As we ring in another new year, the familiar rally of “New year, new me” returns, bringing a fresh wave of resolutions we hope to achieve. This blog post explores the fresh start effect, explaining why such practice endures even when most new year’s resolutions fail.
The Fresh Start Effect
If you have ever felt a surge of motivation in achieving your goals when the calendar page flips to a new year, it is not a coincidence. There is a science behind this renewed vigour. American economist, Katy Milkman, termed such phenomenon the fresh start effect in her book, How to Change (Milkman 2021). It denotes a psychological tendency for people to feel more motivated to pursue goals following meaningful temporal landmarks, such as the beginning of a new year.
It was postulated that temporal landmarks create a sense of psychological separation between our present and past selves, encouraging people to adopt a broader view in relation to our aspirations (Dai, Milkman, and Riis 2014). This hypothesis builds on Richard Thaler’s concept of mental accounting (Thaler 2016), which suggests that we do not think of time as a single, continuous passage. Instead, we mentally divide it into distinct segments. Our socially constructed calendar system reinforces this segmentation by creating shared reference points. For example, we define every seven days as a new week and every 365 days as a new year. As a result, these temporal boundaries shape how we interpret our behaviours. We ‘separate’ ourselves from our past failures by creating a perceived “blank slate” at the start of each new mental accounting period. Thus, the notion of new year new me.
The fresh start effect underscores the importance of timing in motivating change. Yet, despite this initial surge of motivation, most new year’s resolutions fail to last. The second Friday in January is often referred as the Quitters’Day to mark the point when our enthusiasm for our goals typically wanes. This does not suggest that the fresh start effect is ineffective per se. Instead, the takeaway is to recognise that fresh starts on their own are not sufficient to sustain long-term change.
Meaningful change is rarely easy and often demands sustained effort over time. The fresh start effect is a potentially powerful tool to kickstart our motivation for our goals. However, we would probably need other strategies to sustain this motivation to increase the likelihood of success.
Importantly, fresh starts are not limited to the new year. If you find yourself slipping on your new year’s resolutions, you can get back on track by framing certain days (start of a new week or month) or life events (starting a new job, birthday, moving to a new place) as opportunities for a reset. By intentionally creating fresh starts, we can leverage this psychological phenomenon to achieve our goals.
P.S. This blog post is intentionally published on the second Friday of January this year.