How the 'fresh start' effect can help you stick to good habits

Whether it's a birthday, mid-year or a Monday morning, psychologists say that these "fresh start" moments can make us more motivated to change our behaviour and more likely to pursue our goals.

I started the year with good intentions to do more strength training and work on a new book proposal, but other commitments quickly got in the way. 

As I'm entering the second half of the year it feels especially challenging to motivate myself to think about achieving these goals. Life is busy and starting one thing usually means having to give up something else.

If your New Year's resolutions are also fading away, you're in good company. While the start of a new year is a popular time to make new goals and embark on changes our habits, research shows nudging ourselves to create new goals, and forming the habits that help us to achieve them, is an effective way to change at any point in time.

So how do we make resolutions that last? Four experts I spoke to say a key starting point is capitalising on the so-called "fresh-start effect", along with developing good habits and creating realistic goals. Together, the evidence shows, these can kickstart us to make lasting changes.

To make meaningful changes it helps to first to set yourself goals. Research suggests that many New Year's resolutions end in disappointment, with some sources suggesting that as many as 92% of people never achieve their goal.

That's misleading, says Katy Milkman, a professor of behavioural economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in the US, and the author of the book How to Change. As so many people attempt to make a change at the same time, it can make the failure rate appear higher than it is, she says.

One recent US survey found that 87% of people who made resolutions had kept at least some of them after a few weeks, while only 13% had kept none. And a UK survey found that 38% of Brits kept all the resolutions they made in 2025 and 33% kept some.

What this reveals, says Milkman, is that a temporal-based goal can be surprisingly effective. But you don't need New Year to take advantage of this, she says – mid-year is another good time to create our own fresh-start effect. In fact any meaningful date, whether it's the start of the week, a birthday or a new year, can make us more open to change.

Milkman discovered this when looking at searches from a goal-setting website. She and colleagues found that searches for "diet" and "gym visits" spiked during specific time points such as the start of the week, the start of the month or at the start of a new academic term.

Crucially, you can define the time you want to make a change yourself, rather than having to wait for a specific moment. Milkman's team has found that labelling a day as the start of a new time period (e.g. the first day of Spring) rather than as just another arbitrary day (e.g. Monday), made people more likely and more motivated to start pursuing a goal.

Looking for a day to tie your new commitment to can therefore help give us distance from past failures. "In these moments that feel like new beginnings, we feel like we're separated from who we were before. That chapter is over, this new chapter is opening."

While the fresh-start effect can get us started on a new goal, building positive habits is a fundamental part of reaching and maintaining long-term life milestones. While goals require continuous conscious effort, our habits tend to take place without too much thought usually in response to a specific trigger, says Benjamin Gardner, a psychology professor at the University of Surrey in the UK who specialises in behavioural change.

This could involve ordering the same coffee on your commute, or exercising for 20 minutes each morning before breakfast. The advantage of a habit, says Gardner, is that it removes the need for ongoing willpower. "Habits are there to just help us to do the things that we need to do repeatedly, without having to think about it."

But for good habits to form, persistence is key. It takes an average of about 66 days for a specific behaviour to become habitual, although the range can vary from 18 to 265 days depending on the habit in question. Habitual gym attendance takes about six months to become routine, for instance.

Simplifying your goals can help too. In one study, researchers tracked participants who introduced a new daily habit, such as running, eating fruit or doing sit-ups. They found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that simple behaviours such as drinking a glass of water were easier to implement than a more difficult task, such as 50 sit-ups.

Equally important is letting go of habits that get in the way of your goals. This is surprisingly difficult, says Gardner, but we can attempt to override our undesirable habits by substituting a habit we want to stop with a new one. This is exactly what I did when I gave up sugar for six weeks. I swapped my daily sugar treat with a healthier snack until my cravings subsided.

"Directly displacing an old bad habit with a good alternative should be quite useful because it means that you should after a while become triggered to do the thing that you want to do rather than the old bad habit," says Gardner. This strategy could be highly effective because we are more likely to stick with new habits than to drop habits we want to avoid.

While a mid-year fresh start provides a great initial burst of motivation, long-term success relies on picking goals you look forward to doing. This was highlighted in a recent year-long US study tracking over 2,000 people. Researchers found that participants who felt excited about the day-to-day actions required by their goal were significantly more likely to persist.

Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioural sciences at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a co-author of the study, says focusing too much on the end result can sabotage success. She recommends finding something that you look forward to doing, not something that you wish you were already on the other side of. "That requires a bit of introspection," she says.

For those who have the drive to change but struggle to make it stick, understanding the impact of our physical surroundings is an important first step.

"Motivation is only one part of what determines our behaviour and it's not enough on its own," says Felix Naughton, a psychology professor at the University of East Anglia. It's incredibly difficult to quit smoking if your friends continue to smoke, for example, he says.

One way to address this for smokers, Naughton has found, is to better identify when cravings are worst. The same might well apply for those trying to kick other habits: track and anticipate when you are most likely to be tempted and plan ways in advance to intervene.

It also helps to make goals measurable, with specific action plans that can be reviewed regularly, he says. A 30-day challenge may feel less daunting than a goal which is hard to measure. "Having a goal of 'being more active' is quite vague, says Naughton. "[But] giving yourself a goal of walking 8,000 steps every day for the next week. That's very measurable."

Once a habit forms, it starts to feel achievable and rewire your brain in the process. "If you smoked after eating and you stop doing that, then you'll slowly extinguish or erode the link between eating and the reward of nicotine afterwards," he says.

If we are not enjoying the process of pursuing our goals, however, we might need to change how we go about it, says Milkman. "If we can find a way to make goal pursuit enjoyable so it's not something we dread and instead something we look forward to we're dramatically more likely to persist."

This could mean pairing the less enjoyable activity with something we love to do, which Milkman calls "temptation bundling". It could involve sitting on an exercise bike whilst watching TV, or ensuring we exercise with a friend, making it a sociable pursuit in the process.

In one study, she found that people were 35% more likely to exercise if they were doing it with a friend rather than alone. In another study she found that students were more likely to exercise in a gym if they listened to audiobooks at the same time. (For any friends of mine reading this, I can now explain that my insistence on going for a run to catch up is evidence-based).

Remember that even if you are enjoying the process, losing motivation for a long-term goal half-way through is extremely common, something Fishbach dubs as "the middle problem".

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To counteract this, consider breaking up long-term goals into weekly or even daily targets to avoid this slump.

It also helps to monitor progress. For me this involves recognising the benefits of a daily word count, rather than focusing on how much there is still to write and research, which can feel disheartening.

And on days you don't reach your target, use that as a learning point for what to change, rather than consider it a personal failure, Fishbach says. When motivation does dip, it is not necessarily willpower that will carry us through, but the habits we have cultivated along the way.

The more often we do something, the more likely a behaviour is to become a habit. It's even better if we like it too. For me that means slowly learning to like lifting weights and appreciating learning about tricky scientific concepts, rather than simply focusing on the final product.

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* Melissa Hogenboom is a senior health correspondent at the BBC and author of Breadwinners and The Motherhood Complex. She is melissa_hogenboom on Instagram. 

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