Why New Year’s resolutions don’t have to be just once a year

Irrespective of whether you are following the Gregorian or Lunar Calendar, you have probably been thinking about New Year’s resolutions recently. Isn’t it a shame we only seem to do this once a year!

Behavioural science suggests that we don’t have to leave it another 365 days before trying again.

Dai and colleagues (2014) explained in a study on “the fresh start effect” that we humans use New Year’s Day as a landmark of time, “which relegate past imperfections to a previous period, induce people to take a big-picture view of their lives, and thus motivate aspirational behaviours.” The problem is that for many, this only happens once a year.

 A better approach is to start smaller and repeatedly create mini-resolutions to keep yourself on track. The critical point is that we can artificially define when these chapters are – be it a new year, month, day, hour or even a pomodoro 25-minute period.

Sources:

Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behaviour. Management Science, 60(10), 2563-2582.