Back in 2005, a now defunct travel company, Sky Travel, paid a psychologist to determine what is the most depressing day of the year in order to use that date in a marketing campaign to encourage people to book more beach vacations. The psychologist, Dr. Cliff Arnall, found that there were several factors pointing towards the third or fourth Monday of January as being especially gloomy for many people and thus a great time to make summer plans.
The factors he considered were weather, level of debt, monthly salary, time elapsed since Christmas, how long a person has failed to keep their New Year’s resolutions, motivation levels, and need to take action. The travel company called the date ‘Blue Monday’ and it took on a life of its own from there.
Dr. Arnall has explained that he hoped Blue Monday would act as a challenge to people, encouraging them to fight off the ‘blues’ that can follow the holidays and make new plans for adventures or start new hobbies. He has admitted, though, that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Turns out, if you tell people a day is going to be depressing and sad—it probably will be.
I’m curious how Dr. Arnall measured each of these variables. The weather in Jackson on ‘Blue Monday’ this year was sunny, with a high of 36 degrees. Last year it was sunny with a high of 52—were we less depressed last year? It was 75 degrees in Miami, does that disqualify their Monday from being the sad kind of blue?
I have my own hang-ups about making New Year’s resolutions and I’m feeling pretty validated about those now that I know this ‘study’ measured how long it took people to break their resolutions. How does one even do that? Did Arnall and a team of researchers ask every person in the world how long they made it before failing at their resolutions? That seems like a job that should come with hazard pay. What if someone ‘failed’ at their resolution but then started back up? Does that count? Or do you not get points for grit? Surely getting back in the saddle instead of never riding again is worth something?
Then there were motivation levels and need to take action. Were one to plot these on a graph—mine would look like the most amazing rollercoaster Six Flags has ever made. It would start out strong, fueled by coffee and kids still in bed. An hour later, the fighting, complaints about breakfast, grumpy demands about packed lunches, inability to locate shoes, screams of torture during hair brushing, and background noise of constant whining would have my ‘need to take action level’ bottomed out somewhere around, “Fine—you don’t have to like your sister or ever talk to her again, just don’t hit her and please—for the love—get in the car.”
My motivation levels would chart a noticeable uptick when I dropped them at school and headed to the grocery. I would be motivated to purchase delicious, healthy snacks for my family and plan for meals we will all enjoy. This would last only as long as it takes me to remember that there are no meals that we all enjoy. The roller coaster would nosedive as I enter into the hell that is meal-planning. The mental and emotional energy spent choosing what to cook for supper, purchasing the components of those meals, cooking those meals, and then listening to my spawn request cereal (again) is staggering.
So, I’m curious which part of the day Dr. Arnall will measure my ‘need to take action’ and if it will follow the overseeing of homework—after which the only action I need to take involves sitting alone in a quiet room for five minutes; or if he will take a reading during the euphoria that comes on the rare occasions that my children complete their homework in a timely manner and voluntarily run outside to play without asking to watch television. The results would be vastly different.
Websites and magazines take advantage of the myth of Blue Monday every year and start publishing lists of ‘10 things to do to fight Blue Monday.’ This may seem like your typical self-help fluff, but for people who experience real depression (as opposed to the kind created by a travel company) and deal with actual anxiety—warnings of impending doom and gloom actually make it harder to manage these legitimate medical conditions.
I’m sure many of the people churning out the advice columns about how to deal with low moods and increased stress have good intentions, or at the least don’t have malicious ones—but the unintended consequences still exist. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that telling people who are anxious or depressed that a depressing day is heading their way might make them even more anxious. I bet the completely unscientific Blue Monday has sold a lot of beach vacations and garnered a lot of clicks over the years, but at what cost?
Marketing ploys like Blue Monday don’t add anything to our lives, don’t serve anyone, and don’t tell us anything about ourselves except, maybe, that we can be incredibly inventive in our efforts to sell things. I’d rather not buy into that and celebrate something worthy of our time and energy—especially since there’s an actual day worth observing on the third Monday of January. I didn’t even know it was ‘Blue Monday’ when my kids and I headed to our church’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, but finding ways to honor Dr. King seems like a much healthier way to spend the day for everyone.
I was looking online for videos about Dr. King’s work to show my kids and I found an interview with Coretta Scott King where she suggested ways to honor her husband’s work. One of her suggestions was to read more of his writings than just the most well-known speeches, which led me to ‘The Drum Major Instinct’ sermon and this quote which may be the antidote to the ridiculousness of things like unscientific studies that tell us we are going to be sad, “Everybody can be great because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve…You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.”
There is enough anxiety-inducing content available in the world to shade every Monday the deepest cobalt, but there’s also the writing of Martin Luther King Jr. and churches planning days of service with their neighbors and kids you love enough to forgive them for asking for cereal for supper again and places where it’s 75 degrees in January—thanks be to God.
Elizabeth Quinn makes her home in Northeast Jackson with her husband Percy and four children.
