Fresh start effect
Temporal landmarks make us more willing to pursue goals.
What it means
The fresh start effect is the observation that people are more motivated to pursue their goals at moments that feel like new beginnings — the start of a week, month, or year, a birthday, or a new job. Researchers attribute this to temporal landmarks that break the continuous flow of time into chapters: the leading account is that a landmark opens a new mental-accounting period, relegating past shortfalls to an 'old' self, though this mechanism is inferred rather than firmly established. Field data show upticks in gym visits, goal creation, and diet searches at these landmarks, and framing a future date as a fresh start can modestly raise goal commitment. The surge is usually small and short-lived, and the same logic can license delay until the next 'Monday,' so fresh starts help most when paired with concrete plans. It informs habit programs, savings nudges, and prompt timing, and explains both the appeal and the fragility of New Year's resolutions.
The original demonstration
The term was introduced by Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, and Jason Riis in a 2014 paper in Management Science. They examined three archival datasets: Google searches for the word 'diet,' visits to a university gym, and commitments logged on an online goal-setting platform. In each, activity rose sharply at the opening of a new week, a new month, a new year, and a new academic semester, as well as after birthdays and public holidays. Searches for dieting, for instance, climbed at the start of every week and every month, not only in January. The authors named this pattern the fresh start effect and argued that dates carrying the sense of a new beginning act as temporal landmarks: they break the continuous flow of time into discrete chapters and prompt people to act on aspirations they might otherwise defer. Because the datasets were large and observational, they established the phenomenon as a genuine regularity in behavior rather than a laboratory curiosity, while leaving the underlying cause to be tested separately.
Why it happens
Two related mechanisms are usually offered. The first is mental accounting for time: a landmark closes one notional period and opens another, so that setbacks are booked to an 'old' self and the new period begins with a clean ledger. Dai, Milkman, and Riis tested this idea directly in a 2015 Psychological Science paper, 'Put your imperfections behind you,' finding that people were more willing to begin pursuing a goal when a date was framed as separating them from a worse past self. The second mechanism is temporal self-appraisal, studied by Johanna Peetz and Anne Wilson, who showed that a salient landmark changes how connected people feel to their temporally distant selves, and that widening the perceived gap between the current self and a hoped-for future self can, in turn, raise motivation to improve. Both accounts share a common core: the landmark adds no resources or skill, it changes the psychological framing of where one stands in time. A landmark may also encourage a big-picture view, lifting attention from daily routine toward longer-term goals. These mechanisms are plausible and have experimental support, but they remain inferences about why the spikes occur rather than settled fact.
What the evidence shows
The descriptive pattern, measurable upticks in goal-relevant behavior at calendar boundaries, has held up well and been seen across searches, gym attendance, and goal commitments. The stronger test is whether deliberately framing a date as a fresh start changes consequential behavior. Here the best evidence is a field experiment by John Beshears and colleagues, reported in 2021, involving 6,082 university employees. Mailings offered recipients the chance to raise retirement-plan contributions at a future date; describing that date in fresh-start terms, such as the recipient's birthday or the first day of spring, raised the share who agreed to increase savings later, without reducing immediate increases, and lifted contributions over the following eight months. That is a rare demonstration of the effect surviving in a real, high-stakes setting. Other evidence is more sobering. A 2025 study by Marina Milyavskaya and colleagues, with 362 participants surveyed in January versus March, found that people rated their goals' motivation, commitment, and self-efficacy very similarly regardless of season; only planning showed a small difference. Their reading is that fresh starts may help launch new goals but do little to reinvigorate goals already under way. The largest test of downstream attainment is more discouraging still. Analysing nearly a million users of a smoking-cessation platform between 2015 and 2021, Tong Li and colleagues found that for first-time users, setting a goal on a temporal landmark was mostly associated with lower rates of attainment; only among people who had set the same goal before was landmark timing positively related to success. That raises the possibility that landmark-triggered starts, while more numerous, are on average less deliberate and less likely to be carried through. Taken together, the effect on initiation looks real, but the effect sizes are often modest, the benefit for sustaining or reappraising ongoing goals is weak, and more starts do not translate into more completions. None of this makes the effect illusory, but it bounds the claim: the reliable finding is a temporary lift in getting started, concentrated at the moment of a new beginning, with no assurance that the goal is seen through.
Where it breaks down
Several limits temper the practical value of fresh starts. The motivational lift is typically short; the well-documented collapse of New Year's resolutions within weeks is the same effect running out. Landmarks can also invite delay rather than action: because a boundary makes the next period feel like the natural time to begin, people may postpone starting until the coming Monday, month, or year. Marie Hennecke and Benjamin Converse showed that perceived temporal boundaries shape when people expect to initiate a goal, which can push intended start dates outward. The same anticipation can sap goals already under way: across an archival study and four experiments, Minjung Koo, Hengchen Dai, and colleagues found that when an upcoming landmark is made salient, people ease off their current effort, apparently trusting a fresh-started future self to make up the difference, and then largely fail to recover the lost ground. The logic is double-edged in a second way as well: a single missed session can be reframed as the end of a chapter, licensing a pause until the next 'clean' date. The framing also helps only when the boundary marks separation from a worse past; because landmarks spur initiation specifically when they signal a break from an inferior former self, a boundary recruited to leave behind a period one would rather keep should offer little pull. For these reasons, fresh starts work best when the surge is immediately converted into a concrete plan rather than treated as a substitute for one.
Using it in practice
The design implication is to align prompts, defaults, and invitations with moments that already feel like beginnings, and to build in structure that outlasts the initial motivation. Programs can time enrollment offers, reminders, or contribution changes to the start of a week, a new month, a birthday, or a return from leave, and can construct personal landmarks by naming a date as a break from the past. Where prompts can be personalized, tying them to individual landmarks such as a work anniversary or the end of a holiday tends to beat a single fixed calendar date. Because the surge is fragile, such timing is most useful when paired with commitment devices and implementation intentions, specific if-then plans that state when, where, and how the behavior will occur, so that action does not depend on motivation staying high. The same reasoning cautions against over-promising: timing prompts to landmarks reliably raises the number of starts, but has not been shown to raise the rate at which first-time goals are completed. Framing a date as a fresh start is a low-cost nudge that can modestly improve the odds of getting going, not a lever that reliably changes long-run outcomes on its own.
Examples
Gym attendance and goal-setting spike at the start of a week, a month, and especially January.
A workplace wellness program sends its enrollment invitation to arrive on the first working day after each employee's birthday rather than on a single fixed date, so the offer coincides with a personal new beginning.
A savings app offers to schedule an automatic contribution increase to begin 'the first day of spring' instead of 'in about three months,' and more users agree to the later start.
An analytics team at a diet-app company notices new sign-ups rising every Monday and at the turn of each month, and reschedules its onboarding emails to land just before those boundaries.
Someone resolves on January 1 to exercise daily, keeps it up for two weeks, misses a session, and tells themselves they will 'restart next month,' illustrating both the initial surge and the license-to-slack risk.
First described in Dai, Milkman & Riis (2014).
Key references
- Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior. Management Science, 60(10), 2563-2582. doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901
- 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. doi.org/10.1177/0956797615605818
- Peetz, J., & Wilson, A. E. (2013). The post-birthday world: Consequences of temporal landmarks for temporal self-appraisal and motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(2), 249-266. doi.org/10.1037/a0030477
- Hennecke, M., & Converse, B. A. (2017). Next week, next month, next year: How perceived temporal boundaries affect initiation expectations. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(8), 918-926. doi.org/10.1177/1948550617691099
- 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. doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2021.06.005
- Koo, M., Dai, H., Mai, K. M., & Song, C. E. (2020). Anticipated temporal landmarks undermine motivation for continued goal pursuit. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 161, 142-157. doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.06.002
- Li, T., Laato, S., & Yang, Y. (2023). When to set goals that hold? Longitudinal evidence from information system-supported smoking cessation. ECIS 2023 Research Papers, 385. aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2023_rp/385
- Milyavskaya, M., Thorne, T., Sullivan, M., & Esselink, N. A. (2025). Goals across time frames and temporal landmarks: Do time of year and goal age influence goal perceptions? Psychological Reports. Advance online publication. doi.org/10.1177/00332941251399129