Lots of reasons to be cheerful in the ‘worst month’ of the year
THE OTHER day as I was flicking through Facebook a post popped up that reminded me that it was five years ago that I wrote my book The Feel Good Factor in 30 Days. It honestly doesn’t feel that long ago and what a journey I’ve had since!
However, it also reminded me that I launched to coincide with the most depressing day of the year – Blue Monday. Back in 2005, Dr Cliff Arnall, concluded that the third Monday in January was the ‘Bluest’ Monday of all based on his formula of low motivation levels, failed New Year resolutions, the end of Christmas and associated credit card bills arriving on the doormat, all culminating on the third Monday of January when depression reached its peak.
I have to say that before I looked to launch the book, I’d never heard of it, and never really felt particularly any more, or less, depressed on that day than I would on any other.
However, I have noticed that generally speaking we do talk about January being the ‘worst month’ and how flat we feel after Christmas, how dark it still is, it’s like we all have it in for January in some way or another.
This got me thinking about how much we might be creating our experience of January, and I ask them to do it, is to show them that they only see what they look for. Our brains are bombarded with billions of bits of information per second but we only see a very small amount, it would literally grind to a halt if we took it all in. So we have to filter out the stuff we don’t need, and we get to choose what we see.
This made me think about Blue Monday. If it is suggested to us that it is blue, in the same way that I suggest to my attendees to look for a particular colour, then surely we are then on the lookout for everything about that week, about the month that is blue, and we filter out anything that doesn’t fit that profile. So I wonder what would happen if we redefined January completely, we chose not to focus on the failed resolutions, or the credit card bills, but looked for all the things that made it an amazing month, just as amazing as all the others? Perhaps we focus on the bright winter sun, the fact that when you feel it on your skin it’s warm, or the bulbs that are pushing their way out of the soil, reminding you that spring is on its way. There really is an abundance of positivity out there, positivity that we’re simply not seeing... yet. But just because we haven’t seen it yet, doesn’t mean that it’s not there.
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