3 Lessons Blue Monday Can Teach Us About DEI

Not a fan of Blue Monday? See no real value in marking the day?

Even if you’re not a fan of the sentiment, we’re firm believers that you can learn something from pretty much anything. Here are our 3 ideas for things you can learn from Blue Monday (whether you believe in it or not) to put into practice in your DEI work.

Blue Monday is said* to be the most depressing day of the year, and many of us experience a barrage of motivational social media posts every year on the third Monday of January to mark the occasion. But aside from the sentiment that ‘dark, cold weather in January** can lower people’s moods’, is there anything we can learn from Blue Monday, especially in the field of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion? We’ve compiled 3 valuable lessons that Blue Monday can teach us about DEI.

1. Don’t Take Information At Face Value

The first DEI lesson we can learn from Blue Monday is not to judge ideas or people purely on whether something ‘seems’ right. For many of us (especially those in colder, less sunny climates), it makes perfect sense that the third Monday in January would have been scientifically proven to be the most depressing day of the year.

But the reality is that the day was invented by a travel company in 2004, looking to boost sales of holidays. While it was based on a pseudo-science ‘formula’, in reality, there was no solid scientific evidence to back up the claim. In this case, the travel company was aware that people are generally a bit deflated after the holiday season, and capitalised on it by reinforcing that idea with (unfounded) ‘science’ to prove the concept, and hopefully sell more holidays as a result.

In terms of DEI, ensuring that you don’t take information at face value, and dig deeper to understand where it comes from, is also crucial. This is particularly the case when it comes to generalisations about any particular group of people. Whenever you are in a context in which you are instructed that all people of a particular demographic have anything in common, such as a shared need for certain adjustments, seek to understand the source of this decision. Just because it ‘feels right’, doesn’t necessarily mean the information is accurate, and it’s important to ascertain whether that idea came from verified sources and/or people with lived experience, or people making assumptions.

Example: A great example of this is the use of the word ‘brainstorming’. For a number of years, there were reports that people were cautious around the use of this language in the workplace when sharing new ideas as group, for fear of offending people with epilepsy. In reality, when the Epilepsy Society conducted a survey on this, they found an ‘overwhelming response’ that people with epilepsy did not take offence to the term used in that context. Where this idea actually came from is uncertain: the earliest reference to it we can find is a news article from 2005, but the origin seems unclear. If you know anything further, please leave a comment and share with us!

2. Microaggressions

The original premise behind Blue Monday was that it’s the most depressing day of the year courtesy of a number of compounding factors, including:

• The post-holiday season slump for moods and finances

• New Year dieting causing people to feel sluggish and under-fed

• Bad weather and lack of sunlight (the company which invented it is based in the UK)

• Societal pressure from ‘New Year, New Me!’ style articles to turn your life around

Instinctively, many of us will look at that list and feel that, while any one of those things would be manageable, struggling through all of them sounds horrible.

Microaggressions can act in much the same way in a workplace. While the nature of microaggressions means that they are subtle, indirect or unintentional actions or comments that discriminate against a group of people, the impact they can have is anything but ‘micro’. Understanding how it feels to juggle a compounding list of difficult experiences is key in getting to grips with the dangers of microaggressions. Blue Monday can provide people with a familiar parallel to draw for those without direct experience of being discriminated against.

Handy Tip: Whenever a colleague next seems to ‘overreact’ to an event that happened at work, consider what other invisible difficulties may have compounded throughout the day, week, month or their entire time at the company. Their reaction may be about all of those things.

3. Awareness Days Are Important

While the premise behind Blue Monday is not scientifically sound and the original intention behind it was materialistic, there is one important point that Blue Monday shows which is also essential to DEI: that having awareness days or occasions can provide people with a talking point to rally around, especially when discussing difficult issues.

Mental health can be a really difficult topic to open up about, for some demographics more than others. Having a day in which people can raise the topic colloquially can help start conversations for people who otherwise wouldn’t talk about their mental health. Granted, most of the coverage about Blue Monday is normally quite critical and debunking the point of the day (and rightly so) - but even if it’s more about correcting false information than anything else, Blue Monday offers a notable opportunity for organisations with deep knowledge of good mental health practices to share their advice and get more press publicity in doing so.

Similarly, awareness days for DEI offer a time to start conversations that people may otherwise shy away from, and receive more attention to start conversations about the issues faced by those communities. Does that mean that Trans Day Of Visibility or Black History Month solves all the problems faced by those communities? Of course not. It also doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be celebrating diversity all the time, and having these discussions all year round. But it does provide a particular day on which issues for different communities can be spotlighted, and provide an opportunity for tricky conversations to be started that may otherwise have been swept to one side.

*more on that later…

**in the Northern hemisphere - perhaps Blue Monday should be moved to July in the other half of the globe!