We often stumble upon it on social media, in newspaper headlines, or in January advertising campaigns. Blue Monday is presented as “the saddest day of the year,” a sort of fixed appointment in the collective calendar that promises to explain, in a single formula, fatigue, decreased motivation, and winter melancholy. Yet, Blue Monday is neither a discovery of psychology nor psychiatry. There is no clinical study demonstrating that a specific Monday in January is actually sadder than others, nor a formula capable of scientifically measuring our mood. Blue Monday originates elsewhere: not in laboratories, but in communication offices.
The Blue Monday story began in 2005, when a British travel company, Sky Travel, decided to launch a winter campaign. The idea was simple and clever: transform the widespread “down” feeling at the beginning of the year into an almost official event, a specific day on which to concentrate messages, offers, and invitations to “unplug.” To make the proposal more convincing, a formula was presented that supposedly combined several factors: bad weather, time elapsed since Christmas holidays, accumulated debts, decreased motivation upon returning to work, and the difficulty of keeping New Year’s resolutions. This formula was associated with the name of a psychologist—Cliff Arnall—and a date was set: the third Monday of January. The narrative was well crafted: there’s a date, an equation, an expert. It looks like scientific language, but it lacks the essential element of science itself: the method. There are no published data, no protocols, no peer-reviewed studies confirming the idea of a “saddest day of the year.” The formula is more a rhetorical device than a research tool, designed to give a scientific veneer to a marketing story, as if Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus were presented as an anthropological discovery. In short, Blue Monday is a constructed narrative.
Moreover, the fact that Blue Monday is a false narrative is now so well known that a complete debunking is easily available even on Wikipedia under the entry “Blue Monday,” where the commercial origin of the idea and the lack of any scientific basis are explained. Blue Monday is, therefore, a constructed narrative. Precisely for this reason, it becomes an interesting case, as it shows how easy it is to mistake a well-told story for a scientific fact.
Looking at Blue Monday through the lens of epistemology—the discipline that studies how knowledge is formed, justified, and transmitted—means shifting attention from the question “does the saddest day of the year really exist?” to a more interesting one: how do people build their beliefs about complex phenomena such as mood, mental health, and well-being?
What we consider “true” does not depend solely on the available evidence, but also on how it is presented, the stories in which it is embedded, and the very way we think and assess the reliability of information. In the case of Blue Monday, we have no data showing that a particular Monday is objectively sadder; we have a story that organizes January fatigue into a recognizable form. In communication psychology studies, the term narrative transportation is used to describe the process by which, when faced with a story, we become involved to the point of partially suspending critical thinking (van Laer et al., 2014). Blue Monday works precisely in this way: it offers a familiar protagonist—those returning to work or study, tired after the holidays—and an equally clear antagonist, the January Monday, with cold, expenses, and already failing resolutions.
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However, its success does not depend solely on the quality of the narrative. It also depends on the way we think: we tend to look for patterns and causal links, and in the face of a difficult winter, it is convenient to attribute malaise to a single label. This tendency can be understood in terms of need for cognitive closure: the motivation to reduce uncertainty and quickly reach a stable explanation leads to a preference for simple, clear, and definitive interpretations, even when phenomena are complex, gradual, or multifactorial (Kruglanski et al., 2009). We place great weight on our impressions—in January, many people do feel more tired or melancholic—and when a story describes what we feel, we are inclined to consider it true on an emotional level, even without solid scientific foundations.
From a psychological perspective, emotions and moods often function as “information” that guides judgment and can produce a subjective sense of truth even in the absence of strong evidence (Slovic et al., 2007). Annual repetition in the media and on social networks does the rest: the idea becomes familiar, enters common language, and what started as a marketing story takes on the contours of a small winter tradition, rarely questioned. Numerous studies show that repetition increases familiarity and processing fluency, which in turn enhance the perception of truth and acceptability of content, even without new evidence (Dechêne et al., 2010; Unkelbach et al., 2019).
Recognizing that Blue Monday is a media construct does not mean denying that winter can affect psychological well-being. Literature shows that for some people, the cold months are associated with lower mood, motivation, and energy, and in some cases with forms of seasonal depression such as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), which develop over weeks or months and require careful clinical assessment (Melrose, 2015). Reducing everything to a date on the calendar or a formula is misleading.
The risk of initiatives like Blue Monday is trivializing mental suffering, turning it into slogans or promotional tools. The case therefore becomes a useful observatory on the relationship between science and communication: it helps us distinguish a research result from a narrative that uses the language of science without adopting its methods, and reminds us of the importance of asking for evidence and clarifying the limits of claims. At the same time, it invites us to look more closely at the psychological mechanisms that shape our beliefs—the need for simple explanations, trust in immediate impressions, the comfort provided by an orderly story—to read both our moods and the messages interpreting them with greater clarity.
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Article written by Mara Floris, Researcher in Logic and Philosophy of Science at UniSR, and Carlo Martini, Associate Professor in Logic and Philosophy of Science at UniSR.