Some time ago, around this time of year, I remember feeling miserable and I couldn't work out why. No major changes were happening in my life and it was business as usual in terms of getting on with things. Yet for some reason, it was more of a challenge to get motivated and I realised that everyone around me wasn't full of enthusiasm either. By chance, someone else was having a good moan about feeling flat and had no explanation either. This girl piped up that it was a classic case of the Post-Christmas Blues. What? We'd never heard of this before but on further explanation it did start to make sense. Over the Christmas holidays, we get comfortable with having days off, eating lots, watching TV, partying in the evening and generally doing nothing too demanding. We get quite good at it and continue this momentum right though until a few days after New Year. Then the demands slowly creep up on us again and we have to get back to our usual commitments. It seems the normal thing to do and we ignore the way the changes make us feel and how drained we get. Eventually we just resort to feeling down. After hearing about this syndrome called Post-Christmas Blues, we started feeling better. We were able to identify why we were feeling so flat, and we realised that it was perfectly normal and we weren't alone. This rekindled a whole new energy. Very quickly we committed ourselves to getting out of the rut by balancing our blues with a good excuse to work hard and play harder. Recognising you feel down is often enough to spur you into making yourself feel better. Paramount to successfully reviving the feel-good factor is getting the support of your friends. So if you and your friends are getting a dose of the Post-Christmas Blues, accept that it happens and party your way back to an optimum level of enjoying life. David Simpson is an experienced youth counsellor and a regular SYP columnist.
