Pushkin.

Hey, Happiness Lab listeners.

It's finally spring, a season that's all about renewal and new beginnings.

And, of course, spring cleaning. As the

weather gets a little warmer, we naturally get the itch to begin rejuvenating. This is the time of

year when we say yes to clearing out our closets and refreshing our homes. It does feel great to

freshen up our physical spaces. But could we take a similar approach to refreshing our well-being?

Could we turn that spring-cleaning urge towards pruning our junky habits or sweeping out our

negative thought patterns? We usually think of January 1st and the start of the new year as the time

for goals like these, but studies have shown that the beginning of spring is also a great time for a

happiness restart.

Take one of my favorite studies by my friend, the psychologist Katie Milkman.

She recruited a group of people who said they had a personal goal that they'd been putting off

for a while. She then offered them the chance to receive a formal reminder that it was

finally time to get started. Half the participants were offered this formal

reminder on some random day of the year, but the other half was offered that reminder on a day that felt

like a new beginning, the first day of spring. What did Katie find? Well, more than three times as

many people wanted to tackle their goal on the first day of spring rather than on some random day.

I love these results because they show that our minds are always on the lookout for what Katie

calls, temporal fresh starts, those special moments during the year when our motivation to make

positive changes gets a boost. So in this new season of the Happiness Lab, we'll be harnessing

the motivational power of springtime.

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