Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 9 | Written Reflection

I turned twenty-eight on the 19th of May, and true to form, it sent me spiralling into the kind of introspection I usually reserve for New Year’s Eve. Not spiralling in the bad sense, more the sense of catching yourself mid-thought and realising you’ve wandered somewhere interesting. Why do we do this every year? Light candles, blow them out, make a wish we don’t say out loud in case saying it ruins it? Why does one person start counting down the days with genuine glee while another quietly hopes the calendar just skips it?

Birthdays are older than most of our current explanations for why we bother with them. The Egyptians were lighting candles for reasons that had nothing to do with cake and everything to do with warding off evil spirits, treating the day as a genuine marker of transformation rather than a milestone to post about. The Romans came along later and did something that, in hindsight, changed everything: they were the first to celebrate birthdays for ordinary people, not just gods and kings. Which means the entire tradition, at its root, was an act of quiet rebellion, insisting that an ordinary life deserved a day of its own. I like that. I like it a lot, actually, because I have always been what you might call a birthday person, mine or anyone else’s. There is something genuinely thrilling about making someone feel seen for twenty-four hours, about the small conspiracy of a surprise, about watching someone’s face do that particular thing it does when they realise people remembered.

But not everyone feels that. Social media would have you believe birthdays are universally adored, a parade of balloons and captions and confetti emojis, but plenty of people quietly dread the day the way some people dread Mondays. There’s a real term for it: birthday blues, sometimes birthday depression, sometimes birthday anxiety, depending on who’s naming it. It shows up before it even shows up. You feel it circling for days beforehand, a kind of low-grade tiredness or disinterest that creeps in ahead of schedule. Some people go quiet. Some withdraw socially just as the day looms, like they’re bracing for impact rather than looking forward to anything. Self-esteem takes a dip. Appetite shifts. There’s a fog that settles in that has nothing to do with the cake you haven’t eaten yet.

So where does that come from? A lot of it, if I’m honest, comes down to expectation, and expectation is a dangerous game, one most of us have played and lost at some point. You have a version of the day in your head, the perfect gathering or the perfect gift, and reality, as it tends to, shows up looking nothing like the mental storyboard. Maybe you’re the type who moves heaven and earth to make everyone else feel celebrated, yet quietly, privately, you’re still waiting for someone to throw you the party you’ve never asked for out loud. And when birthday after birthday passes without it, you start to draw a conclusion that’s hard to shake: nobody’s going to think of this for me unless I spell it out myself. That conclusion, once it takes root, has a way of souring the whole day before it even starts.

Then there’s the ageing of it all, which is its own particular flavour of dread. Birthdays are an annual, unavoidable reminder that time is doing what time does. For some people that reminder tips over into something darker, a kind of countdown logic, where each birthday reads less like a celebration and more like a ticking clock inching toward mortality. The face in the mirror looks a little different. The energy doesn’t bounce back the way it used to. And somewhere in there, a quieter thought creeps in: what have I actually done with the years I’ve already spent? Which is really a different name for the same thing: life assessment. Birthdays are notorious for turning into an audit, particularly the milestone ones. Eighteen. Twenty-one. The big three-oh, the big four-oh, whichever number carries weight in your particular corner of the world. We’ve built entire cultural rituals, extravagant parties, expensive gifts, elaborate expectations, around the idea that certain ages demand certain achievements, and if you haven’t hit them, the day itself can feel like an uncomfortable mirror rather than a celebration. Suddenly you’re thinking about the resolution you made in January and conveniently forgot by February, the hobby you keep meaning to pick up, the promise you made yourself and quietly shelved. And you start doing the maths on whether you still have time, a time frame that, more often than not, somebody else built for you without asking.

Comparison doesn’t help, either, and social media has turned it into a full-contact sport. A single scroll through everyone else’s confetti and candlelit dinners is enough to make your own plans feel small by comparison. That’s the trap of it. The second you start comparing, you’ve already lost, because comparison always finds a way to make you feel like you’re missing something you didn’t know you wanted until you saw someone else have it. Add in family and friends nudging you toward a particular kind of celebration, or the entire gift-industrial-complex insisting that love is measurable in packaging, and you’ve got a day engineered to disappoint almost by design.

And sometimes it’s simpler and sadder than any of that. You’ve just had some genuinely shitty birthdays before. A hard year. A first birthday without someone who used to be there. A loss or a change so significant it recoloured the whole occasion permanently, so that the day carries a certain ache no matter how much time has passed. Nostalgia can cut the opposite way, too, chasing the memory of a birthday so good that nothing since has managed to top it, which is its own quiet grief. Some people simply aren’t ready for the amount of change a birthday represents and would rather stay exactly where they are, thank you very much. Others feel the specific dread of being watched, the gifts, the attention, the hosting, the sheer performance of being celebrated, and would honestly rather disappear into a corner with a book. And underneath a lot of it, there’s loneliness: the day arriving and reminding you, pointedly, of who isn’t there to share it.

None of this discriminates by age or background, by the way. You can love your birthday for twenty-seven years running and then, one year, without much warning, feel completely different about it. That’s allowed. The trick isn’t pretending it doesn’t happen. It’s noticing it and actually doing something with it rather than white-knuckling through the day and calling it fine.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always been the birthday person in my family, and I think I know exactly why. We were never a family with much to throw around, but birthdays were somehow always full: good food, good cake, and everyone actually present. We have this tradition of waking each other up with the birthday cake, candles already lit, first thing in the morning, and even now that half my family is scattered across the world, they still send it to me on video. That small, slightly ridiculous ritual has carried more weight for me over the years than any elaborate party could. Turning twenty-eight, I feel steady. Grateful for the decade of mess and growth that got me here, aligned with where I’m headed, and, this is the part that actually surprised me, genuinely proud of the goals I gave myself extra time to reach, rather than disappointed I didn’t rush them. Each birthday I set myself something to carry into the next year, the same way some people do resolutions at New Year’s. And the honest truth is I don’t need much beyond that. My people, a cake, a candle, and a goal, that’s the whole formula. My family taught me, without ever saying it directly, that less really can be more.

If any of this birthday-blues business sounds familiar, there are ways to loosen its grip. Say what you actually want out loud, rather than hoping someone reads your mind. Tell your people how you’d like to be celebrated and where they fit into that picture, because most people aren’t withholding on purpose, they simply don’t know. Let go of the milestone scoreboard society hands you and measure the day against your own priorities instead of someone else’s idea of where you should be by now. It’s worth asking yourself honestly whether your goals are yours or borrowed. If loneliness or sadness creeps in, say that out loud too, to someone who can actually hold it with you; most people would rather know than guess. Write it down if that’s more your speed, what’s actually bothering you, and what you’re genuinely looking forward to accomplishing, because a birthday is as good a reset point as January ever was. And write a gratitude list while you’re at it, not as a performative exercise but because it has a genuine way of shrinking the comparison instinct down to something manageable.

A birthday is, at the end of the day, a personal thing, not a public examination. It deserves to be shaped around what actually makes you feel good rather than what looks good from the outside. However you celebrate, celebrate it as yours. Don’t hand another one over to the blues if you don’t have to.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.