in the middle of January, the weather is unfavorable and it is more than possible that by now we have already failed with some of the New Year’s resolutions. All this is based on a mathematical formula that in 2005 supported the psychologist at Cardiff University, Cliff Arnall.
The mathematical formula is as follows: 1/8C+(Dd) 3/8xTI MxNA . In it, “C” is the climatic factor, “D”, the debts that Christmas leaves us, “d” is the money collected in January, “T” is the time elapsed since the end of Christmas, “I ” is the time elapsed since the last failed attempt to break a bad habit (for example, smoking), “M” is the individual’s motivations, and “NA” is the need to act to change life.
The equation resulted in the third Monday in January being the most depressing day of the year. However, and as was later shown, the formula has neither head nor tail. In fact, its origin is in a marketing campaign, it is not the result of science .
The history of Blue Monday begins in 2004, when the travel company Sky Travel intends to take measures to increase its sales in 2005. It asks the communication agency Porter Novelli for help and this idea comes up with the following proposal: to prepare a study that would conclude that the third Monday of January was the saddest day of the year for, just that day, announce their trips.
For the study to be accurate, the agency needed the signatures of several psychologists . After receiving several refusals, Porter Novelli got psychologist Cliff Arnall, from Cardiff University, to validate the study with his signature. However, Arnall did not do so because he truly believed the study to be true, but because he received a certain amount of money in return.
Dean Burnett, one of the experts who worked with Arnal, publicly stated a few years ago that, in his opinion, Blue Monday was “nonsense”, as well as a “lack of respect for all those people who truly suffer or have suffered depression” . He added that “it is extremely unlikely that there is a reliable set of factors that cause depression in an entire population at the same time each year.”
Blue Monday has been rejected in different academic fields, as well as among different psychologists and scientists. In fact, they have come to describe it as pseudoscience.
And this is how Blue Monday has come to us, disguised as science, but as what it really is: a successful marketing campaign that year after year manages to sneak into the media and social networks. Therefore, there is no objective reason to be sad just on the third Monday in January .
