Brace yourself, this is a very Northern Hemisphere-centric message. If you’re a friend from below the equator, could you forward this back to yourself for July?
A friend recently posted about Blue Monday and how to use music to pull yourself out of its spell. While Blue Monday isn’t real (sorry Ian), his idea for using music to impact mood is well-researched and excellent.
Blue Monday was a marketing idea from a now-defunct British travel agency to get people to book trips when they were feeling mid-winter, post-holiday gloomy. They worked with a psychologist and motivational speaker who gave reasons that the third Monday of the year, at least in Britain, is the gloomiest, and therefore saddest day. Turns out to be totally undocumented.
What IS true is that the amount of daylight and the weather and other impacts (financial, physical, work, social) can impact your mood tremendously. And, while time heals a lot of these, ignoring these feelings is not as useful as noticing them and remedying what you can.
If the weather – or anything else about life right now – has you more down than you’d like, you have two jobs:
- Notice those feelings. Name them, talk to yourself or someone else about them to understand what’s happening.
- Add in some good feelings. Pick one or two (or twelve) things that make you feel good and do those on purpose. Drink something warm that you love, listen to something uplifting, watch something that makes you laugh, hug something or someone reliable and comforting, say something that fills you up, smell something delicious… you name it.
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to reduce stress, avoid sadness, decrease anxiety. All of those things are very hard to do, and not usually compatible with living your life. Sometimes the answer is to add something good and then see how you feel.
What will you add?
All my best,
Dr. G
