9 Tips To Turn Blue Monday Into A Happy Workday

Beware the third Monday of January, popularly known as the Blue Monday and predicted to be the most depressing day of the year. January, in itself, could be depressing for many reasons. For one, it is insufferably cold in most parts of the world. It rains off and on, and few of us like to wade through the slush when it’s freezing. Plus, we are already 20 days into the New Year and must have broken most of the resolutions we are supposed to follow for the rest of the year. If that is not enough, there is always a sinking feeling at the back of our mind when we realise that festivities are finally over; work is now piling up and for many of us, performance appraisal is looming large in the horizon.

Do cheer up, folks! It’s just a fad, without any substance. There could be no science or logic that can measure and pinpoint a day as the ‘unhappiest’ of the year. But in case you are curious, let’s tell you Dr Cliff Arnall, a psychologist who taught at the Cardiff University’s adult education centre for some time, first introduced this concept in 2005 and came up with a (ludicrous) formula to calculate the D-day. Wikipedia cites a Press release by a mental health charity and puts down the formula as:
[W + D – d]TQ
MNa
Here W=weather, D=undefined, d=debt, T=time since Christmas, Q=time since failing our New Year’s resolutions, M=low motivational levels and Na=the feeling of a need to take action. The calculation part must be raising a laugh and ‘experts’ have already come up with different dates. According to a report by The Guardian, this year, drinks company Upbeat has announced that we’ve had it wrong all along. It’s not the third Monday of January we should be worried about. It’s the first Monday back at work that’s the worst.

Whether you want to go by the new calculations or want to stick to the third week timeframe (like us), one thing is crystal clear. The factors mentioned above surely drive depression as most of us might have already experienced. So the concept has gained some popularity and it has now become a ritual of sorts to nudge the people around us on this specific day and alert them to the dangers of depression.

That’s a much-needed requirement to begin the New Year on a positive note. Stress, anxiety and depression are the modern day monsters that can’t be killed with one holistic silver bullet. Figures show that depression affects 350 million people worldwide and is slated to become the second leading cause of death and disability across the world by 2020, according to a study by the World Health Organization (WHO). One in 13 persons in India runs the risk of slipping into depression while the average age of depression is estimated to be 31.9 year in the country, as per WHO. It, therefore, makes sense to mark a day to acknowledge the threat to our overall well-being and support each other to ensure a better work-life experience.

“Use this day as a springboard for a higher quality life,” Daily Mail of the UK quoted Dr Arnall as saying. Now, we call that sound advice, for once. So, instead of feeling blue, try and make it the ‘happiest’ of Mondays by following these 9 ‘happiness’ tips at workplace and also at home, whenever applicable. And in doing so, let joy be the theme of your soul. After all, you can’t spread happiness until you are happy yourself.