10 steps to improved physical and mental health this January

January can be a depressing month, but that doesn’t mean you have to be. Exercise, talking with friends, a good night’s sleep and gratitude for small things all improve mood, writes Clodagh Finn

THERE’S a formula for the most depressing day of the year. Take a hostile Monday morning in January, mix in post-Christmas debt, a little winter malaise, some rotten weather and it all adds up to Blue Monday, which supposedly falls on January 19.

It’s tosh, of course. That Blue Monday is the most depressing day of the year was first mooted by a psychologist in 2005. It has been dismissed as pseudoscience.