If there was ever a perfect time to make a life change, this
is it.
Behavioral scientists have long known that times of
disruption and trauma also create new opportunities for growth and change.
Disruption happens when life knocks us out of our normal routines. It can be
moving to a new city, starting a new job, getting married or divorced, or
having a child. And for many of us, there’s never been a bigger life disruption
than the pandemic, which changed how we work, eat, sleep and exercise, and even
how we connect with friends and family.
اضافة اعلان
“I think this fresh start is really a big opportunity,” said
Katy Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School and author of the new
book “How
to Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.”
“I don’t know when we’ll have another one like it. We have
this blank slate to work on. Everything is on the table to start fresh.”
Much of Milkman’s research has focused on the science of new
beginnings, which she calls “the fresh start effect.” Milkman and her
colleagues have found that we’re most inclined to make meaningful changes
around “temporal landmarks” — points in time that we naturally associate with a
new beginning. New Year’s Day is the most obvious temporal landmark in our
lives, but birthdays, the start of spring, the start of a new school year, even
the beginning of the week or the first of the month are all temporal landmarks
that create psychological opportunities for change.
In one study, Milkman found that students were most likely
to visit the gym around the start of the week, the first of the month, following
birthdays or after school breaks. Another study found that “fresh start
language” helped people kick-start their goals. In that study, people were far
more likely to start a new goal on a day labeled “the first day of spring” than
on an unremarkable day labeled “the third Thursday in March.” (It was the exact
same day, just labeled differently.)
Another study found that when people were advised to start
saving money in a few months, they were less likely to do so than a group of
people told to start saving around their birthday that was also a few months
away. The birthday group saved 30 percent more money.
For many people, the lifting of pandemic restrictions and
getting vaccinated means planning vacations and returning to more-normal work
and school routines. It’s exactly the kind of psychological new beginning that
could prompt the fresh-start effect, Milkman said.
“We have this opportunity with this blank slate to change
our health habits and be very conscientious about our day,” Milkman said. “What
is our lunch routine going to look like? What is our exercise routine? There’s
an opportunity to rethink. What do we want a workday to look like?”
It’s not too late to reset
As the pandemic recedes, some people worry that the past
year of lockdowns, restrictions and time at home was a missed opportunity.
Leslie Scott, a nonprofit event organizer in Eugene, Oregon, said she feels
that she just muddled through a stressful year, rather than using the time to
make meaningful life changes.
“I sometimes wonder if I squandered this gift of time,” said
Scott, an organizer of the Oregon Truffle Festival. “I have all this anxiety
that we’re just going to go back to what people think of as normal. As we come
out of our cocoons, am I emerging from something and moving toward something
new? Or am I just stuck?”
While some people did develop healthy new habits during
lockdowns, it’s not too late if you spent your pandemic days just getting by.
The good news is that the end of the pandemic is probably a more opportune time
for meaningful change than when you were experiencing the heightened anxiety of
lockdowns.
“COVID-19 was an awful time for many of us,” said Laurie
Santos, a psychology professor at Yale who teaches a popular online course
called The Science of Well-Being. “There’s lots of evidence for what’s called
post-traumatic growth — that we can come out stronger and with a bit more
meaning in our lives after going through negative events. I think we can all
harness this awful pandemic time as a time to get some post-traumatic growth in
our own lives.”
So what’s your next chapter?
One of the biggest obstacles to change has always been the
fact that we tend to have established routines that are hard to break. But the
pandemic shattered many people’s routines, setting us up for a reset, Santos
said.
“We’ve all just changed our routines so much,” she said. “I
think many of us have realized during the pandemic that some of the things we
were doing before
COVID-19 weren’t the kind of things that were leading to
flourishing in our lives. I think many of us were realizing that aspects of our
work and family life and even our relationships probably need to change if we
want to be happier.”
One reason fresh starts can be so effective is that humans
tend to think about the passage of time in chapters or episodes, rather than on
a continuum, Milkman said. As a result, we tend to think of the past in terms
of unique periods, such as our high school years, the college years, the years
we lived in a particular town or worked at a certain job. Going forward, we’re
likely to look back on the pandemic year as a similarly unique chapter of our
lives.
“We have chapter breaks, as if life is a novel. That is the
way we mark time,” Milkman said. “That has implications for the psychology of
fresh starts, because these moments that open a new chapter give us a sense of
a new beginning.
“It’s easier to attribute any failings to ‘the old me.’ You
feel like you can achieve more now, because we’re in a new chapter.”
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