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September 10th, 2026
​A newsletter by Anne-Laure Le Cunff​

🐛 The Fresh Start Effect

What do September, January, and your birthday have in common? They can all make change feel easier.

Psychologists call this the fresh start effect: the tendency to feel more motivated at a meaningful point in time. These moments can create optimism, increase confidence, and make past failures feel less important.

The fresh start effect is closely linked to temporal landmarks – dates or events that divide our lives into distinct periods and give us a sense of before and after. Some are shared, such as the beginning of a week, month, year, or school term. Others are personal, such as a birthday, moving house, starting a new job, or returning from a holiday.

Researchers found that people were more likely to engage in goal-directed behavior after temporal landmarks. Google searches for “diet” increased at the beginning of weeks, months, and years, while gym attendance rose after events such as birthdays and the start of a new semester.

Their explanation was that temporal boundaries make it easier to separate our current self from what they called our “past imperfect self”, while also prompting us to think about our lives at a broader level.

This helps explain why September can feel unusually energizing even when you’ve not been in school for years. It’s a culturally familiar transition point, associated with returning to work and beginning a new season.

That shift can be useful: fresh starts can provide a temporary boost in motivation, making it easier to begin something you’ve been avoiding, and can create an opportunity to reconsider priorities, such as which projects deserve more attention and which habits still make sense.

But the same optimism can also make us overestimate how much we can change at once. A new season arrives and suddenly the plan is to exercise every morning, cook every meal, read more, reorganize our work, sleep eight hours, and finally learn a language.

Over time, this can create a reset cycle where we repeatedly redesign our routines at the start of a month, season, or year, but rarely stick with one approach long enough to learn from it.

So, how can you make the most of the fresh start effect without falling prey to its pitfalls?

1. Run tiny experiments

Use a fresh start to test a small change rather than commit to a big transformation. “I need to get organized” can be overwhelming, but “For the next two weeks, I’ll do a weekly review every Sunday afternoon” gives you manageable data you can actually evaluate.

2. Make space for reflection

Before deciding what to change, ask what is already working, what is not, and what you have learned. You may discover that the problem is not your entire routine but one part of it, or that a habit you were about to replace is actually worth keeping.

3. Create your own fresh starts

You don’t have to wait for your birthday or the new year. A Monday, the end of a project, or a return from holiday, can create a sense of transition. What matters is that the moment feels distinct enough to mark a boundary you can leverage to start a new season.

The problem with the fresh start effect isn’t ambition. It’s implementing big changes designed for a highly motivated version of yourself and expecting an ordinary version of yourself to maintain it.

Instead, use temporal landmarks as a useful moment to ask: what should I keep, what should I stop, and what is worth experimenting with next?

🛠️ Tool of the Week

📝 Into the Mind of...

LIZ TRAN

Each week I ask a curious mind about their habits, routines, and rituals. This week we learn from change expert and leadership coach Liz Tran, whose book AQ explores why the Agility Quotient is the intelligence we need to handle uncertainty.

1. One idea that keeps you up at night? The gap between how fast the world is changing and how slowly we’re adjusting to our new reality. I worry that my friends, colleagues, and children lack an accurate compass for the future.

2. One strategy to restart your creative engine? Even five minutes without my phone restarts my creative engine. My best ideas have always come from quiet moments – plane rides, walks, the shower. Anywhere I can truly be alone and hear my own intuition.

3. One mindset shift that transformed your work? I’ve transformed my work by splitting it into two distinct modes: the Generator and the Editor. In Generator mode, I create without inhibition. Once that creative engine runs out, I flip the switch to Editor mode. Only then do I bring out the critical eye.

Read Liz’s book

👀 Brain Picks

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🗓️ Community Events

If you enjoy the newsletter, you’ll love our community of curious minds conducting tiny experiments within a safe space and learning together. Here is an overview of upcoming events (full calendar):

• Create rituals for renewal. In this guided session, Gosia Fricze will help you explore the importance of intentional renewal and how to create meaningful rituals that support your energy, creativity, and wellbeing.​
• Design your self-leadership framework. Join William Collins for a conversation where you will learn how to understand your mind frames, how they impact your relationship with the future, and how to reframe them.
​• Make yourself legible. In this practical workshop, Chris Read will share a collection of simple sensemaking tools developed through years of trying to better understand his own thoughts, emotions and reactions.
​• Make progress on your projects. Join Kathryn Ruge for our Monday and Tuesday ‘body doubling’ coworking sessions to work on personal or work-related projects that you want to make progress on, covering all timezones. Ethan Miller is also hosting a cowriting session on Sunday this week.
​• Improve your knowledge management system. Join our next PKM meeting where we learn from one another through sharing how our systems work in the real world and give new PKM users a leg up.
​• Host your own workshop. Do you have an idea for a short presentation and Q&A or a workshop you’d like to trial? Test your first iteration in the Ness Labs community and get feedback. We promote all sessions here in the newsletter.

All of these and future events are included in the price of the membership (only $49 for one year), as well as access to our courses, workshop library, and a dedicated space to track your tiny experiments.