The subtle and successful science of ‘fresh starts’
‘When’ explains why the new year is motivating — and how other key moments in time can be, too
At some point in your life, you probably made a New Year’s resolution. On Jan. 1 of some year, you resolved to drink less, exercise more, or call your mother every Sunday. Maybe you kept your resolution and rectified your health and family relations. Or maybe, by February, you were pasted on the couch watching Legend of Kung Fu Rabbit on Netflix while downing a third glass of wine and ducking Mom’s Skype requests. Regardless of your resolution’s fate, though, the date you chose to motivate yourself reveals another dimension of the power of beginnings.
The first day of the year is what social scientists call a “temporal landmark.” Just as human beings rely on landmarks to navigate space — “To get to my house, turn left at the Shell station” — we also use landmarks to navigate time. Certain dates function like that Shell station. They stand out from the ceaseless and forgettable march of other days, and their prominence helps us find our way.
In 2014, three scholars from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania published a breakthrough paper in the science of timing that broadened our understanding of how temporal landmarks operate and how we can use them to construct better beginnings.
Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis began by analyzing eight-and- a-half years of Google searches. They discovered that searches for the word “diet” always soared on Jan. 1— by about 80 per cent more than on a typical day. No surprise, perhaps. However, searches also spiked at the start of every calendar cycle — the first day of every month and the first day of every week. Searches even climbed 10 per cent on the first day after a federal holiday. Something about days that represented “firsts” switched on people’s motivation.
The researchers found a similar pattern at the gym.
At a large northeastern university where students had to swipe a card to enter workout facilities, the researchers collected more than a year’s worth of data on daily gym attendance. As with the Google searches, gym visits increased “at the start of each new week, month and year.” But those weren’t the only dates that got students out of the dorm and onto a treadmill. Undergraduates “exercised more both at the start of a new semester . . . and on the first day after a school break.”
They also hit the gym more immediately after a birthday — with one glaring exception: “Students turning 21 (the legal drinking age) tend to decrease their gym activity following their birthday.”
For the Google searchers and college exercisers, some dates on the calendar were more significant than others. People were using them to “demarcate the passage of time,” to end one period and begin another with a clean slate. Dai, Milkman and Riis called this phenomenon the “fresh start effect.”
To establish a fresh start, people used two types of temporal landmarks — social and personal. The social landmarks were those that everyone shared: Mondays, the beginning of a new month, national holidays. The personal ones were unique to the individual: birthdays, anniversaries, job changes. But whether social or personal, these time markers served two purposes.
First, they allowed people to open “new mental accounts” in the same way that a business closes the books at the end of one fiscal year and opens a fresh ledger for the new year. This new period offers a chance to start again by relegating our old selves to the past. It disconnects us from that past self’s mistakes and imperfections, and leaves us confident about our new, superior selves. Fortified by that confidence, we “behave better than we have in the past and strive with enhanced fervour to achieve our aspirations.” In January, advertisers often use the phrase “New Year, New You.” When we apply temporal landmarks, that’s what’s going on in our heads. Old Me never flossed. But New Me, reborn on the first day back from summer vacation, will be a fiend about oral hygiene.
The second purpose of these time markers is to shake us out of the tree so we can glimpse the forest. “Temporal landmarks interrupt attention to day-today minutiae, causing people to take a big picture view of their lives and thus focus on achieving their goals.” Think about those spatial landmarks again. You might drive for miles and barely notice your surroundings. But that glowing Shell station on the corner makes you pay attention. It’s the same with fresh start dates. Daniel Kahneman draws a distinction between thinking fast (making decisions anchored in instinct and distorted by cognitive biases) and thinking slow (making decisions rooted in reason and guided by careful deliberation). Temporal landmarks slow our thinking, allowing us to deliberate at a higher level and make better decisions.
The implications of the fresh start effect, like the forces that propel it, are also personal and social. Individuals who get off to a stumbling start — at a new job, on an important project or in trying to improve their health — can alter their course by using a temporal landmark to start again. People can, as the Wharton researchers write, “strategically (create) turning points in their personal histories.”
Take Isabel Allende, the Chilean-American novelist. On Jan. 8, 1981, she wrote a letter to her deathly ill grandfather. That letter formed the foundation of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Since then, she has started each subsequent novel on that same date, using Jan. 8 as a temporal landmark to make a fresh start on a new project.
In later research, Dai, Milkman and Riis found that imbuing an otherwise ordinary day with personal meaning generates the power to activate new beginnings. For instance, when they framed March 20 as the first day of spring, the date offered a more effective fresh start than simply identifying it as the third Thursday in March. For Jewish participants in their study, reframing Oct. 5 as the first day after Yom Kippur was more motivating than thinking of it as the 278th day of the year. Identifying one’s own personally meaningful days — a child’s birthday or the anniversary of your first date with your partner — can erase a false start and help us begin anew.
Organizations, too, can enlist this technique. Recent research has shown that the fresh start effect applies to teams. Suppose a company’s new quarter has a rough beginning. Rather than waiting until the next quarter, an obvious fresh start date, to smooth out the mess, leaders can find a meaningful moment occurring sooner — perhaps the anniversary of the launch of a key product — that would relegate previous screw-ups to the past and help the team get back on track. Or suppose some employees are not regularly contributing to their retirement accounts or failing to attend important training sessions. Sending them reminders on their birthdays rather than on some other day could prompt them to start acting. Consumers might also be more open to messages on days framed as fresh starts, Riis found. If you’re trying to encourage people to eat healthier, a campaign calling for Meatless Mondays will be far more effective than one advocating Vegan Thursdays.
New Year’s Day has long held a special power over our behaviour. We turn the page on the calendar, glimpse all those beautiful empty squares and open a new account book on our lives. But we typically do that unwittingly, blind to the psychological mechanisms we’re relying on. The fresh start effect allows us to use the same technique, but with awareness and intention, on multiple days. After all, New Year’s resolutions are hardly foolproof. Research shows that a month into a new year, only 64 per cent of resolutions continue to be pursued. Constructing our own temporal landmarks, especially those that are personally meaningful, gives us many more opportunities to recover from rough beginnings and start again. Adapted from WHEN: The Scientific Secrets
of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink, to be published on Jan. 9, 2018 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Daniel H. Pink.
New Year’s Day has long held a special power over our behaviour. We turn the page on the calendar, glimpse all those beautiful empty squares and open a new account book on our lives