{"id":13087,"date":"2012-01-16T09:35:24","date_gmt":"2012-01-16T14:35:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13087"},"modified":"2012-01-16T09:35:24","modified_gmt":"2012-01-16T14:35:24","slug":"it-may-be-pseudoscientific-gibberish-but-it-makes-a-good-newspaper-headline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/01\/16\/it-may-be-pseudoscientific-gibberish-but-it-makes-a-good-newspaper-headline\/","title":{"rendered":"It may be pseudoscientific gibberish, but it makes a good newspaper headline"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s pretty much a certainty that your local newspaper and radio stations have been busy pushing the meme that today is “Blue Monday<\/a>“. It’s actually a bit of advertising creativity that’s metastasized:<\/p>\n

\n

January is a depressing time for many. The weather’s awful, you get less daylight than a stunted dandelion and your body is struggling to cope with the withdrawal of the depression-alleviating calorific foods, such as chocolate, of the hedonistic festive period. January is one long post-Christmas hangover.<\/p>\n

So there are many reasons why someone may feel particularly “down” during January. But every year, much of the media become fixated on a specific day — the third Monday in January — as the most depressing of the year. It has become known as Blue Monday.<\/p>\n

This silly claim comes from a ludicrous equation that calculates “debt”, “motivation”, “weather”, “need to take action” and other arbitrary variables that are impossible to quantify and largely incompatible.<\/p>\n

True clinical depression (as opposed to a post-Christmas slump) is a far more complex condition that is affected by many factors, chronic and temporary, internal and external. What is extremely unlikely (i.e. impossible) is that there is a reliable set of external factors that cause depression in an entire population at the same time every year.<\/p>\n

But that doesn’t stop the equation from popping up every year. Its creator, Dr Cliff Arnall, devised it for a travel firm. He has since admitted that it is meaningless (without actually saying it’s wrong).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s pretty much a certainty that your local newspaper and radio stations have been busy pushing the meme that today is “Blue Monday“. It’s actually a bit of advertising creativity that’s metastasized: January is a depressing time for many. The weather’s awful, you get less daylight than a stunted dandelion and your body is struggling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,28,73],"tags":[97,71,141,39,139],"class_list":["post-13087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-media","category-randomness","tag-advertising","tag-debt","tag-depression","tag-junkscience","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3p5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13087"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13088,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13087\/revisions\/13088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}