Why It’s Worth It |So often, we get enthused, set goals, and gather our determination to bring about a change in our lives, only to peter out in relatively short order. Why is this so hard? What if there are psychological hacks to turbocharge our goals that could make all the difference?

This episode of Choiceology explores The Fresh Start Effect, one of Katy Milkman’s favorite topics. The Fresh Start Effect is a psychological mechanism that can turbocharge motivation when making a change, regardless of how simple (e.g., be less messy) or complicated (e.g., quit a job and launch a business).

The underlying science is clear: tagging the official start of goal pursuit to a set time marker that we deliberately choose (and has meaning to us) can boost our success. We all love to feel like we are starting new, unburdened by past mistakes, and we can make fundamental, significant changes when we align our goal planning with the start of a deliberately chosen new chapter. The momentum we gain from leaving our old selves behind can rocket us to nailing a change that would otherwise elude us.

Katy starts the episode by discussing how religious and secular rituals tap into a psychological predilection we use to mark time, wipe the slate clean, and start anew. She then visits with Ray Zahab, a former hard-drinking, junk food-eating, smoking party animal who completely changed his life by harnessing a single moment in time.

Ray started his transformation on New Year’s Day, 2000, the start of a new year and new century. His initial goal was straightforward:  to quit smoking. Ray had failed to stop numerous times before, but this time, the Fresh Start Effect and Ray’s hard work boosted him to victory. After that, he took up running and never looked back.

Today, Ray can add record-breaking ultra-marathoner, extreme adventurer, adventurer-in-residence with the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, and founder of a non-profit that strives to educate and empower young people to his list of accomplishments. Ray’s philosophy is simple:  he believes we are all extraordinary.

Background |In this episode, we hear Ray Zahab’s accounting of the power of Fresh Starts and listen to researchers Richard Thaler and John Beshears speak about how their work has led us to understand the phenomenon of mental accounting, a vital ingredient of any Fresh Start. The conversation touches on how humans perceive time, our mental accounting process to measure it, and our tendency to categorize time into distinct “episodes” or “buckets.” Key points include:

• “Start days” are (mostly) arbitrary – Ray’s monumental change was attached to the turn of the century. But research shows that we can pick any given day – our birthday, a solstice, a Monday, the first day at a new job, a recent move, or even a lucky number – to mark the moment we start a new “episode” in our lives, so long as it has personal meaning. The key is to see the temporal landmark as a beacon, the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.   
• Temporal landmarks – According to research, we innately see our lives in distinct episodes, not as one long continuous flow. We can leverage this perception to identify time-based landmarks, ground our goal planning, and turbo boost off a Fresh Start.
• New me – Marking time this way helps us look back and say, “That was the old me” and “This is the new me.” It makes everything feel possible and serves to separate us from previous failures.
• Mental accounting – This umbrella term captures our tendencies to label and divvy up all sorts of resources (such as work schedules, money, the timeline of our lives, etc.).
• Financial accounting – This form of mental accounting describes our tendency to allocate money into buckets we believe can never be used for another purpose. On the positive side, this tendency guides us to self-discipline about budgets and simplifies our lives. But this rigidity can lead to odd decisions, like taking out a high-interest loan rather than breaking into the vacation bucket. Somehow, we categorize our dollars and treat some of them differently, even though they have the same value.
• Temporal accounting – The tendency to see our lives as episodes is another subset of mental accounting. Instead of labeling money, we allocate the resource of time. We can wield this psychological tendency to achieve long-sought change by picking a day (and making it iconic!) to start our new beginning.

Source | Choiceology podcast:  A Clean Slate – Season 2, Episode 5 (January 1, 2022)

About | Katy Milkman is a behavioral scientist, Wharton professor, national bestselling author, and host of Choiceology, a Charles Schwab original podcast that melds conversations about science, research, and human quirks to help us make better decisions and avoid costly mistakes. She also produces an insightful free newsletter, Milkman Delivers (sign up on her website!).Katy believes the key to changing ourselves for good lies in better understanding the internal obstacles that hold us back.