Welcome to the Most Depressing Day of the Year

The first Monday after the holidays has come to be called Blue Monday.

You’ve finished all the mince pies, the weather is terrible, Christmas ended up being horribly expensive and most of us are back to the daily grind.

So it wouldn’t come as a surprise if you had started to feel down in the dumps.

But don’t worry, you aren’t alone, because today is Blue Monday – supposedly the most miserable day of the year.

Blue Monday was originally identified in 2005 by academic Cliff Arnall, who thought it fell on the last full week of January.

He calculated the date using a variety of factors including weather conditions, debt levels, failed New Year’s resolutions and the number of days that had elapsed since the end of the Christmas holidays.

But over the past three years, researchers analysed more than 2million tweets posted by Britons in January looking for negative language and phrases indicating a drop in mood.

They found that today, there will be nearly five times the average number of tweets relating to guilt, as people abandon their promises to pursue a healthier lifestyle.

Yeah. It’s 19 degrees as I write this in central Texas. 19 degrees should not happen in this part of the world. The heater is running so hard it’s either going to launch itself into orbit or it’s going to throw me into catastrophic debt. The holidays are done, so the fun is done. Visiting with family is over. Vacation and break time is over. New Year’s came and went and nothing really changed. If you bothered to make a New Year’s resolution, you’ve probably already broken it, and you’re depressed about that. If you have trees in your lawn, they have turned on you and are dumping several metric tons of leaves that you’ll have to clean up. But it’s too cold to bother with now, and anyway, you have to work. Maybe it’ll warm up to 25 degrees by the end of the week.

Ugh.

Yeah. I get it.

But things could be worse.