BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

Hello, I'm Matthew Price.

This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.

Every weekday, Tina Deheelie and I take a look at one big question about one big story.

Today, Blue Monday, how bad is it really?

Now today we thought we would overturn some of our misconceptions about life

because we're always hearing how bad things are especially on a day like

Blue Monday, which originally, and I've just learned

this, was a PR invention by a holiday company back in 2005.

They said that they'd run this formula, they'd got the equation, they'd come up with what

was singularly the most depressing day of the year, it was officially January the 21st.

So Blue Monday's an invented thing, but so too does it turn out that a lot of

our fears about life and the world are also invented in our own minds.

And the people here at the BBC who ran the data on this

are Rachel Schreier and Joey Durso.

As you're going to hear, both of them are fascinated by figures and charts and statistics and what all of those

things tell us about what is really going on. I work for reality check which is

the BBC's Fact-checking service.

J works with the politics team at the moment,

but we both started out as little baby journalists

in the analysis and research department here,

which is a kind of little pod of geeks basically who sit around digging into the

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