Katy Milkman

“When we diagnose someone with diabetes, we don’t put them on insulin for a month, take them off of it, and expect them to be cured.”

In medicine, doctors recognize that chronic diseases require a lifetime of treatment. Why do we assume that behavior change is any different?

But everyone has problems—even Google.

We knew that people instinctively gravitate toward moments that feel like fresh starts when they want to make change happen.

the power of the New Year

We go from “student” to “working professional”; “renter” to “homeowner”; “single” to “married”; “adult” to “parent”; “New Yorker” to “Californian”; “denizen of the 90s” to “twenty-first-century American” all in the flip of a switch. And labels matter to our behavior.

“I mean, it was the end of the century, right? This was a reset switch for humanity.”

With the shift to a new year, it’s almost as if past attempts to stay off social media, earn As in school, be a better colleague, and eat healthier can be dismissed as the failures of another person

Last year you couldn’t cut it at work or failed to quit smoking, but “that was the old me,” you think, “and this is the new me.”

Hengchen, Jason, and I suspected that if people really felt that they were new and improved, it could, in some cases, be enough to help them overcome a meaningful obstacle to change.