Why New Year’s Resolutions are Silly (it's not what you think...)

January is named for the two-faced Roman god, Janus. His distinguishing feature was simultaneously looking back in reflection and forward in anticipation (imagery which pre-dated the Julian calendar by over a century)–a good choice for the first month of the new year .

New Year’s Resolutions have existed in various forms from the time of the Ancient Babylonians (c. 2000 BCE), who would commit to returning borrowed tools in the new year,  through the middle ages, when knights would renew their vows of chivalry, until present day.  Modern iterations of resolutions typically focus on jettisoning unhealthy habits or “finally” getting around to long deferred goals. 

Whenever people have been doing something for millennia, it’s worth asking why. As the saying goes, "the world has changed, but people haven’t." From antiquity until today, a universal human desire has been to make positive changes towards a more idealized version of ourselves. But why is January the time we do this? Well, ancient and modern humans alike understood the “fresh start effect”–even if not identifying it by that name.  The fresh start effect, coined by Katy Milkman and colleagues in a 2014 paper,  is a psychological phenomenon where a "temporal landmark" triggers a surge in motivation and energy. 

So, what’s wrong with that? Nothing. But the silliness of New Year's Resolutions lies in our tendency to restrict the power of the fresh start effect to the season when the calendar turns over. Milkman notes that any landmark can function in the same way as long as we imbue the occasion with the significance of being a 'fresh start.'  The beginning of a new season/quarter, a new month, a new week, or even the moment we get back into a project after a lunch break, each can serve as a 'fresh start' moment.   

The key to a fresh start is that we must believe the moment is significant as some form of a new beginning AND, equally importantly, it must come while we are not exhausted.  When this is true, we can mentally distance ourselves from past failures and break free from habituation–the feeling of being stuck in a repetitive, uninspiring grind.  With fresh starts, the brain is able to reset and we find renewed clarity, sense of possibility, and, therefore, motivation. Who couldn’t use more of that? 

Why New Year's Resolutions Rarely Work

The motivation inspired by annual resolutions has an expiration date, which is well short of 365-days for most people. This is why the gym is packed in mid-January and less so with each passing week. 

So with the free and abundant availability of “fresh start effects” that are accessible by simple reframing, why not leverage this effect as often as we are able to create a way to reframe a moment as a new beginning?  

Challenge 

Pick a smaller New Year’s Resolution this year and reframe it as your "January resolution." Reassess on January 25th how it’s working. Use February 1st and the first of each subsequent month to either recommit to the resolution with a new approach or strategy or pick a new goal and start over. 

This method minimizes the all-to-common experience of feeling shame about our failure to keep to resolutions for more than a few days or weeks. Plus, this method gives us 12x the fresh start effect boosts spread conveniently throughout the year. 

More on The Fresh Start Effect:

Psychology Today

Fresh Start Effect - Milkman et al (2014)