This year’s Blue Monday may be worse than most – but cut yourself some slack

Try focusing on the silly joys in the coming days, writes Natasha Preskey

There are lots of ways to lift the clouds (Getty/iStock)

This coming Monday (18 January) is a date few lifestyle journalists are likely to forget. Since 2004, the third Monday of January has been known as the “most depressing day of the year”, after psychologist Cliff Arnall was asked by travel firm Sky Travel to devise a “scientific formula” for the January blues.

Arnall has since urged people to “refute the whole notion” of Blue Monday. But his creation’s legacy lives on in journalists’ inboxes, where each year well-meaning PRs offer solutions and coping strategies for the alleged day of doom.

Blue Monday’s creator may have been trying to sell us holidays (if only) but his suggestion that poor weather, post-Christmas debt and broken new year’s resolutions are likely to bring us down is, of course, not a complete fantasy. Especially in 2021, when ditching Dry January means cracking open a bottle of wine in your living room, and sitting on a park bench can attract attention from the police. This, Blue Monday number 17, will surely be the bleakest yet.

While, individually, there’s little we can do about the overwhelming doom of January 2021, there is some comfort in accepting that, yes, this January is really bad. If Zoom workouts feel like yoga-ing through treacle, you’ve eaten far too much beige food this week and your WhatsApp is full of unanswered messages, it’s for good reason, and you’re not the only one.

On Lifestyle, we’ve been trying to focus on the few silly joys available to us this month. TikTok’s absurd – and surprisingly catchy – sea shanty trend (trust us, you’ll be humming them around the house before you know it), playing club bangers in the shower (and maybe even whacking the lights off and having a dance), and the news that Barbie is definitely (maybe) an LGBT+ ally.  

This month may be long and hard but the sun is now rising before 8am and, in those low moments, you could always try conjuring an image of yourself, later this year, in a very trashy bar somewhere dancing to a sea shanty.

Yours,

Natasha Preskey

Lifestyle senior reporter