Keeping sadness at bay on the bleakest days

Joe Gillis has a cold. Recently he began taking acid reflux medicine. The winter can get to him. His feet ache.

But when I asked him, Friday, if he was sad, I think I could hear his head shake all the way from Yarmouth.

“I’m too busy,” said the rural doctor, a married dad of three. “I just don’t think so.”

I typed those words with emphasis into my laptop because Monday isn’t just the start of another workweek. It’s Blue Monday, said to be the most depressing day of the year because, the theory goes, it’s when we’re all cold, broke and riddled with shame because our new year’s resolutions to get fit, drink less booze, and be better to others, have already fallen to the wayside.

Now, Gillis is a doc, with a physician’s income, which probably means that he is not afflicted by the financial blues.

Something big, on the other hand, is seemingly working against his happiness.

Last Wednesday, you see, he turned 47. Though that hardly makes the Creignish, Inverness County-native Methuselah, it is a notable number.

A study released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research says 47.2 is the age when people in the developed world have the least amount of happiness, with the figure rising to 48.2 in developing nations.

The author of the study, David Blanchflower, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, studied data from 132 countries, including 95 developing and 37 developed nations to determine the connection between well-being and age.

He concluded that every country has a “happiness curve,” U-shaped over lifetimes, that reaches its nadir in developing nations at age 48.2.

“Unhappiness is hill-shaped in age,” Blanchflower wrote in the study. “The curve’s trajectory holds true in countries where the median wage is high and where it is not and where people tend to live longer and where they don’t.”

In the study, Blanchflower used a variety of different measures of unhappiness: despair, anxiety, loneliness, sadness, depression, phobias and panic, being down-hearted, losing sleep and confidence, feeling left out and “thinking of yourself as a worthless person.”

As one American newspaper noted in its coverage of the study, “in other words just your garden variety mid-life crisis.”

Forty-seven, I’ll be honest, is just a hazy memory for me.

But Gillis, whose average patient at his Yarmouth practice is 45.8 years old, reminded me of some of the pitfalls to that time of life: the older parents, who may or may not have started to be afflicted with dementia, cancer, heart disease and the other afflictions of aging; the growing financial responsibilities of homeownership and post-secondary education for children; the daily physical reminders that, no, you are not 35 — or even 45 — any more.

Even at my venerable age I recall that by 47 you do realize that even people you really love do actually die. Existential questions about the nature of life are surely fermenting by then. Probably you have asked yourself Peggy Lee’s immortal question: "is that all there is?"

Marriage, or at least companionship, helps stave off the despair, according to the Blanchflower study.

So does, of all things, owning a dog or cat, according to Rebecca Greenstein, a Toronto veterinarian who told me Friday that there is increased recognition of the therapeutic function of pets, both in the general population and for folks struggling with mental illness.

Pets get people outside, connecting with others. On days like Blue Monday, she said, they also give people a sense of being needed.

“They provide acceptance without judgment,” said Greenstein, who is also veterinary medical adviser for Rover.com, an online marketplace for trading pet services.

Another way to keep the darkness at bay is finding a way to keep life fresh and exciting.

Gillis, for example, spent 20 years as a public relations practitioner and then went to med school at age 35.

Now he has this second career, he has three kids aged seven through two, he has a whole new life in Yarmouth.

“I’m a little closer to 50,” Gillis says of the significance of his birthday. “I’m probably more than half way through life.”

But if the months ahead are going to be his saddest on record things are going to have to go south real quick.

In fairness, it might never be as good as Gillis’ 30s, when he was financially independent for the first time and felt that selfassurance and excitement that comes with the belief that his life was his to create.

He doubts, on the other hand, that they will be like the early 20s, the worst time for Gillis, as they were for so many of us.

He had led this idyllic sheltered life in Cape Breton. Now, after attending university he was in big city Halifax, “trying to figure life and myself out.”

That was a long time ago. He was a young man then. Back in the innocent, uncomplicated days, when Blue Monday was a song by Fats Domino.