Time for a psychological do-over

The start of a new year (and other new beginnings) offer the useful perception of a clean slate.

Photo by Clemens van Lay on Unsplash

Happy New Year! This time of year is all about starting anew—new resolutions, goals, gym memberships, and things to accomplish.

Why do we change (or attempt to change) ourselves at the start of a new year? It’s explained by one of my favorite psychology concepts, which tells us that a new beginning can be just the right moment to make an adjustment.

It’s called the fresh start effect.

I first learned about it from the book How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, by the Wharton professor Katy Milkman.

Here’s how researchers defined the fresh start effect: “…landmarks demarcate the passage of time, creating many new mental accounting periods each year, which relegate past imperfections to a previous period, induce people to take a big-picture view of their lives, and thus motivate aspirational behaviors.”

Milkman and her team confirmed the fresh start effect after spotting trends in datasets related to change:

• College students signed up for gym memberships “not only in January, but also earlier in the week, after a school holiday, at the beginning of a new semester, and after their birthdays.”

• People set goals “…in January, on Mondays, and after holiday breaks” and around birthdays.

• Searches for “diet” spiked during these new-beginning moments.

New beginnings offer a psychological do-over.

It turns out that the perception of a clean slate can be a good enough reason to break a habit or start a new one. From How to Change:

“When we surveyed a panel of Americans about how they feel on fresh start dates such as New Year’s or their birthday, we heard again and again that new beginnings offer a kind of psychological ‘do-over.’ People feel distanced from their past failures; they feel like a different person—a person with reason to be optimistic about the future.”

Milkman wrote that these reset moments allow us to shift how we label ourselves.

“If you’ve ever made a New Year’s resolution, confidently predicting that the ‘new you’ in the ‘new year’ would be able to make a change, the potency of labels may resonate,” she wrote.

It’s not limited to the new year.

If you want to make a change, new beginnings offer a practical hook. And as the research revealed, you’re not limited to January.

Here are a few ideas for new beginnings, big and small:

• First day of a new season

• Mondays

• Returning to work after a vacation

• First day of the month

• The start of a new job

• Birthdays

• Start of a sports season

• Relationship changes

• Moving to a new home

• Holidays

Thanks for reading.

Eric