On May 31, I turned 27. Messages poured in, cards arrived: yet despite all of this, I found myself in floods of tears. 

I’m not alone in indulging in a massive cry on my birthday. The phenomenon of the “birthday blues” affects, on average, 83 per cent of people, with many psychologists viewing birthdays as “temporal landmarks” that drastically alter our mental state. This tracks with 23-year-old Maddy Allen. “I have cried on my birthday almost every year since I was about five,” she says. “Birthdays are a clear point of comparison. [I end up] reflecting on how much has changed.” While she notes this can occasionally be a healthy, helpful practice, negative thoughts often overshadow the positives. 

Mark Vahrmeyer, a psychotherapist at Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy, affirms that the “birthday blues” are a deeply ingrained social phenomenon and a “very recognisable and common experience.” The distress often stems from a fundamental cognitive dissonance. “A birthday functions like an annual confrontation between the life we imagined we would be living, and the life we are actually living,” he explains. “That gap between the ‘expected self’ and the ‘actual self’ can be emotionally powerful because it touches on desire, regret, ambition, loss and identity.” 

For many, confronting this ‘gap’ can bring about a stark spike in psychological distress. As Caroline Davies, 24, puts it: “There’s no party that can make you feel like you’re escaping your own mortality.” Population-based studies even show that suicide risks are six per cent to 40 per cent higher on birthdays compared to normal days. 28-year-old Vida Adamczewski says that she went as far as trying to take a “codeine overdose washed down with Prosecco” on her 18th birthday. “My 17th to 18th year had been full of shattering family drama and school pressure,” she recalls.

For others, birthdays can force an agonising confrontation with grief. This is undoubtedly the case for me: having lost my mother as a teenager and being estranged from my father, the day is a painful reminder of my losses. I’m not alone: bereaved individuals regularly experience a significant increase in severe depressive symptoms when made to confront a major life milestone without their loved one. Stanley Smith, 27, can relate. “My mum made every single birthday so special for me in the past, so I have become used to feeling loved and appreciated on my birthday. That has changed since her passing. I don’t have that same care.” 

These feelings are often only worsened by cultural and social expectations. Vahrmeyer describes the concept of “socially prescribed happiness” as something that is “profoundly alienating because birthdays come with an emotional instruction: you should be happy, you should feel loved, you should be grateful, you should want to celebrate. The difficulty of course, is that human beings do not experience emotion on command.”

In the digital era, this “emotional instruction” is amplified by social media, with young adults caught in a trap of constant comparison. Birthdays, Vahrmeyer notes, frequently “become performances of being loved. It can become a painful measurement: who remembered, who forgot, how much effort was made, and how does my life look compared with others?” 

To combat the impending doom, some young people are actively finding alternative ways to cope and depressurise the day. “My friend Johann had the brilliant idea of creating a ‘crying competition’ at their birthday, to which I planned on taking an onion to help guests who might need it,” says Rachel Edwards, 33.

Edwards has also become what she calls “birthday fluid”. “I changed my birthday from February to April Fools’ Day, and the whole day felt like a sort of prank,” she explains. “I now choose the date of my birthday each year. If I don’t feel like having it in February, I just change the date to a month that I do.” 

Ultimately, while reflecting on our lives can be a healthy tool for growth, birthdays can often feel pretty high-stakes – and that’s where it gets unhealthy. As Vahrmeyer says: “birthdays should not become a courtroom in which the self is put on trial.” So next time your own birthday comes around, try not to dwell on it too much. Don’t set out with the intention of treating the day as a fleeting opportunity to overhaul your life, or a test for your friends and family to ‘prove’ how much they really love you. Take the pressure off yourself, cry if you want to, and maybe eat some cake – and chances are you might just enjoy yourself.