Blue Monday Isn’t Real—How the Myth Took Hold (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Apparently today is the most depressing day of the year. It's even got its own official name, Blue Monday. But is it true? Well, in 2004, a psychologist was asked by a travel company to come up with a scientific formula for the January blues. The weather, having no money after Christmas, and probably already failing your New Year's resolutions, as well as low motivational levels, are just some of the elements that make up the formula to find the bleakest day of the year, which is apparently the third Monday of January. And sure, it looks scientific, but it's not, because a lot of these elements you can't even measure, like the motivational levels for the whole country. The travel company just wanted the formula as a marketing tool to sell cheap holidays to people who now thought they were unhappy. But despite this, Blue Monday's kind of stuck. Some people think the day trivialises other mental health conditions, like seasonal affective disorder. Others think it's just a cheap way for companies to try and get people to spend more money. So yeah, Blue Monday, not real.