Take our Ambition Test

Find a therapist near me

The motivation that comes with a "start" often fades when its novelty wears off or life interrupts our plans.

Life's inevitable interruptions become hard to recover from when we treat them as evidence of failure.

Designing for fun can make desirable behaviors easier to start and maintain, especially when motivation fails.

There's something undeniably appealing about a fresh start. We feel it at the beginning of a new year, but also in many other moments: a new week, a birthday, the first day back after time away, or any other marker that lets us believe some previous period has closed. Researchers have described this as the fresh start effect, the tendency for temporal landmarks to make our aspirations feel a little more available to us. In those moments, the clean slate feels real, and beginning again can feel energizing.

Psychology Today's recent cover story, "The Best Ways to Begin Again," explored this tension beautifully, making the case that beginning again can be good for us precisely because it asks us to enter the vulnerable state of being new at something. Novelty can wake us up. Beginnerhood can stretch us. First attempts can remind us that we are still capable of change. But the same qualities that make a beginning powerful also make it fragile. Being new at something usually means tolerating mistakes, awkwardness, and uncertainty long enough for the experience to become meaningful. When the novelty wears off, the pursuit is not quite what we expected, or life interrupts the way we imagined things would unfold, often our initial plan can break down.

The Part After the Plan Breaks

I was recently fortunate enough to sit down with Steve Kamb, author of How to Try Again and founder of Nerd Fitness, to discuss this topic. Kamb has spent years thinking about behavior change in the place where most advice tends to get thin: after our best intentions meet real life. One of the things I most appreciate about Kamb's ideas is that he doesn't treat failure as a character flaw. He's much more interested in what happens next: how we talk to ourselves after a........

© Psychology Today