The start of a new year is often viewed as a time for a fresh start. Whether you make a formal New Year’s resolution or just use the date as a landmark for anchoring changes you want to make to your life, it’s very common to want to turn over a new leaf with a new year.
But these resolutions and promises to start fresh don’t always outlast the month. Many of us feel we have failed by the end of January: not having made the changes we wanted, we give up.
What’s happening here? The problem might be with the concept of the fresh start itself.
Why Fresh Starts Feel So Appealing
According to research from Harvard and UCLA [1] it is extremely common to commit to personal goals, such as going to the gym more, for example, or starting a diet to become healthier, immediately after what researchers call a temporal landmark. They showed that Google searches for tips to pursue goals increase significantly after:
- Birthdays
- Holidays
- New years
- The start of the month
- The start of the week
- The start of the school year
They suggest that this temporal landmarking is linked to our understanding of the passage of time. It’s much easier for us to create a time frame based around a major calendar event, since we can envision a block of time in our minds during which we might make a change.
Why Fresh Starts Often Fail
The problem with setting a big goal at the start of the year is that it is tied to an idea of the future that doesn’t always reflect reality. In other words, the way we imagine the new year is almost certainly different to, and more idealistic, than how it will play out across our everyday lives.
This means that the goals we make for our fresh start on New Year’s Day are often too general, too big, and not reflective of all the small actions, thoughts, and interactions that actually make up our day-to-day lives. So, when the grandiose goals we set ourselves don’t fit into the lives we actually lead, we feel that we’ve failed at making our fresh start as we fall back into repeating the same old patterns over and over again.
And because failure feels bad, this can have a negative impact on our self worth and self confidence, to the extent that a failed fresh start can come to feel worse than the original frustrations and negative patterns that inspired us to make changes in the first place.
Better Ways to Grow in the New Year
However, just because fresh starts often fail doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to develop and grow in the New Year. You can still aim to make changes that will improve your quality of life over the course of the coming year, especially when managing fear and anxiety are concerned. The key is to make small changes and build new patterns through repeated actions that affirm the change you want to make.
Generic Goals Versus Specific Goals
The first important consideration when setting realistic and achievable goals, rather than relying on a grand fresh start ideal, is in the way you position the goal itself.
According to research out of Sweden, simply rephrasing a New Year’s resolution can be the key to success, so long as you phrase it in a way that makes it positive and manageable on a day-to-day level. [2]
Rather than setting broad, outcome based grand goals such as:
- I will stop being afraid
- I will stop being anxious
- I will be healthier
- I will sleep more
- I will get my life organised
It is far more effective to focus on specific, repeatable actions that fit into everyday life.
For example:
- Tomorrow, I will notice each time fear shows up rather than trying to stop it
- Each morning, I will take two minutes to write down what is worrying me
- In the afternoon, I will add one piece of fruit to what I eat
- Tonight, I will go to bed 30 minutes earlier than usual
- On Mondays, I will write a simple list for the week ahead
These kinds of goals are concrete, time-bound, and realistic and they work with the rhythms of real life rather than relying on motivation or willpower. As these small actions are repeated, they begin to form patterns, and it is those patterns that make longer-term change possible.
Building a Pattern and Learning to Love it
As I often tell the people I help overcome their fears and anxieties, the point of starting small is to help your brain develop a new pattern that it can rely on when thinking about change.
What feels like an uncontrollable terror is in fact the brain encountering a certain situation or stimuli and moving rapidly along a well-worn neural pattern it has learned and reinforced, often over decades of life! This pattern activates the nervous system which tells your body to react in fear.
Fresh starts tend to fail because they focus on the outcome rather than the process that makes change possible, which in turn, can feel overwhelming. A new year, a new plan, or a strong burst of motivation cannot by itself replace patterns that have been built and reinforced over time.
Sustainable change follows a sequence, not a single decisive moment. I have found that lasting change tends to move through seven distinct stages, and these stages apply just as much to everyday goals as they do to fear and anxiety.
- Noticing the Pattern: Change begins by recognising what already happens. This might be the familiar urge to avoid, the spike of anxiety, or the internal resistance that appears when you try to do something differently. Fresh starts often skip this step, assuming the past no longer matters once a new date arrives.
- Creating a Pause: Before a new response is possible, the nervous system needs a brief moment of calm. This does not mean forcing yourself to relax or feel positive, it simply means slowing the body enough to interrupt an autopilot response.
- Reconsidering the Meaning: With a pause in place, patterns can be seen more accurately. Discomfort can be recognised as a learned response rather than evidence that something is going wrong.
- Choosing a Different Response: This is where small, intentional actions matter, such as going to bed earlier, writing a short list,or noticing fear rather than fighting it. These actions may seem insignificant, but they introduce something new into an old pattern which helps to break the cycle.
- Completing the Action: Following through, even briefly, gives the brain new information. It learns that the moment you were expecting to resist or avoid can be handled differently.
- Reflecting on What Actually Happened: Taking a moment to look back is essential. Not to judge or criticise, but to notice what was easier than expected, what helped, what you need to work on more, and how your body responded on this occasion.
- Reinforcing the New Pattern: Each repetition strengthens the new neural pathways. Over time, these small actions accumulate, and the brain begins to favour the newer, steadier pattern instead of the old one.
Viewed this way, progress is not about trying to make a fresh start carry you through the year, and a date in the calendar cannot override patterns that have been learned and reinforced over time. What does make a difference is the steady repetition of small, manageable actions that fit into real life. Although small actions can feel insignificant at first, they’re what make larger steps easier later on, we tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what consistent effort creates in the long run.
Each time you notice a familiar response and choose something slightly different, you give your brain new information about what is possible, and as you repeat your actions, these moments accumulate, and change becomes less about effort and more about reliability.
Ultimately, growth does not happen in a single decisive moment at the beginning of the year, but in the quiet consistency of patterns that are practiced, reinforced, and gradually incorporated into day-to-day life.
Sources:
[1] Dai, Hengchen and Milkman, Katherine L. and Riis, Jason, The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior (December 24, 2013). Dai, H., Milkman, K.L., & Riis, J. (2014). The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior. Management Science, 60(10), 2563-2582., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2204126 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2204126
[2] Carlbring, P. (2020) ‘NEW STUDY: How to succeed in keeping your New Year’s resolution’, Per Carlbring, 9 December. Available at: https://www.carlbring.se/how-to-succeed-in-keeping-your-new-years-resolution/ (Accessed: 19 December 2025).