Or: Why the Urge to Begin Again on the First Day of Fall Is Not in Your Imagination
Every year, on the first day of fall, I find myself doing something that has nothing to do with summer ending and everything to do with starting over. I clear the desk. I buy a new journal. I pull out the list of things I said I would do this year and have not done yet. I look at it with something between guilt and affection and decide: not too late. There are still three months. This is where it begins.
I used to think this was a quirk of the school calendar. The part of me that never quite grew out of the autumnal equinox as a new year. But it turns out there is a name for what happens when a date that feels like a starting line arrives. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School studied exactly this. In 2014, Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, and Jason Riis published a study called the Fresh Start Effect. They tracked gym visits, Google search trends around health and diet, and goal-setting behavior across thousands of people. The pattern they found was consistent: the desire to pursue goals spikes right after a date that feels like a new beginning. Not just January first. Any starting line we recognize as a starting line. A birthday. The first of the month. A Monday. The first day of a new season.
If you want to read the study yourself, Wharton published a summary here. I find it interesting that there is an actual word for this. For the way a birthday, a new season, or even a Monday can make starting over feel genuinely possible. Worth knowing about.
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Why the First Day of Fall Feels Like January
January arrives when we are already tired. The holidays are over. The days are short. The cold that was romantic in December is just cold in January. Our good intentions have to fight the weather, the dark, and the post-celebration slump all at once.
The first day of fall is different. The air has changed. The light has changed. After three months of heat that asked very little of us mentally, the cooler mornings arrive and something in the mind wakes back up. I notice it every year: the pull toward the desk, the book, the project I set aside in June. The mental clarity that the long light of summer somehow makes harder to find.
That is not a trick. That is a gift. Use it.
What the Urge to Begin Again Is Asking For
The fresh start impulse is real, but it is also brief. The window of genuine motivation that opens around one of these dates is wide enough to act in. It does not stay open indefinitely. The resolution made on January first that gets no traction by January third was not a bad resolution. It just did not get turned into anything concrete quickly enough.
So when the first day of fall arrives and you feel it (that combination of restlessness and readiness), the question is not whether to pay attention. The question is what to do with it while it is here.
I want to suggest something that is not a five-step plan or a life overhaul. It is something smaller and, I think, more lasting. The fall fresh start is best honored not with a long list of goals but with a few deliberate choices. What do you want more of before the year closes? What do you want to be doing differently in December than you are doing now?
Write it down. Not in a spreadsheet or a goal-tracking app. On paper, in a notebook, in your own handwriting. There is something about writing a thing down that makes it real in a way that typing it does not. I have kept a journal for years. The entries I return to are never the ones I typed. They are the ones I wrote with a pen, slightly crooked, in the margin or on a slip of paper on a morning that was moving too fast.
If you do not have a journal you love, the first day of fall is a good moment to find one. The journal itself matters less than the habit. But a notebook you are glad to open helps. Truthfully, my favorite journals are composition notebooks that live in a leather holder Gary made for me.
The Case for Going Analog
The fresh start impulse is asking you to be more present with your own life. That is very hard to do while also being fully available to your phone.
I wrote about the analog bag a while back, and I decided to come back to the idea this fall. For those who missed it: an analog bag is a bag (a tote, a basket, whatever you like) filled with things that keep you off your phone. A book. A journal. A puzzle. A sketchpad. Some good pens. The point is not to be virtuous about technology. The point is to make the phone slightly less convenient than the interesting thing sitting right beside it.
You can read more about how I think about this in this Weekend Meanderings post on the analog life. The short version: the slower hours that fall offers are a resource. The question is whether we spend them scrolling or spend them on something that gives back.
A puzzle is one of my favorite fall companions. There is something about the patience it requires. It is not mindless, exactly, but it is not taxing either. I pull one out every fall and work on it as I pass by the table, a little at a time. By the time it is finished, the season has usually shifted another degree toward winter and I am ready for another one.
A good puzzle for fall, something rich in color and detail, is one of the best investments I know for relaxing.
A Fresh Start Does Not Require a Grand Plan
The messaging around new beginnings tends toward the ambitious. New year, new you. A full reset. A complete overhaul of habits, systems, and perhaps also your kitchen cabinets. If that is what you want, the first day of fall is as good a time as any to begin it.
But the most lasting fresh starts are the quiet ones. The ones where you simply decide to do one thing differently. Go outside for twenty minutes every morning before the day takes over. Read before bed instead of scrolling. Make Sunday afternoons the time you cook something slow and good. Write three things down each morning before you open the computer.
Small enough that you actually do it. Repeated often enough that October becomes a different kind of month than August was.
The researchers noted something that has stayed with me. The fresh start effect works, in part, because it creates psychological distance from our past selves. The imperfect version of us who did not exercise, did not write, did not do the thing we kept meaning to do. That version stays on the other side of the starting line. This version, the one who arrived with the autumnal equinox, gets to try again.
The calendar does not hold grudges. The past does not determine what comes next. New starting lines are available, more often than we realize, to anyone willing to step up to one.
Step up to this one. There are still three months. It is not too late.
What does your fall fresh start look like this year? I would love to know what you are returning to, or beginning for the first time. Leave a comment below or come find me on Pinterest and Instagram, where I share what the season looks like from here.
Happy first day o Fall friends!
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