[MUSIC] So we've been talking about ways that we can actually implement all these behaviors and thought patterns and emotions that we want. And a final way that we can do that is to use the biases we have when it comes to time. Now we don't often realize that we think about time in a biased way but we do. We all think about time linearly. We think about time in a very strange bias way which we'll get to, but this is powerful because we can use the biased way we think about time to hack our happiness. There are certain moments that wind up being better for implementing strategies we really want to implement. So what's the biased way that we think about time? Well, we usually would assume that our psychological timeline works like this. We're in this lecture, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever, your life goes like you're number one, you're number two, your number three, right? But that's not how we think about things. We think about things based on particular psychological events, events that sort of matter to us. So your real psychological timeline might not look like this. It might look something more like this. I'm just kind of making up some meaningful events for you but it might be like maybe you move to a new city. Now you live in New Haven for the first time. You go to middle school, there's a sort of middle school period and there's like you started high school period. There might be some period where you met some new friend group in high school and that changed everything. There might be some time where you started dating that jerk and then you broke up with that jerk. That might be like a week, but it's like marked in your brain as a certain kind of period, right? Covid obviously that is a marked up period. March 2020 I think will be looming larger than any other March in your life because that's when Covid started, right? And on and on and on. The key is that time is not linear. We mark time by these big events in our life, but that means researchers have shown that when a new event happens, when there's some fresh moment, that allows us to break with all our old habits. It kind of becomes this moment where we can start afresh and open a new page and this is what Katy Milkman talks about a lot. She in her book How to Change talks a lot about how we can use these, what she calls fresh start moments. We can have a fresh start effect where we use these moments to start new behaviors. What's the fresh start effect? Well it's a psychological phenomenon which becomes easier to adopt these new habits and make these behavioral changes at these things that might be natural temporal landmarks. So a new year, a new birthday or whatever, right? We know this, right? People think this. People are like new year, I'm going to start exercising this year, I'm going to start meditating, it's my birthday, right? Like new birthday, new year, you're going to try to start something. Hot girl summer, that was a thing. There are these moments where like it's summer now and now I'm going to start these new behaviors, right? And we think that and we're motivated to start and just because of the act that we're motivated to start, the evidence suggests that we're kind of better at it. We can have these moments where we can start new habits more easily. So if you're going to try some of these behaviors, why not do them at a moment where it's just going to be easier for you to implement them. And researchers Katie Milkman and her colleagues really looked at why this is and there's a whole set of reasons why these fresh start moments work. One is that we kind of divide our time into mental accounts like this is my high school time, this is my senior year, this is my senior summer, right? We have these ideas and once we have a new mental account, we can kind of break with the past. These temporal landmarks allow us to put our past failures into some account in the past. So it was like that was old me, that was like spring semester me. Now it's summer me and everything is different and so you can behave a little bit differently. They also these temporal landmarks especially things like birthdays and new years, they put a focus on the bigger picture. You're I'm 18 now, I need to think differently, I need to prioritize certain things, right? And that allows you to have a bigger focus picture which would sometimes make it easier to do these harder things. And so the psychprotip about fresh starts is that you should use them if you're thinking about all these habits and behaviors we've talked about. Pick a new free fresh start moment that you can use to hack your happiness and you've got a lot coming up. We're all having this conversation when you're about to go back to school. Those of you who are listening might be starting a new semester or a new month or even a new week. All of these things are powerful moments where you can start these new habits and when in doubt, pick your birthday because a new year new you is a powerful way to start these habits. So hack your timelines to find ways to start new habits. [MUSIC]
