‘Blue Monday’ falls on Monday 19th January, it was largely created as a marketing gimmick by the holiday industry, but has been embraced by many of us and for good reason. Mental health professionals often only focus on the negative side of issues but marketing people see the opportunity and as any business graduate will tell you if you are a good SWOT you will look for the opportunity in any threat. Here mental health expert Noel McDermott looks at the opportunity to be had in feeling low and simple changes you can make to boost your mood.

Before we look at that, it’s important to spot when your mood needs some advice from a professional so a quick guide can be used called PHQ 9, as used by your GP. It will give you a numerical score on your depressive symptoms indicating if there are issues that need professional help. The higher the score the more serious the issues are.

Don’t dismiss your feelings - they count

Let’s say you are not ‘clinical’ in your low feelings, so why could they be helpful? One way of thinking about feelings is that they are quick guides to giving us non-cognitive information. Ways we can assess situations without all the effort of thinking them through, which can be super helpful or super problematic depending on the situation of course. We have a whole bunch of feelings that simply say, ’that’s good, do more of it’, and a whole bunch that say ‘that’s not good, do less of it’. Or to put it another way, the good feelings say, ‘nothing needs to change’ and the bad feelings say, ‘something needs to change’. Here’s an example:, ‘I’m getting hugs, I feel good, nothing needs to change and I can keep on getting hugs’, 'I'm being punched in the face, I feel bad, I need to stop getting punched in the face’. Obviously that’s an exaggerated example but it’s there to make the point which is don’t dismiss your feelings especially if they are bad ones. Ask, what is this feeling telling me?

Feeling low might be telling me something needs to change. Which is exactly what the travel marketing person who jumped on the research understood. It’s interesting to note that marketing as a profession is often credited to have been started by Sigmund Freud’s nephew!

So are you feeling a bit blue? What needs to change?

Here’s a few evidence based things you may want to try to pep up, that don’t involve jumping on a jet:

As mentioned above, hugs. Never a bad idea to get more hugs in your life; cats, dogs, kids, adults…. hug them all!

Exercise… an oldie but a goodie. Exercise is the single most important health and wellbeing change you can make in your life to feel better

Helping other people … to many of us helping others when we feel low seems counterintuitive, but the evidence is quite clear, being pr- social and helping others is a huge mood booster

Make sure you haven’t inadvertently surrounded yourself by idiots. The place where we do this the most these days is online. Cull that algorithm and your followers/following lists. I can’t stress this enough, get positive, prosocial life affirming people in your life, IRL and online

Eat well but don’t beat yourself up if you slip with a choccy or two! Although specific foods don’t necessarily affect mood, we need regular meal times and plenty of veg and fruit for health. There is no mental health without physical health. Try to make meal times social and sit down with others. For those loved ones absent, remember the meals we had online together in the pandemic? Get creative with that one.

Noel comments: “You can if you want to go on holiday of course, but don’t feel afraid to embrace change and connect with your feelings and emotions, they’re real and they count.”

Mental health expert Noel McDermott is a psychotherapist and dramatherapist with over 30 years’ work within the health, social care, education, and criminal justice fields. His company Mental Health Works provides unique mental health services for the public and other organisations. Mental Health Works offers in situ health care and will source, identify and coordinate personalised teams to meet your needs – https://www.mentalhealthworks.net/