If you’re looking to the new year to give you a fresh start, maybe dial down your expectations if you want to avoid disappointment
Presumably you’ve abandoned your New Year resolutions by now, unless you’re truly wise, in which case you never made any to begin with. Yet even in the absence of specific plans for the coming year, it’s almost impossible, in early January, to avoid the phenomenon that researchers have unsurprisingly labelled “the fresh-start effect”: that sense of beginning a new, distinct period of life, with the foregoing year relegated to history. (This can happen in September, too, because the school year is etched so deep in our psyches.)
Studies show that these “temporal landmarks” cause us to take a big-picture view of our lives; what they don’t show is that it does us much good. Maybe there’s a brief burst of motivation, but mainly the fresh-start effect makes for unrealistic expectations and therefore disappointment. You’re so excited about making some aspect of life enormously better that real, modest changes get dismissed as insufficient.
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