As if we needed any more reason to ruminate over pandemic life’s daily plights, today (January 16) is Blue Monday — the third Monday of January, which is rumored to be the most depressing day of the year.

But is it?

Research hasn’t proved that there is any one day more depressing than all the others, but the PR stunt that has unfortunately cemented itself into modern culture.

It began in 2005 with a news release from the now-defunct British TV channel Sky Travel: With the help of a psychologist, it said, it had calculated the most miserable day of the year.

The team had apparently worked it out with a complex formula developed by UK-based psychologist Cliff Arnall to determine people’s lowest point.

The formula was meant to analyze when people booked vacations, assuming that people were most likely to buy a ticket to paradise when they were feeling down. Arnall came up with reasons why people might want to take a vacation and from those extrapolated the gloomiest day of the year.

Arnall’s formula looks the part: [W+(D-d)]xTQ/MxNA. Upon closer inspection, however, the variables involved are subjective and plainly unscientific. W, for instance, stands for weather. D is debt and d is monthly salary, while T means time since Christmas and Q is the time since you gave up on your New Year’s resolution.

None of the factors he included can be measured, or compared by the same units. The formula can’t be adequately assessed or verified. For example, there is no way to measure the average number of days since people slipped up on their New Year’s resolution. And January’s weather varies among different states, countries and continents. In short, there is no scientific merit to it.

“I had no idea it would gain the popularity that it has,” Arnall told CNN. “I guess a lot of people recognize it in themselves.”

Arnall has also claimed to campaign against his own idea of Blue Monday as part of the “activist group” Stop Blue Monday. But that group, as it turned out, was also a marketing campaign — this time for winter tourism to the Canary Islands.

Now, he told CNN, he’d do it again.

“I don’t regret it at all,” he said, adding he has “used the media” on several occasions with the intention of starting conversations about psychology.

“My problem with academic psychology and peer reviewed publications … they don’t really make that much difference to regular people,” added Arnall, who was paid £1,200 to come up with Blue Monday.

That’s not a popular view in the profession, however.

Critics of the concept of a “Blue Monday” have held that it is irresponsible to attribute clinical depression to external causes and to suggest it could be solved with something as easy as a vacation to a sunny beach.

“This is not the right way to raise awareness,” said Dr. Antonis Kousoulis, director of the UK Mental Health Foundation’s efforts for England and Wales. “By saying this single day is the most depressing day of the year, without any evidence, we are trivializing how serious depression can be.”

“Mental health is the biggest health challenge of our generation,” he added. “Trivializing it is completely unacceptable.”

What is real is the winter blues, more clinically known as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. It’s a form of depression that people experience usually during the fall and winter months when there is less sunlight. The most difficult months for people with SAD in the US tend to be January and February, and it improves with the arrival of spring.

Psychology Today reported that SAD is estimated to affect 10 million Americans, and that another 10% to 20% may have mild symptoms. For 5% of adults who experience SAD, for about 40% of the year they have symptoms that can be overwhelming and can interfere with their daily lives.

The condition has been linked to a biochemical imbalance in the brain prompted by shorter daylight hours and less sunlight in winter. As seasons change, people experience a shift in their biological internal clock, or circadian rhythm, that can cause them to be out of sync with their regular schedule.

The easiest way to start taking action against SAD is to focus on light exposure, either by seeking out natural sunlight or sitting in front of a light therapy box for a minimum of 20 minutes per day.

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