It turns out that Mondays aren’t that bad after all. In fact, they’re the second happiest day of the week.

This piece in The Guardian reports a really interesting piece of research – a long-term study of the content of blogs and their relation to collective happiness. They trawled through a load of content and analysed how ‘happy’ people were by what they were writing. Words like joy, happiness and fun got put in one bracket, while words like sad, boring and loss went in another. And then they looked at not only who was happiest, but when we are happiest. 

There are countless ways of measuring happiness, all of which have their flaws, but this seems like a clever way of indicating happiness on a global scale.

According to this methodology, Obama’s first day in office was the happiest for the world in a while. Interesting stuff. It’s all reported in full in the Journal of Happiness Studies.