What Is the Fresh Start Effect? (And Why You Don't Need Monday)

It's Sunday night. The gym bag is packed and sitting by the door. There's a note in your phone that says "Starting Monday," and you mean it this time.

And to be fair, Monday is a pretty good day to start. There's real data on that. There's also data on what happens to everything between now and Monday, which is the part nobody prints on a mug.

This Sunday is a big one, too. November 1 is the first of the month, it lands on a Sunday, and in most of the US the clocks fall back an hour that same morning. Three landmarks stacked on one day. So it's a good week to get clear on what the fresh start effect actually is, what it does well, and where it works against you.

The fresh start effect is the bump in motivation people get right after a moment that feels like a new beginning. Researchers call those moments temporal landmarks: the start of a week, a month, a year or a semester, a birthday, a holiday.

The term comes from a 2014 paper by Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis in Management Science. They didn't ask people how they feel about Mondays. They went and looked at what people actually did, across three big sets of real-world data, and found the same pattern every time. Right after a landmark, people go after the things they want for themselves more than they do on an ordinary day.

Diet searches, gym visits and new goal commitments all jumped right after landmarks. How big the jump was depended on the landmark and the data.

Increases are compared with ordinary days. Source: Dai, Milkman and Riis (2014).

The gym study followed 11,912 undergrads swiping into a university fitness center over 442 days. Their likelihood of going rose 47.1% at the start of a semester and 7.5% after a birthday. One funny exception: attendance dropped after students turned 21. The authors didn't test why. I think we can guess.

The stickK data covered 66,062 commitment contracts from 43,012 people, and it wasn't only health goals. Career, school and money goals rose at the same landmarks. The researchers also checked placebo searches like "weather" and "laundry," and those didn't move. Nobody resolves to do more laundry in January.

It works as a nudge, too. In a 2021 field experiment with more than 6,000 university employees, John Beshears, Dai, Milkman and Shlomo Benartzi offered people a chance to start saving for retirement on a future date. When that date was framed as a fresh start, like New Year's or their birthday, enrollment on the future date was 50% higher than with a generic date.

Because a landmark draws a line, and the old version of you, the one who skipped the gym all October, ends up on the other side of it.

Dai and her colleagues proposed three reasons. Landmarks chop time into new mental accounting periods, so last month's misses get filed under last month. People tend to pin past failures on a former self, which makes the current self feel like the better candidate for the job. And landmarks pull your attention up out of the day-to-day details toward the bigger picture.

A year later they tested the idea directly in five lab experiments, published in Psychological Science as "Put Your Imperfections Behind You". Pointing to a date as a new beginning raised people's intentions to start on a goal, partly because it made them feel further away from their past, imperfect selves.

The framing piece is kind of wild. In one of those experiments, people picked when they wanted a reminder about a goal. When March 20 was labeled "the first day of spring," 25.61% chose it. When it was presented as an ordinary day, 7.23% did. That's the same day on the calendar getting more than three times the takers, and the only thing that changed was what it was called. Dai and her coauthor Li summarize those numbers in a 2019 review in Current Opinion in Psychology.

Starting on Monday is fine. Waiting for Monday is where it costs you.

In 2020, Minjung Koo, Hengchen Dai, Ke Michael Mai and Camilla Song published a study in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes with a title that reads like a warning label: "Anticipated temporal landmarks undermine motivation for continued goal pursuit." Across an archival study and four experiments, they found that when an upcoming fresh start is on people's minds, they put less effort into goals they're already working on.

The reason is pretty human. People start treating their future self like a separate person and optimistically assume that person will handle it. The authors call it "intrapersonal loafing," which is about the most academic way possible to say "Monday me has got this."

And the effort people skipped before the landmark didn't reliably get made up after it. Those days just don't come back.

The fix they found is small. When people were reminded of the everyday things they already do for their goal, the slacking effect weakened, and in one experiment it disappeared. That's also the logic behind tying a goal to a cue you hit every day instead of a date on the calendar, which is the whole idea of an if-then plan.

Yes, mostly when things are already going well.

In that 2019 review, Dai and Li point out that a landmark can set up a comparison with past success that discourages people who've been doing consistently well. And a landmark that changes your surroundings, like a college student going home for break, can knock loose a habit that was working fine.

So if you're on a good run, a new month isn't a reason to start over. You just keep going.

If the run gets broken, that isn't a reason to wait for the next landmark either. In the habit study best known for its median of 66 days, Phillippa Lally's team found that missing one opportunity "did not materially affect the habit formation process." More on that in how long it really takes to build a habit.

Nobody has run this study on ordinary mornings, so I'm not going to pretend they have. But the research points somewhere useful.

Landmarks work because they draw a line between the old you and the current you, and the spring experiment shows the line can come from how a day is framed, not only from the calendar. A Monday is a landmark partly because we all treat it like one. A morning can get some of that same treatment if you mark it on purpose.

To be clear, that's my read, not their finding. There's a practical case for it anyway. If waiting for the next big landmark makes people ease off, then the nearest landmark is the best one, and tomorrow morning is always nearer than January.

The Question is a free iPhone app that asks one question every morning: What will make today matter? You answer before the inbox, the group chat and the news get a vote, and it takes under a minute. Around midday it reminds you what you said. In the evening it checks in. Streaks count the days you answered, and there's no list to manage.

It's the smallest version of a fresh start I know. You don't wait for the first of the month to draw the line. You draw it with one answer, every day, and that daily answer is a lot like the reminder of everyday effort that weakened the "Monday me" effect in the Koo study. It isn't the same thing they tested, but it's the same idea. There's more on why it's the same question every day, and on the question itself.

A few answers for this Sunday, November 1, when the week, the month and the clocks all turn over:

None of those need the first of the month. They'd work just as well on a random Wednesday, and that's kind of the point.

Yes, with limits. The original 2014 paper found it in three large sets of real-world data, and five lab experiments published in 2015 showed that highlighting a new beginning raises people's intentions to start a goal. Later work shows it can backfire when you wait for the landmark or when you're already on a good run.

The start of a week, month, year or semester, birthdays and holidays all showed up in the research. A label can make a date work too: people chose March 20 far more often when it was called the first day of spring. The 2014 paper only studied birthdays as a personal landmark, so things like a new job or a move are less tested.

An upcoming fresh start makes your future self feel like a different person who will handle it. Koo and colleagues (2020) found this lowers effort on goals people are already pursuing, and the lost effort isn't reliably made up later. Reminding people of what they already do every day reduced the effect.

No. In Lally's 2010 habit study, missing one opportunity did not materially affect habit formation. Pick it back up the next morning instead of waiting for the next big date.