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-to-day 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.
