September Is Your Second-Chance January

New York Magazine:

September has a back-to-school vibe that’s hard to shake. This tends to be true even if it’s been many years since you were a student, and even if you currently have no school-age children at home. The writer Gretchen Rubin has observed that September is like the “other January,” in that many people come up with resolution-type goals for their post–Labor Day selves. “Even if you’re a big grown-up adult,” she said in a recent Facebook chat, the traditional start of the American school year “kind of has that sense of new beginning.” Your actual 2016 resolutions are likely long-forgotten, but that’s okay. September is your second chance.

This notion of new beginnings, incidentally, was the subject of an insightful 2014 paper by a trio of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. In it, they found evidence of something they called the “fresh start effect” — that is, that people are much more likely to think of the bigger picture of their lives, and set goals accordingly, just after beginning some new era. These could be, and often were, big milestones: a new job, a new marriage, a new school year. But, just as often, they were much smaller than that: the start of a new month (or even of a new week or day), or the first day back at work after a vacation.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine