Why Mondays Feel Worse (Half a Million Gallup Interviews Say They Are Not)
Updated: 1 day ago
"Blue Monday" is one of the most durable ideas about mood. It is also one of the most tested, and the tests keep coming back the same way: Monday is not the worst day of the week. It only feels like it, and the reason it feels like it is visible in the numbers.
The data
The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index interviewed about 1,000 Americans every day and asked whether they felt happiness, enjoyment, laughter, worry, sadness, and anger "a lot of the day yesterday," along with a 0 to 10 rating of their life as a whole. Economists John Helliwell and Shun Wang used more than 520,000 of those interviews to test the day-of-week question and published the daily means in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.
We took the day-by-day table from that paper and ran three comparisons the paper does not spell out: Monday against the midweek average (Tuesday through Thursday), Monday against the weekend, and the size of the Sunday-to-Monday swing for each emotion. Figures are the share of people reporting each feeling for a lot of the previous day.
Monday versus the rest of the week
Happiness: 86.8% on Monday; Tuesday through Thursday average 86.8%. No difference.
Enjoyment: 82.0% Monday; 82.1% midweek.
Worry: 34.8% Monday; 34.9% midweek.
Sadness: 18.4% Monday; 18.9% midweek. Monday is slightly lower.
Anger: 14.8% Monday; 15.3% midweek. Monday is slightly lower again.
On every measure, Monday is within half a point of the midweek average, and on the negative emotions it is marginally better. Whatever Monday is, it is not uniquely blue. Friday is a little better than the other weekdays (happiness 88.1%, worry 33.2%), and then the weekend is a different world:
Happiness: 89.8% Saturday, 90.1% Sunday.
Enjoyment: 87.3% and 87.9%.
Worry: 27.4% both days.
Anger: 11.9% and 11.6%.
Life evaluation, the 0 to 10 ladder, does not move at all: 6.59 on Monday, 6.56 on Sunday. People judge their lives the same way on every day of the week. It is the day's feelings that swing.
The swing is the story
Here is the comparison that explains the myth. Compute the change from Sunday to Monday:
Worry rises by 7.4 points, from 27.4% to 34.8%.
Enjoyment falls by 5.9 points, from 87.9% to 82.0%.
Happiness falls by 3.3 points, from 90.1% to 86.8%.
Anger rises by 3.2 points, from 11.6% to 14.8%.
Sadness rises by 1.6 points, from 16.8% to 18.4%.
That is the largest single-day move in the whole week, and it happens between going to bed on Sunday and waking up on Monday. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday feel about the way Monday did, but they do not follow the best day of the week, so there is no contrast to notice. Memory keeps the contrast and drops the plateau.
A 2012 study by Arthur Stone, Jim Harter, and a colleague, using 340,000 Gallup interviews, reached the same conclusion: strong weekend and Friday effects, minimal support for a blue Monday. Gallup's summary of the paper adds the telling detail that when people are asked to recall their mood after the fact, they report Mondays as bluer than their same-day reports ever showed.
Where the weekend effect comes from
Helliwell and Wang's paper also shows what is behind the weekend lift. Respondents reported 7.1 hours spent socially with friends or family on weekend days versus 5.4 on weekdays, and the authors estimate that the extra 1.7 hours raises average happiness by about 2%. The weekend effect is about twice as large for full-time workers as for everyone else, and much smaller for people who describe their supervisor as a partner rather than a boss.
So the thing that makes Monday feel bad is not Monday. It is the loss of social hours and the return to a workplace, and the size of that loss depends on the workplace.
What this means for your own tracking
Population averages hide individuals. Your own worst day might be Sunday night, or Wednesday, or the day after a particular meeting. The only way to know is to log a few words each evening for a couple of weeks and then look at the entries by day of the week.
That is the kind of pattern Mood Textapp is built to surface. It texts you each evening, you reply in a few words, and asking for your patterns shows which days tend to run low and what you mentioned on them. If your Mondays really are worse, you will see it. If, like most of the Gallup sample, they are not, you may find the real culprit somewhere you were not looking.
If low days are most days, that is a different problem from a Monday problem, and worth taking to a doctor. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Try it by text
Text Hi to (572) 223-3345 to start Mood Textapp. There is no app to install, and it works on any phone that can text. Each evening it asks how your day was, each morning how you slept, and after two weeks one question, "what patterns do you see?", shows you your own day-of-week picture.
Your first 20 messages are free. After that, one $9.99 a month subscription covers every Textapp. More on the Mood Textapp page. Text STOP at any time to end it.
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