Blue Monday can be a meaningful moment — not just a date on the calendar.
When is Blue Monday?
Blue Monday 2027 is Monday 18 January 2027. If you’re planning Blue Monday activities for your team this year, scroll down — the 12 practical ideas below all work for 2027 planning.
Planning Q1 wellbeing beyond Blue Monday?
Download our free 2027 Wellbeing Awareness Days Calendar — every awareness moment for the year, with workshop ideas for each.
While often discussed as ‘the most depressing day of the year’, Blue Monday also highlights common pressures that many workplaces feel in January.. lack of daylight, post-holiday stress and reduced motivation.
For organisations, this day (and the surrounding period) can be a useful prompt to think about how wellbeing is supported more consistently throughout the year — not just on one date.
Below are five evidence-informed ways to boost mood and wellbeing on and beyond Blue Monday, with ideas you can use as part of longer-term workplace wellbeing planning.
1. Focus on your Strengths
If there’s one thing you do for Blue Monday 2027– get your team to think about their strengths.
Just as a fish doesn’t know it is wet, we don’t always know our strengths because they seem so natural and normal to us. Our signature strengths don’t seem like a big deal to us, but they mean so much to other people.
Research shows that when people identify and use their unique strengths, they report feeling ‘more alive and fundamentally happier’.
The Gallup Institute looked at a huge dataset from millions of employees across the globe. The results showed that the more hours per day adults believe they use their unique strengths, the more likely they are to report ‘being energetic’ ‘being happy’ and ‘smiling and laughing a lot’. In fact employees who use their strengths every day are more than three times more likely to report having an excellent quality of life.
2. Try this Morning Happiness Practice: The 7 Minute Delay
This is about starting your day powerfully. There are multiple studies proving that the state that you start the day in – tends to be how your day unfolds. So if you start your day by grabbing your phone and feeling stressed and overwhelmed its going to be quite hard for you to turn this state around for the remainder of your day.
The first 7 minutes of your morning is about doing what’s good for you. Meditation, stretching, drinking a glass of water, cuddling your kids or partner or dog. Whatever will stop the cortisol surging up and putting you in a place of high stress to start your day. A morning routine can be transformative. If you don’t have one in place already, Blue Monday is the perfect time to start.
3. Three Good Things
The practice of noting 3 good things from your day or week has been popularised as a sure-fire way to boost your happiness and strengthen your mindset.
In our day-to-day lives, it’s easy to get caught up in the things that go wrong and feel like we’re living under our own private rain cloud. At the same time, we tend to adapt to the good things and people in our lives, taking them for granted. As a result, we often overlook everyday beauty and goodness—a kind gesture from a stranger, say, or the warmth of our heater on a chilly morning. In the process, we frequently miss opportunities for happiness and connection.
When seeking to live your happiest life, gratitude is the key to becoming more conscious and aware of the happiness and joy that are already present in your life. At the end of each day, take a moment to say or write down Three Good Things. Chances are you’ll struggle to stop at three.
Thinking beyond one day?
Blue Monday can spark conversations. For many organisations, it becomes a starting point for longer-term support that strengthens leadership, manager capability and team wellbeing across the year.
4. Know your Values
How you identify is incredibly important to happiness. And your personal identity comes from your values.
Values are a set of ideas about HOW you want to live your life; the kind of person you want to be; and the principles you want to stand for. If life was one complete journey, then a value would be a path you choose to follow. Consider values as a kind of ethical GPS we can use to navigate through life.
See the list of values in the table and have a think about which you feel most aligned with. Once you’re clearer on what your personal values are, you’ll find it easier to value and prioritise the things that make you happy.
5. Find your Flow State
Have you ever been so engaged in an activity that you lost all sense of time? Hours passed, but you didn’t notice – you felt calm, focused, deeply satisfied, even meditative? This is the Flow State.
In our Productivity Workshop we explore how to harness this state intentionally — balancing structure with creativity, reducing digital distractions, and managing attention in short, focused bursts. It’s about working with your brain’s natural rhythm, not against it.
The Flow state is the optimal state of human consciousness. Research shows that the more often you experience it, the greater the sense of wellbeing, happiness and general life satisfaction.
Psychologists describe flow as having 6 core components:
- Complete concentration on the task at hand – our thoughts and actions become one.
- The sense of self decreases and the ego is quietened
- Our perception of time changes
- The sense of anxious struggle disappears
- The sense of control increases – the task provides immediate feedback which helps with the psychological immersion
- The task becomes a pleasurable experience in and of itself
Flow has been shown to make people up to 500% more productive; 600% more creative; and increase thinking power so much it can cut learning times in half! Flow can even make us more empathetic.
When in flow we feel utterly content and in control of our world and we feel totally aligned to our purpose – our thoughts and actions are one and the same.
If your job doesn’t put you in flow state, that’s fine – try to find ways of accessing flow state in your personal time. If you are not sure where to start – try to think of something that you loved to do as a child – building lego, painting, playing an instrument; games. Play is another crucial ingredient for happiness that we often forget in adulthood.
6. Run a workplace Blue Monday energiser
The cheapest, fastest way to shift the team’s collective energy on the actual Monday morning. A 30-minute energiser combines movement, breath and music to break the post-Christmas slump in real time — no slides, no theory, just an embodied reset that puts the team in a different state before they start their week.
Research on group exercise and shared physical activity consistently shows mood-lifting and connection-building effects beyond what either does individually. The energiser format works equally well in-person at your office or virtually for hybrid teams (cameras-on, chair-friendly variations available).
Most-booked at 9.30am Monday morning to anchor the week, or as a mid-afternoon pick-me-up on Blue Monday itself.
Book our Wellbeing Energiser for Events: a 30-minute movement and mood-shift session designed for whole-team Blue Monday delivery.
7. Book a Mental Fitness Hour
January’s anchor mental health workshop and our most-booked single session year-round. The Mental Fitness Hour gives every colleague the basics of looking after their own mental health — what’s normal, what’s not, how to spot when a peer is struggling, and how to start the conversation. Particularly relevant in January, when motivation is low and the post-Christmas adjustment makes mental wellbeing harder to maintain on autopilot.
Sixty minutes, delivered live in-person or virtually for global teams. Pairs well with Mental Health Training for Managers (parallel-track session for line managers covering the same content from a leadership lens).
Across our UK client base, organisations who book the Mental Fitness Hour for Blue Monday consistently report it as the single most-engaged moment of their January wellbeing calendar.
Book the Mental Fitness Hour — practical, evidence-led, designed for the whole team.
8. Run a sound healing or breathwork session
The restorative complement to a content-heavy Blue Monday programme. A 30-45 minute sound healing session (gongs, singing bowls) or guided breathwork creates the kind of nervous-system reset that January desperately needs — short daylight hours and the cumulative stress of the new-year ramp-up genuinely affect physiology.
Sound healing and breathwork both activate the parasympathetic nervous system measurably, lowering heart rate and cortisol within the session. The experience translates particularly well to teams who’d usually roll their eyes at the word “meditation” — there’s nothing to learn, no technique to perform, just an immersive sensory experience that does the work for them.
Often booked as the closing piece of a Blue Monday afternoon, or as a standalone mid-week restorative session in the week following.
See our Sound Healing and Breathwork sessions.
9. Workplace Good Mood food
What we eat genuinely affects how we feel — particularly in January, when post-holiday eating patterns, reduced sunlight (and therefore reduced vitamin D) and low energy combine to push mood down. The science on the gut-brain axis is increasingly settled: certain foods stabilise blood sugar, support the production of mood-regulating neurotransmitters, and protect cognitive performance through the working day.
Our Good Mood Food workshop translates that science into the actual changes employees can make that week. Practical things like protein at breakfast (stabilises mood for hours), the role of omega-3s in mood regulation, the foods that actually help with January energy dips, and the swaps that beat the post-lunch slump. Led by a BANT-registered nutritionist — credentialled, not generic.
A great Blue Monday session for organisations whose teams have been asking about nutrition specifically.
Book the Good Mood Food Workshop — the science of how nutrition affects mood, made workplace-practical.
10. Wellbeing for Winter workshop
For organisations who want to treat Blue Monday as part of a coordinated winter wellbeing investment rather than a one-day intervention. Our Wellbeing for Winter workshop addresses the specific challenges of the darker months — seasonal mood patterns (including SAD awareness), the way reduced daylight affects sleep and energy, and the small daily habits that protect mental health from October through February.
The strongest version of this workshop sits at the start of January as the framing piece for a wider winter wellbeing programme — Blue Monday is the obvious launch moment, and the workshop gives the team practical tools they’ll genuinely use through February and beyond.
Particularly suited to organisations in industries where January is the hardest commercial month (financial services year-end, post-Christmas retail, professional services peak workload).
Book the Wellbeing for Winter workshop — seasonal capability for the months that need it most.
11. Encourage manager check-ins on Blue Monday week
The lowest-cost, highest-impact intervention on this list. Encourage every line manager to hold a 15-minute 1:1 with each direct report in the week of Blue Monday — with a wellbeing question on the agenda alongside the usual work updates. Something genuinely open like “How are you really doing, on a scale of one to ten?” rather than a generic “how are you?”
The reason this works: line managers are the single biggest determinant of workplace mental health, but most haven’t been explicitly equipped to hold these conversations. A scheduled prompt on a culturally meaningful date (Blue Monday) gives them permission and structure to ask, without it feeling intrusive.
For organisations building this into a longer-term capability rather than a one-off, this is exactly what our Mental Health Training for Managers workshop builds.
See Mental Health Training for Managers for the year-round version of this conversation skill.
12. Workshops to Mark Blue Monday 2027 at your Workplace
If your organisation wants to turn Blue Monday 2027 awareness into everyday wellbeing, these January workshops are a powerful place to start:
Planning ahead for 2027?
Download our free Wellbeing Awareness Days 2027 Calendar to plan your wellbeing strategy for the year ahead
Blue Monday at work — the basics
When is Blue Monday 2027?
Blue Monday 2027 falls on Monday 18 January 2027 — the third Monday of January. Blue Monday is calculated each year by a (much-debated) formula combining weather, post-Christmas debt, time since Christmas and motivation levels. Whether or not the science holds up, the date has become a meaningful annual workplace wellbeing moment in the UK.
Is Blue Monday actually the most depressing day of the year?
Probably not — the formula was originally created for a Sky Travel marketing campaign in 2005 and there’s limited peer-reviewed evidence to support it. However, the date has become a useful workplace prompt to address the genuine pressures of January: short daylight hours, post-holiday adjustment, financial pressure and lower motivation. UK employers increasingly use Blue Monday as a launch moment for January wellbeing programmes rather than treating the day itself as scientifically meaningful.
Booking a Blue Monday workshop — timing, format and programme options
What are the most-booked workplace wellbeing workshops for Blue Monday?
Across our UK client base, the most-booked Blue Monday sessions are our Mental Fitness Hour (whole-team mental health workshop), Wellbeing for Winter (seasonal capability workshop), and a Wellbeing Energiser session to kick off the team’s week. Most clients book Blue Monday workshops in late November or December for January delivery.
When should we book a Blue Monday workshop?
Six to eight weeks ahead of January for the most-booked slots — December planning windows fill up fast. For Blue Monday 2027 (18 January), book by mid-November 2026. For Blue Monday 2028, book by mid-November 2027.
What’s the difference between Blue Monday and a winter wellbeing programme?
Blue Monday is a single date prompt; a winter wellbeing programme is the year-round investment that addresses the underlying issue (energy, mood and motivation through October-February). Many UK organisations now use Blue Monday as the visible launch moment for a 3-month winter wellbeing programme rather than treating it as a one-off intervention. See our Wellbeing for Winter workshop for the programme anchor.
Can Blue Monday workshops be delivered virtually for global teams?
Yes — most Blue Monday workshops work well virtually across time zones, particularly relevant for hybrid and global teams returning from Christmas break. We deliver via Zoom, Teams or Webex, with optional recording for asynchronous access. See our Virtual Wellbeing Workshops for Global Teams.
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