It’s the first few days of 2020 - the turn of the decade and a fresh start. Like every year, several of us have made New Year resolutions, from exercising more to spending less time on social media. And just like every year, there’s numerous articles giving us ideas about what we can resolve to change and how we can stick to our newfound behaviors. This is the time for unbridled optimism, where we convince ourselves that this year, we’ll eat healthier, read more, or stress less.
But when February comes, the New Year isn’t so new anymore and our resolutions are likely to have faded away.
New Year’s Eve and Day are examples of what psychologists call temporal landmarks - significant moments in time that are subjectively (like your birthday) or collectively important and that parse a period of time into a before and after. Such landmarks are further related to the “fresh start effect,” which suggests that people are more likely to (and more motivated to) pursue a goal after a temporal landmark has occurred. For instance, a cardiac event can be a temporal landmark in an obese individual’s life that prompts changing food habits. And New Year’s comes with its social connectedness with most others across the world (at least those who observe the Gregorian calendar), making it a fairly salient landmark.
On a smaller scale, we’re also likely to be inspired by fresh starts at the beginning of calendar events, like a new week or a new month (“I’ll go to the gym starting Monday”) or even by a new hour within the day (“I’ll start cooking at 7PM; now it’s just 6:48PM”). Such landmarks help demarcate the passage of not just time, but of ourselves as well. We tend to perceive our past selves as riddled with imperfections that we want to leave behind and begin afresh. Our experience of time and life as a whole is punctuated by these landmarks that spur us to set new goals and aspire to attain them.
Temporal boundaries also open up new mental accounting periods, and not just in the financial sense. Sure, the “annual vacation account” is going to be dipped into differently as compared to the “home utilities account.” But if the psychological self resolves to make a change after the vacation ends, it constitutes a temporal landmark (think of the number of times you’ve decided to get healthier just after the holidays). Even anticipating a landmark can motivate individuals to embark on the pursuit of new goals (or the completion of existing ones). Though time is continuous, our psychological and temporal selves partition it into meaningful units that can incentivize our resolutions.
What happens when these landmarks are too far apart, say every New Year’s Day? Sustaining longer-term change is more difficult and people who’ve committed to starting new patterns or stopping old ones can cave in to delay discounting. This is when we discount or devalue eventual benefits (better health) in favour of short-term and immediate rewards (one more cigarette). For instance, if you could get $100 today or $300 in a year, which would you pick? Most people prefer the immediate reward ($100) in lieu of waiting for a later and better one ($300) and this can wreak havoc with your determination to stick to resolutions. But consider a shorter time frame, bookended by a calendar event (like New Year’s Day) and a personally relevant milestone - it’s likely that when the end of the tunnel is in sight and temporally closer than an entire year, we may be able to exercise that self-control after all.
Principles like this underlie public health movements like Dry January, where the only rule is to give up alcohol from New Year’s Day till February 1st. Millions sign up to participate voluntarily with no expectation of a reward, not including improved health. According to the 2019 evaluation of the movement, 64% of those who signed up to stay off alcohol were successful in their resolve! Having a predetermined end date for a resolution that is not too far off into the future may be just as much (if not more) important than having an optimistic start date. And because temporal landmarks can be created around our subjective experiences, we can leverage them to motivate us optimally.
If you’re one of the many who has made a resolution, or many, this year, take a peek into your personal calendars and spot an upcoming event when you’d like to end it - a birthday, a vacation, a new life event, a friend’s wedding; it could be anything as long as it is significant for you. Who knows, maybe with the end in sight, you will be motivated to keep on carrying on.
Hansika Kapoor
