We have a natural hunger for these landmarks in time. Take the prevalence of New Year’s resolutions. The Wharton professor Katherine Milkman said she found it striking that “at the start of a new year, we feel like we have a clean slate. It’s the ‘fresh start effect’ . . . all of my past failures are from last year and I can think, ‘Those are not me. That’s old me. That’s not new me. New me isn’t going to make these mistakes.’ ” In other words, New Year’s resolutions are not really about the resolutions. After all, for most people, the resolutions haven’t changed. Most people wanted to lose weight and save money on December 31, too. What we’re doing on New Year’s Day is more like a mental accounting trick. Our past failures are left on the ledger of Old Me. New Me starts today. New Year’s resolutions should really be called New Year’s absolutions. Milkman realized that if her “fresh start” theory was right, then the slate-cleaning effect shouldn’t be confined to New Year’s Day. It should also be true for other landmark dates that would give us an excuse to reset our record, such as the start of a new month or even a new week. Milkman and her colleague Hengchen Dai tracked down attendance data for a university fitness center, and they found strong proof of their “fresh start” hypothesis. The probability that students visited the gym increased at the beginning of each new week (by 33%), new month (by 14%), and new semester (by 47%). So “fresh starts” happen not only on New Year’s Day, but also on any other landmark date. If you’re struggling to make a transition, create a defining moment that draws a dividing line between Old You and New You.
What we can do is to take advantage of these “mental accounting tricks” and set moments where we can have a fresh start. This allows us to do things that we know are important but have been neglecting (exercise?). Sometime, just knowing how to frame our situation in a different way can yield vastly better results.
