Blue Monday isn’t just a song by New Order
Apparently, it’s the most depressing day of the year but this just isn’t true, in fact, how it got the title is much stranger.
The title was given to the third Monday of every January by UK travel company Sky Travel in 2005.
In a press release issued by the company, they claimed that this day was somehow the worst of the entire year thanks to their special equation.
Their magic way of calculating how sad this day is took factors such as weather, debt, and the amount of time since the holidays and broken resolutions.
Realistically most of those could affect an individual on any day of the year, but they stated that “happiness” is at its lowest on Blue Monday.
As you can imagine, when people read this, ironically enough, they weren’t happy.
Not only could people not settle on what Monday was actually the worst of the month, but experts also called out their “pseudoscience”.
Despite originally being coined for marketing purposes, in order to encourage people to book holidays, the term is now part of everyday vocabulary and some people even believe Blue Monday is a real thing.
Speaking to Glamour, Samar McCutcheon, MD, a psychiatrist with The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, explained, “Blue Monday was a marketing gimmick created by a travel company who asked a psychologist to develop a ‘depression formula’ to find the most depressing day of the year.
“However, it is not possible to create a formula for depression that can be generalized to everyone. There is nothing to say that the days that fall before or after are more or less depressing for us all.”
In other words, you can’t calculate how real humans will feel on a given day no matter what formula you have.
So to hell with the meaningless expression, we should reclaimed it and try to have the best day possible.
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