The Why #35: Why do my New Year’s resolutions die with January?

3 min readFeb 3, 2022

By Dan Monheit, 4.2.22

Question submitted by Laura, Coolangatta

I hear you Laura, but let’s be honest, we both knew this was coming. Sure, we put on brave faces in December, talking up our New Year’s resolutions and how much more committed to them we’d be if we just wrote them down.

But then it was New Year’s day. And summer break. And barbecues. And Slip n Slides. And warm nights. And mosquitoes. And domestic flights. And Covid. And RATs. And kind of back to work but not really back to work. And then actually seriously back to work. And then what were we talking about again?

Oh yeah, commitments and their rapid decay. Which reminds me, we should talk about the bias at play here before we both lose interest in this email.

The Fresh Start Effect

The Fresh Start Effect refers to our tendency to move toward achieving a goal only after a special occasion or key date has passed.

‘I’ll start next week’

‘I’m going to lose weight for the wedding’

‘Next month I’m studying extra hard’

Sound familiar? Yeah, me too.

In 2014, the excellently named researcher Katy Milkman looked at how people used the ‘Commitment Contract’ function on the goal setting website StickK (for context, Stickk is a site where people commit to consequences, usually of the cash paying variety, for not achieving goals that they set themselves).

Milkman poured through data from over 66,000 commitment contracts and found that people were far more likely to commit to their goals at the beginning of a new week (+62.9%), new month (+23.6%) or new year (+145.3%) than at any other time. Interestingly, these jumps were consistent across goals relating to health, career, education and personal relationships.

Unfortunately, fresh starts don’t last forever, and when that initial burst of ‘new year, new me’ motivation fades, so too can our commitment.

But fear not Laura. There’s no need to wait till 2023 to get back to flying high. Any fresh start’s a good one. Maybe you’ve got a birthday coming up? If not, March is just around the corner and a new week is just a weekend away!

For brands, new beginnings are a great time to bring in new customers, knowing they’ll be far more motivated to commit. Gym’s typically see a new membership spike of more than 20% post New Year’s, but gyms shouldn’t have all the fun. Fresh starts can be used to promote fashion (new season, new look) to education (new year, new career) and everything in between. The real trick is setting a date to get started.