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.
Cultivate your own ‘fresh-start effect’
To make meaningful changes it helps to first 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.”
Persist to make new habits stick
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.
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.
Enjoy the process not just the end point
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.
