Happy New Year. It feels like yesterday when I wrote a blog post to reflect on 2023 and to say there’ll be a 2-week hiatus in my posting schedule, but here we are again. It’s the first week of 2024, and this January, like every January, I feel like I’ve been inundated with the same sort of new-year-new-me and time-to-improve-your-life messages that come around this time of year.
It’s everywhere too. It’s in the mainstream media, news outlets, podcast episodes, digital advertisements from meal prep services who claim their offerings can help us sort our diets out once and for all, popular gym chains who have taken over the bulk of the billboards in the city centre to remind us that if we’re not frequenting the gym now, we’re getting left behind, productivity “experts” who insist on selling their services to those who want to kickstart their success for good this year, I could go on.
This is all understandable. Research conducted by Wharton Professor Katy Milkman suggests that there are benefits to taking advantage of time-based landmarks to trigger desired behavioural change. This has come to be known as the fresh start effect. The idea behind this is that there are certain points in time that produce the psychological effects of a clean slate, thus enabling us to have the much desired, often elusive fresh start. These time-based landmarks allow us to put all our past failures, bad habits, and undesirable behaviours behind us, and start all over. The fresh start effect can be leveraged at different time points, such as the start of every week or month, birthdays, or perhaps the most significant of them all, the start of the calendar year. This might explain why self-improvement messaging is so prevalent in January. With the start of the new year, we feel like we can leave all our baggage behind and finally be our best selves, we’re more motivated than ever to dispense with bad habits and cultivate new ones, and we’re filled with endless possibilities of who we can become. The thing is, more often than not, these possibilities don’t translate to reality. Depending on the studies you cite, 80 to 90% of New Year resolutions fail before the end of January.
Does this mean that we’re better off not making any New Year resolutions? Should we forego all hopes of self-improvement at the start of the year? Is it all a lost cause? Not necessarily. One reason we fail at actualising our resolutions and maximising the fresh start effect is that we fail to realise just what we’re up against.
I’ve previously written about how we tend to not notice progress because progress often happens slowly, as opposed to disaster which often descends on us suddenly. This is courtesy of Steven Pinker’s work. However, progress isn’t the only thing that goes unnoticed because it creeps up on us. While it is true that disasters tend to happen suddenly, it is sometimes the case that these sudden disasters are merely manifestations or symptoms of a larger, more severe problem. For instance, when a flood destroys an entire seaside village in the east, it catches the attention of people the world over, and it seems like yet another unforeseen act of god. But it behoves us to consider that this sudden flood is a result of rising sea levels, brought on by decades of climate change. The flood is the symptom of a larger problem which persists because we’re not taking it seriously and we’re not acting quickly enough.
Just as we fail as a society to address existential threats that creep up insidiously on our species, our personal behaviours sometimes follow a similar pattern. We tend to form our bad habits and behaviours slowly, over time. It is very rarely the case that bad behaviours are formed instantly, although the implications or effects may come out of the blue. There’s usually a point of initiation, and then a period that follows where we delude ourselves into thinking we’re in control, and we tell ourselves we can change or stop whenever we feel like it. This would go on for some time, until one day the habit or behaviour becomes something that’s just always been there, something we’ve always done, something we try so hard to change.
This is a time of year when we’re more determined than ever to jettison bad behaviours and imbibe good ones, thus becoming the best versions of ourselves. But how can we set ourselves up for success? Honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t have all the answers, but what I do know is that in our quest to leverage the fresh start effect to better ourselves this new year, it behoves us to review our goals and work towards resolutions that aim to address the root cause of the behaviours we’re trying to influence, as opposed to operating with surface-level symptoms.
P.S.: My middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, and my debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.