Why the New Year Doesn’t Feel the Way You Thought It Would

 Transcript

Before we begin today, I want to take just a moment to orient you to something new. Many of you listen to this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and dozens of other podcast platforms and broadcast radio stations around the world. But as of this year, 2026, this podcast will now also be available in video form.

The conversations will be the same, the reflections will be the same, but if you want to experience these episodes face to face, you can now do that as well. You can find the video version, which will be hosted by YouTube alongside the audio, and you're welcome to engage with whatever format feels right for you.

Nothing has been replaced. Something has just been added. By the way, my YouTube channel is @profrjstarr - @profrjstarr. Now, with that said, let's talk about where we actually are. This, the first episode of 2026 will go live on January 7th, a full week into the new year. And psychologically, this is a different moment, very different moment than January 1st.

You see, the first day of the year is symbolic. It's clean, it's abstract. It's a number on a calendar that invites imagination. January 7th is, is not symbolic in the same way. By now, the new year has been entered. It has. It has weight, it has texture. The emails have started again. The routines have crept back in.

The expectations that were floating loosely a week ago have begun to settle into real life. For many people, this is when a quiet discomfort shows up. Not, not a crisis, not a despair, just a a subtle sense that something hasn't quite landed yet. There is often an unspoken question humming in the background at this point in the year.

Why doesn't this feel different or more precisely? Why did I expect it to feel different? We are taught culturally to treat the new year as a reset, a psychological clean slate, a fresh start. But, but the mind doesn't, the mind doesn't actually operate that way. The calendar changes, but the internal structures that, that organize our experience, they they don't dissolve on command.

Our habits, our emotional patterns, our unresolved tensions, our unfinished narratives all cross the threshold with us. And when that starts to register, when that reality really starts to register, a kind of low grade unease can appear.

This is not a personal failure, it's, it's a mismatch between symbolic time and psychological time. You see, psychological time moves differently. It's, it's not segmented neatly into years. It moves through memory, expectation and meaning. It carries continuity. And when we impose a cultural story of sudden renewal onto a system built for gradual integration, the result is often disappointment that has nowhere obvious to go.

So what I want to explore today is this particular emotional space, the feeling of being inside the new year, but not fully oriented to it yet. The sense of standing in a threshold that no one talks about once the confetti has been swept away. Because this space matters and it deserves language.

In psychology, we sometimes talk about liminal states. A liminal space is an in-between space, not where you were, not yet where you're going. Traditionally, this concept comes from anthropology and ritual studies, but it applies beautifully to an internal experience.

Liminal periods are psychologically unsettling because the old structures have loosened, but the new ones have not yet stabilized. Early January is one of the most common liminal periods people experience every year, even if they don't have words for it. The previous year has closed. Its story, feels finished, even if it was painful, even if it was incomplete.

It has a kind of narrative containment. The new year by contrast is still amorphous. It hasn't acquired shape yet, and the mind does not love ambiguity. The mind prefers coherence. It prefers to know where it stands, what it's doing, and why. When coherence is temporarily unavailable, the nervous system can register that as discomfort, even if nothing is objectively wrong.

This is why people often feel restless one week into the year, or oddly heavy, or emotionally flat, or quietly anxious without being able to point to a specific cause. There's a sense of being underway without yet feeling grounded. Another layer of this experience comes from expectation hangover. In the final weeks of December, people often project meaning forward.

They imagine how things might feel different, how they might show up differently, how certain tensions might finally resolve. These projections are not foolish. They're human. They help us tolerate endings and face beginnings. But when the year begins and life resumes its ordinary rhythms, those imagined shifts do not automatically materialize.

And the gap between expectation and reality becomes visible, and that gap can feel like a personal letdown, even though it's actually structural. We rarely ask whether the expectations themselves were reasonable. We simply notice that the feeling we hope for has not arrived. This is where many people start to quietly blame themselves. They think I should feel more motivated by now, or I should feel clearer, or I should feel hopeful, or at least different.

The word "should" does a lot of damage here. There's nothing wrong with feeling unsettled one week into the year. In fact, it's a sign that your psychological system is accurately tracking continuity. You are still you. Your life did not pause for a symbolic reset. The mind is simply adjusting to a new temporal frame while carrying forward an old internal architecture.

That adjustment takes time. Another reason this period feels uncomfortable is that it exposes the illusion of clean breaks. We like the idea that time can erase complexity, that turning a page automatically resolves what came before. But meaning doesn't work that way. Meaning accumulates emotional residue carries forward.

Unfinished business doesn't just dissolve because the date changes. When people feel a subtle disappointment in early January, it it's, it's often grief in disguise. Not grief for something specific, but grief for the fantasy that this year would feel lighter immediately. Grief for the idea that effort would suddenly feel easier, that uncertainty would recede on its own.

Now, now naming this matters because unnamed grief often masquerades as self-criticism. You might notice thoughts like, I don't know what I'm doing, or I should have this figured out by now, or something must be wrong with me. Nothing's wrong with you. You're experiencing the psychological reality of transition. There's also a broader cultural factor at play here. You, you see, we live in an environment that treats forward motion as a moral imperative.

Progress is framed as visible, energetic, and fast. Stillness is interpreted as stagnation. Uncertainty is framed as a problem to solve rather than a condition to inhabit. So when the new year begins and you don't immediately feel propelled forward, it can feel like you're already behind.

This is a false comparison. You see, growth does not announce itself on January 7th or January 1st. Integration does not arrive on schedule. Much of the most meaningful psychological work happens quietly without markers or metrics. The mind often needs time simply to recalibrate, to notice what carried over, to sense what no longer fits.

To recognize what remains unresolved without rushing to fix it. That process isn't dramatic, it's subtle, and because it is subtle, it's easy to misinterpret as failure or a lack of ambition. It's neither. If you are feeling unsettled right now, it may be because you're actually paying attention. Another aspect of this moment has to do with identity.

The new year invites identity narratives. Who am I becoming? What kind of person will I be this year? What version of myself am I leaving behind? These? These are large questions. And, and large questions rarely produce immediate emotional relief, right? They, they often produce unease precisely because they matter.

One week in the old identity has not fully loosened and the new one has not yet formed. That is an inherently unstable place to stand. We often underestimate how much identity, continuity the nervous system requires. Sudden shifts, even positive ones, can feel disorganizing.

The self needs time to recognize itself in new patterns. When people say they feel off at the start of the year, they're often responding to this identity lag. The story of who they are has not yet caught up to the story of who they hope to be and, and that gap is uncomfortable. It's also fertile.

It's where reflection happens. It's where, it's where values clarify. It's where meaningful change actually begins long before it becomes visible. The problem is, is that we're rarely taught to tolerate this phase. We're encouraged to to, to rush past it, to declare intentions, resolutions, to optimize, to act decisively. Action becomes a way of escaping uncertainty, rather than responding thoughtfully to it. And sometimes the most psychologically mature move is not to accelerate, but to pause long enough to notice what this moment is asking of you. And often what it's asking for is not reinvention, but orientation.

Orientation means asking quieter questions. What actually carried forward with me into this year? What didn't resolve just because the calendar changed? What feels unfinished, not because I failed, but because it's still alive? What expectations did I bring with me that may not be realistic or may need to be renegotiated? These questions don't produce slogans. They produce understanding. Understanding doesn't feel exhilarating. It, it feels grounding. So if you're listening to this and thinking, I just feel tired, that matters too.

The end of the year is often emotionally taxing, even when it's pleasant. Social demands, reflection, memory, comparison, obligation, all of that accumulates. January 7th is often when the body finally notices. Fatigue at the start of the year is not a sign that something is wrong. It may be a delayed signal that something finally slowed down enough to be felt. We pathologize this far too quickly. We interpret tiredness as a lack of discipline, lack of motivation, lack of drive. But very often it's simply the nervous system recalibrating after sustained output. The pressure to be energized immediately is not psychologically informed.

It's culturally manufactured. You don't owe the year enthusiasm on demand. What you owe yourself is honesty about where you actually are. There is a particular relief that comes from hearing that nothing has gone wrong, just because things feel unsettled. That relief does not come from reassurance alone, it comes from having an accurate framework. And the accurate framework is this: early January is not a beginning in the psychological sense. It is a transition, and transitions are inherently ambiguous. Ambiguity is uncomfortable because it resists narrative closure. But ambiguity is also where flexibility lives. If you can tolerate this week, not by forcing meaning onto it, but by letting it be what it is, you are doing something quietly sophisticated. You are allowing psychological time to move at its own pace.

This doesn't mean doing nothing. It means not demanding premature clarity. It means understanding that orientation precedes direction. And orientation is a process, not, not a declaration. So as this year unfolds, there will be plenty of moments to talk about growth, change, values, and direction. But the first task is simply to stand where you are without turning that stance into a judgment.

If the new year feels heavier than you expected, that does not mean you are failing it. It may mean you're meeting it honestly. That honesty is a better foundation than any resolution.

So, if you are one week in and feeling unsettled, you're not late. You are not broken. You are not behind. You are in the threshold. And thresholds are not meant to be rushed through. They're meant to be crossed with awareness.

I'll leave that with you.