Nathan Dumlao for unsplash
(Picture: Nathan Dumlao for unsplash)Welcome to the most ‘miserable day of the year’ (™). Blue Monday seems to tap into the emotional space that we all find ourselves in around now.
Cash has worn thin due to post-Christmas debt and the early December payday; the weather’s bleak, the nights are long and there are an almost infinite number of days until the next bank holiday – or any other holiday for that matter.
Historically this day wasn’t so miserable. Money worries and bad weather have been part of January for time immemorial but up until 2004, the third Monday of the month was considered no more or less depressing than any other day.
The story of how we’ve come to see Blue Monday as the most emotionally challenging is one which starts in the years leading up to 2004. It is the story of a global disaster which tapped into a powerful set of emotions. Powerful enough so that, even 18 years after it was invented by Sky Travel to sell holidays (more on this in a second) people not only still talk about it, but they truly believe that the third Monday of the year makes them feel blue.
Unease and paranoia
2004: three years after the relative peace of the post-Cold War era had been shattered by the 9/11 terror attacks. Britain was at war with Iraq, and great swathes of the population weren’t happy about it. A year before, in 2003, a new virus had cut loose in the East. The SARS outbreak in Asia caused panic, killing 774 people and infecting 8,098.
An air of unease had become commonplace, particularly when it came to travel. New rules around flying, including increased security checks meant that what had once been a leisurely activity was suddenly fraught with tension. And because of that, fewer people were booking holidays – much to the dismay of the UK travel industry.
It was then that execs at Sky Travel came up with a novel marketing ploy. What if they could scientifically find the ‘best day for people to book a holiday on’. They could use it to drive sales in a period when fewer of us felt like splashing out on a foreign holiday.
They contacted a psychologist – Dr Cliff Arnall – who duly came up with an equation for when we’re most likely to want a break, and crucially, most likely to act on that desire.
As he told The Daily Telegraph in 2013: "I was originally asked to come up with what I thought was the best day to book a summer holiday but when I started thinking about the motives for booking a holiday, reflecting on what thousands had told me during stress management or happiness workshops, there were these factors that pointed to the third Monday in January as being particularly depressing.”
Blue Monday was born.
Horror and hope
It seems that no one realised how successful this piece of marketing would become. And it may well not have taken off had it not been for one of the biggest natural disasters in living memory.
On Boxing Day 2004, just off the coast of northern Sumatra, at 7:58am local time, a 9.3 magnitude earthquake unleashed a tsunami the likes of which comes less than once a century, possibly once a millennium. Waves 30 metres high crashed into Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and India, reaching as far as South Africa. It killed over 227,000 people and destroyed the homes and livelihoods of countless others. There were fears of many more deaths from disease and starvation in the aftermath. For the second time in less than half a decade, the entire world watched the news in horror.
Horror is a particularly potent emotion, a mix of fear and disgust which not only causes us distress but compels us to take action.
When we witness something ‘horrifying’, the amygdala, which regulates most people’s fight-flight-freeze response, goes into overdrive. Adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine rocket, often off the chart. This is the fear part.
As well as the amygdala, a part of the brain called the insula taps into the body’s many disgust receptors. At its most basic level, disgust evolved to warn us about things that could be harmful – rotten food or flesh, disease, devastation. We view them as an infection we must cleanse.
When a disaster strikes, we feel an urge to put it right, to wash the devastation away. When disgust and fear collide, that’s horror. The most potent part of which is that it makes us want to act and act now.
As January 2005 came round, the aftermath of the Boxing Day Tsunami made a bleak month feel bleaker still. The idea that this may well be the most depressing day of the year seemed completely rational – not just because of the horror we were seeing on television - but also because after any great shared calamity, people would reach for hope. The promise of Blue Monday is that there are things to look forward to. If this is indeed the most miserable day of the year, then the rest must be – relatively speaking – much better. Right?
This piece of capitalist inception has remained with us ever since. Problematically, Blue Monday is complete hogwash. You can feel miserable at any time of the year. Bad moods don’t run to a calendar, and depression certainly doesn’t. Blue Monday acts as an example of how that sort of pseudoscience becomes popular. Even Dr Arnall has since claimed that it was “never his intention to make the day sound negative”.
But after being confronted with so much horror, our desperation for some kind of explanation – regardless of how flimsy – was understandable. The fact that, almost twenty years on, we’ve internalised it as a truth, though, is undoubtedly unfortunate.
