According to an article in today’s Austin American-Statesman (which requires a subscription so no link) entitled, “In mood science, today = bluest of 2006″ today is supposed to be a gloomy day based on the calculations of one Cliff Arnall, a health psychologist at Cardiff University in Wales. He uses the following formula to calculate the year’s “emotional low point”:
1/8W + (D-d)3/8 x TQ/M x NA
The variables are weather (W), debt (D), monthly salary (d), time since Christmas (T), time since failure to quit a bad habit (Q), low motivation levels (M) and the need to take action (NA).
I’m not a mathematician, and I’m not sure how to assign the variables, but I tried to work it anyway.
It’s beautiful today in central Texas and even 1/8 of that is still a pretty fine day. I got lost on failure to quit a bad habit. Are we measuring minutes or years? If I just quit a bad habit or never failed to quit a bad habit, then does Q=0? If so that could throw the whole equation out of whack. We could wind up with gloominess essentially being 1/8W + 0. As stated earlier 1/8 of a beautiful day ain’t bad. I also realize you’d need to make a major adjustment for the southern hemisphere since large swaths of the planet could be enjoying a perfect summer day.
Basically then it seems that if you quit a bad habit on a reasonably nice day (or in the southern hemisphere), you’ll have no call to worry about your debts, income, motivation or the fact that Christmas was a month ago.
Fortunately for me, I had a non-melancholy Monday and was able to maintain all of my bad habits.
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