The Lesson Plan

No kidding.

According to some psychology guys, January 22, is the most depressing day of the year. They call it Blue Monday.

Quoting from this news source and this:

‘Blue Monday’, ‘the worst day of the year’, was first defined by Dr Cliff Arnall of Cardiff University and marks the final full week of January when people experience a series of combined depressive effects. Working with public relations company Porter Novelli, he devised the mathematical expression: [W + (D-d)] x T^Q / (M x NA).

It factors in the dreariness of the (W)eather, the arrival of Christmas bills or (D)ebt, minus monthly salary (d), (T)ime elapsed since Christmas and the failure to keep a New Year’s resolution or to (Q)uit a bad habit, low (M)otivational levels and the need to take action (NA).

He worked out that people are most likely to get the blues in the final full week of January because of the combination of bad weather, Christmas debts and broken New Year resolutions.

Alright. So let’s make sense out of this. Dr. Cliff Arnall is a psychologist, and a ‘happiness and motivation’ expert, whatever that means. A group called the Samaritans — an emotional charity — and their 17,000 members has begun a campaign to promote optimism and good health for the rest of their lives starting on this day.

And according to them, the British stand the best chance of surviving Blue Monday. Makes sense, since this news isn’t taken seriously in places other than Britain.

For the rest of us, we can think of it this way: some ’scientific method’ determined that today is the most depressing day of the year. Ergo, the next days can’t be any worse. Right? Well, this is what all this would mean to me if I take this seriously, and I don’t.

We Filipinos have too many ‘depressing days of the year’ already. And with the election season coming? It can only get worse. But we get by with our sense of humor, and faith that the next day is a chance for everything to be better. There are no Blue Mondays here, only bright tomorrows.