The Clean Slate - Why the New Year is a powerful starting point for new habits
I love all the nerdy psychology shit behind habit formation. I just think it’s fascinating how our brains work to form and keep a habit. And even more fascinating how hard it is for our brain to BREAK those patterns once they’re really “in” there.
And I’ve been seeing a few anti-New Year posts and conversations about how the start of the New Year is just like any other time of year, and therefore, there’s no “magic” around this time of year to help kickstart change or some new habit formation.
And I have to say… I disagree.
Ok, of course, we should never feel COMPELLED by anything except our own inner want & need to make shifts in our lives. BUT…
A New Year is simply NOT like any other time of the year. This is what I totally disagree with.
The New Year is a not only an actual timestamp for “New” in our calendar, but it is also a psychological fresh start.
The New Year signifies the beginning of something, shedding the old and stepping into the new. It’s the timeline “break” our brains require to help us recharge and realign. Without this kind of celebratory “event” our minds would literally just become a mush of exhausted activity that operates on a loop.
You know what I mean - the 2020/2021 New Year felt a bit like that, didn’t it? We were still in a very scary space with the pandemic, numbers were high, death rates were high, restrictions were high…
Going into a new year didn’t really feel like the fresh start we needed after the year we’d had. We didn’t get to have the effect of that fresh start or the Clean Slate, as Gretchen Rubin calls it.
She writes, in her book on habit formation, Better than Before, that the Strategy of the Clean Slate, is one of the most powerful strategies to use to begin a new habit, or make a shift.
The Clean Slate absolves us of past indiscretions. It paves the path for a new beginning. These are exactly the things we celebrate on New Years, right?
We get to:
Get rid of the dead weight, unwanted baggage and expectations of the old year
We can take inventory of the wins & losses we experienced to understand how we've grown and what we've learned
We get to connect back to who we are at our core, having shed the expectations of the year that was
We get to visualise and dream about the future, free from those expectations
Other clean slates work in similar ways. A new job, a new neighbourhood, house or apartment, and new car, making a new friend or even just rearranging the furniture in your space - all spark the strategy of a Clean Slate, in the same way New Years does.
It clears our minds to think anew, to dream anew and to start anew.
Are you ready to take advantage of your Clean Slate, friend?
Check out the STAPLE Coaching offerings to claim your 2022.
