Christmas is over – sleigh bells have stopped ringing, Aunt Beryl has gone home and the three-foot-high neon pink Christmas tree has been stowed away until next December. Bridgemas feels like many moons ago. Through the hazy memories of port-induced hangovers and porter-induced carols, the notion of ‘Cambridge’ twinkles in the distance, beckoning the wise students back to whatever it was they did before swapping Secret Santa gifts and getting absolutely sloshed.

As the Nativity ends, the Cambridge-approved term-time mental health narrative begins: arrive back at Cambridge buzzing for a new term (though dreading the work, right guys?), maintain a perfect balance of stressed and elated, plummet into a neat rivulet of despair for Week Five and then bounce back out again, ready to enjoy the last three weeks.

But maybe your Christmas was hard. Perhaps the first comment your grandmother made was about your weight. Your dad might have said something that implied he wasn’t as ‘accepting’ of your sexuality as he claimed to be. Maybe you couldn’t go home at all, or really, really wished you didn’t have to. Perhaps all the work you promised your supervisor you’d catch up on just didn’t happen, no matter how hard you tried.

The ‘breaks’ we get from Cambridge, particularly Christmas, are filled with expectations – to be cheerful and chatty, to eat and drink a lot, to rest but stay on top of your work – which can be just as hard as the term itself. And there is nothing wrong with feeling that way. When I returned to Cambridge in January last year, I started to cry in a coffee shop and begged my mum to take me home, convinced that I wasn’t at all ready to come back. Admittedly, I was mainly upset because I’d forgotten my favourite duvet cover, but that suddenly felt like the end of the world. It can be difficult to adjust to coming back to Cambridge however your festive season played out, and we should perhaps do a better job of recognising that fact.

That the excitement of beginning Lent term falls in bitterly-cold January seems the most obvious contradiction in the age-old Cantab mental health saga – after all, isn’t winter supposed to make you sad? People with Seasonal Affective Disorder find their mental health is adversely affected by the long nights and cold weather, a condition that is quickly conflated in modern media with ‘January blues’. Everyone, from The Guardian to Buzzfeed, will soon come up with a list of helpful tips (some reasonable, some not) that promise to help us ‘beat the blues’ and get back to our chipper selves by February. Food and fitness companies splurge on adverts to remind us that exercise produces endorphins and the only way to exercise properly is by BUYING THIS.

While the ‘January blues’ isn’t automatically a myth by virtue of its rather sinister commodification, we should be weary of handling mental health as if it’s a one-size-fits-all 100 per cent cotton yoga poncho in olive green. As with our own ‘Week Five Blues’, the risk is that we begin to expect symptoms of depression and anxiety, brushing away our friends’ calls for help, or even our own, as temporary and perhaps standard. We all have the right to take our own mental health seriously, and to see recovery as something important to us individually, outside of the timely restrictions of a New Year’s resolution.

There are plenty of resources out there, but Cambridge and society as a whole need to do a better job of recognising that feeling sluggish after one too many mince pies is not the same as feeling like a failure because you ate them at all. My late Christmas present is to remind you all that you have permission to feel lousy or happy whenever you damn well need to, and to offer your friends the same courtesy. Ask how they’re doing, ask yourself how you’re do ng, and please, please don’t buy new workout gear just because Kate Hudson tells you to.

If you think you or a friend may have a mental health issue, or you would like to know more, go to:
www.studentminds.org.uk
OR
www.nhs.uk/Livewell/mentalhealth/Pages/Mentalhealthhome.aspx

In Cambridge, the University Counselling Service can normally fit you in pretty quickly if you’d prefer not to go down the NHS route:
www.counselling.cam.ac.uk

And finally, here is my weekly self-care, de-stressing activity (you don’t even have to order something from Amazon):
www.virtual-bubblewrap.com/bubble-wrap.swf