Why do I always want to start on Monday?
· Source: Dai, Milkman & Riis, Management Science, 2014
It’s Thursday evening, and you’ve just eaten the last of the biscuits you promised yourself you wouldn’t buy. The running shoes are still by the door where you put them on Sunday night. So you make a deal with yourself: this week is a write-off, but on Monday it all starts properly.
You’ve made this deal before. Sometimes Monday arrives and you really do go for that run. Other times Monday turns into “the first of the month”, and the first of the month turns into January. Either way, the pull of a fresh date is strong, and it’s fair to wonder whether it’s just a way of putting things off.
Three kinds of data, one pattern
Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis set out to check whether the New Year’s resolution is just one example of something that happens all year round. Instead of running an experiment, they looked at records of what people actually did, day by day, in three very different places.
First, Google searches for the word “diet”. Second, visits to a university gym, recorded automatically whenever a student swiped a card at the door. Third, goals that people signed up for on stickK, a website where you commit to a goal and can put money on the line if you fail.
All three rose after what the researchers call temporal landmarks: dates that mark a beginning. The start of a new week, month, year or semester. A birthday. The day after a public holiday. They named the pattern the fresh start effect.
How big the jump was
Some of the numbers are large. Measured against the baseline in their analysis, interest in dieting on Google rose by 14.4% at the start of a week and by 82.1% at the start of a year. A new month added 3.7%, and the days after federal holidays in the United States added 10.2%.
The gym data covered 11,912 undergraduate members. Students went more at the start of each week, month, year and semester, and on the first day after a school break. Visits tailed off as each week went on.
Birthdays were the odd one out, in an interesting way. Most birthdays were followed by more gym visits. After their 21st, the age when they could legally buy alcohol in the United States, they went less. The authors offer guesses about why and say plainly that those explanations are speculative.
On stickK, people were 62.9% more likely to commit to a goal at the start of a week and 145.3% more likely at the start of a year. The pattern held not only for health. It showed up for goals about money, career, study and relationships, which makes it hard to explain the whole effect as people working off a big holiday meal.
Why a date might feel like a new page
This kind of data shows when people act, not why. The authors suggest two reasons, and they say clearly that the paper doesn’t test them directly.
The first is that a landmark draws a line in time. Last week’s slip-ups now belong to the old period, and the person on this side of the line feels a little more like the one who keeps promises. The second is that a landmark pulls you out of the daily rush for a moment. You look at your life from further back, and from there your bigger goals are easier to see.
A new week can’t change you. It can make it easier to try again.
A later paper from the same team took this into the lab. Across five experiments, Dai, Milkman and Riis found that pointing out a date as the start of a new period made people more likely to say they intended to start on a goal. They also report that part of this came from feeling separated from a past, imperfect self. These were intentions in a study, not habits followed for months, but they fit the field data.
Starting fresh or putting it off?
Here’s the honest catch. In the field data, the extra push was often short. After a holiday, motivation spiked on the first workday and dropped off fast. Over a week, a month or a semester, it faded more slowly. The paper also didn’t check whether goals started on a landmark were more likely to succeed.
The authors raise the risk you probably suspect already. If people know a clean slate is coming, they might allow themselves more slip-ups before it, or wait for it instead of starting now. They list that as a question for future research, not a finding.
So the Monday instinct is real and common. Whether it helps depends on what you do with it. A fresh date is a good moment to begin. It’s a poor reason to give up on Thursday.
A small example
Here is an invented example. Tom wants to read more. He has started three times this year, each time on a Monday, and each time the book ended up under a pile of post by Wednesday.
This time he notices something. Each restart came with a big plan: an hour a night, a list of twelve books. By Wednesday there was usually a bad day and no room left for the plan. The slip wasn’t the problem. Treating the slip as the end was.
So on the first of the month, he looks back at the old month for five minutes. Out loud, he names what actually worked: two evenings when he read in bed with the phone in another room. He names what didn’t: trying to read after the late shifts. Then he sets something small for the new month. Ten pages, phone in the kitchen, not on late-shift nights.
When he misses a night, he doesn’t wait for the next Monday. He just reads on the next ordinary evening. The fresh start was for setting things up, not for permission to stop.
When it’s more than a stuck habit
Wanting to start again is normal, and most of us restart the same few habits many times. It’s worth talking to a doctor or a therapist if the cycle starts to hurt: if each failed restart leaves you ashamed for days, if the goal itself is about food or weight and has started to take over your thoughts, or if low energy keeps you from starting anything at all for weeks. Those are signs that something other than timing is in the way.
Try it tonight
- On the next first of the month, spend five minutes saying what worked last month and what didn’t.
- Pick one small thing to start, and say exactly when and where you’ll do it.
- If you miss a day, restart the next day, without waiting for the next Monday.
On the first of the month, say last month’s lessons out loud in Halflight. It files them under that date, so you can read them back the next time you start again.