How to Use the Fresh Start Effect to Begin a Habit

Plenty of people decide on a Thursday that they’re going to start running, then wait until Monday to actually go. It sounds a little silly, but researchers have found the same habit in very different kinds of data, and Mondays aren’t the only dates that do it. The first of the month, a birthday and the days after a holiday all seem to make starting easier.

Behavioural scientists call this the fresh start effect. It’s worth understanding, because it can be used on purpose, and because it has a clear limit that catches a lot of people out in the second or third week.

Where the Pattern Shows Up

The name comes from a 2014 paper by Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis. They looked at three records that have little to do with each other: Google searches for the word “diet”, daily visits to a university gym, and goals created on a commitment-contract website, where people stake money that they lose if they don’t follow through. Across those records, goal-related activity went up at the beginning of a week, a month or a year, and after birthdays and holidays.

Dai, H., Milkman, K.L. & Riis, J. (2014). “The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior.” Management Science, 60(10), 2563-2582.

Most of those landmarks are small. A Monday comes round 52 times a year and means nothing in particular, and it was still enough to show up in the data.

Why a Date Makes Any Difference

The explanation the researchers give is a kind of mental accounting. We tend to file our lives in chapters, and a landmark closes one and opens the next. The version of you who skipped the gym all through September starts to feel like a slightly different person from the one looking at a calendar that says October 1, and that earlier person’s lapses seem to count for less.

A 2015 follow-up by the same team tested this more directly by changing only how a date in March was described. In one version it was the first day of spring. In the other it was just a date. People who saw the spring version were more inclined to start on their goals that day.

Dai, H., Milkman, K.L. & Riis, J. (2015). “Put Your Imperfections Behind You: Temporal Landmarks Spur Goal Initiation When They Signal New Beginnings.” Psychological Science, 26(12), 1927-1936.

The effect has also been tested on something with real money attached. In a field experiment on retirement savings, people were offered the chance to start saving more at a later date. When that date was described as “after your next birthday” or “at the start of spring”, they chose to raise their savings more than people who were simply offered a delay.

Beshears, J., Dai, H., Milkman, K.L. & Benartzi, S. (2021). “Using fresh starts to nudge increased retirement savings.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 167, 72-87.

What a Fresh Start Won’t Do

All of this research is about beginning. None of it shows that a habit started on a Monday lasts any longer than one started on a wet Wednesday afternoon. Anyone who has joined a gym in January knows what the third week feels like. A landmark makes it easy to set an ambitious goal, and big goals tend to be the first casualties once the new-chapter feeling wears off.

The same chapter thinking can also work against you later. Miss a few days in week two and it’s tempting to write the whole attempt off and wait for the next Monday, or the next month, to try again, even though two missed days on their own would have cost you very little.

Using One on Purpose

Start by picking a landmark. A Monday, the first of the month, a birthday or the first day back from holiday will all do, and if today is a Monday you already have one. You can also mark one yourself, such as the day you start a new job, as long as it genuinely feels like the start of something. Then choose a single habit and make it small enough to do on a bad day: a ten-minute walk after lunch rather than a new training plan, one vegetable at dinner rather than a whole new diet.

Decide on the first action in detail, with a time and a place, and do it on the landmark itself rather than the day after. Before you start, agree with yourself that a missed day means picking up again the next day, not waiting for the next fresh start. And keep a simple daily record. The pull of the landmark will fade, probably sooner than you’d like, and a one-line entry each day is easy enough to keep going without it.

If you’d like a starting line that’s more than a date, Lamplit’s health questionnaire is free. It builds a lifestyle profile across six areas (sleep, movement, nutrition, stress and mind, habits, and connection) and ends with a few suggested next steps. Pick one of them, only one, and log your first entry for it today, while it still feels like a beginning.

Take the free health questionnaire in Lamplit and choose one next step to start today.