3 Reasons January Triggers Your Anxiety
From post-holiday depletion to pressure-filled resets, these factors make the start of the year emotionally heavy.
By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | January 2, 2026
January has always been culturally framed as a fresh start. The act of hanging up a new calendar can almost feel like giving ourselves permission to plot new goals and craft newer versions of ourselves. Yet, for many people, despite its rush of novel energy, January fails to bring motivation or hope. Instead, it brings a potent form of anxiety and a resistance toward beginning again.
As the holidays come to a close, and work and school resume, the winter dark still stretches on in many parts of the world. Suddenly, people report feeling anxious, low-energy, restless or strangely deflated. As it turns out, there's real scientific research behind these January blues and why the new year can feel emotionally rough.
This reaction is so common that people have now started to refer to it as "January anxiety": a cluster of emotional responses tied to transitions, identity pressure, uncertainty and post-holiday depletion.
Below are the key research-backed reasons why January can feel emotionally threatening rather than inspiring, and what this fear reveals about the human mind.
1. January Amplifies Anticipatory Anxiety and Uncertainty
A core psychological driver of anxiety is not just stress itself but the anticipationof stress. This is because January represents the open-ended unknown of a year that has not yet unfolded — filled with decisions, responsibilities and potential failures.
Research on stressor anticipation shows that simply thinking about an upcoming stressor can increase ruminative thoughts and undermine mood later in the day or week. In a longitudinal, dense daily life study, researchers found that individuals who anticipated a stressor showed higher levels of negative rumination hours later, a pattern tied to decreased well-being and increased anxiety.
This anticipatory anxiety helps explain why New Year's expectations, often framed as a broad, vague call to "be better," can produce more dread than excitement. January intensifies this because it compresses the future into a single mental snapshot, flooding our mind with questions like "What will this year bring?" "Will I succeed?" or "Will things change?" For anxious minds, these questions can feel unmanageable.
Add to this broader societal pressure to create and live up to lofty resolutions, and you've got a psychological gridlock of anxiety. When there's a gap between how you want to behave and how you actually behave, that gap produces negative affect and distress. Rather than feeling energized by possibility, the brain defaults to threat prediction, scanning for what could go wrong instead of what could go right.
2. January Demands Perfection After Post-Holiday Depletion
The idea that January should feel energizing ignores the biological and psychological reality that most people enter January emotionally depleted. A 2025 study of nearly 300 parents across the Christmas season, published in Communications Psychology, found that high levels of parental burnout during the festive period predicted lower genuine emotional expression and greater volatility in affect over time.
For weeks, maybe even months, leading up to December, many people run purely on social momentum like celebrations, travel, family time, reconnecting with friends and ritual observances. Human emotion is built in part on anticipation and reward, and when those inputs suddenly disappear after New Year's, the emotional system can experience a kind of crash.
This phenomenon is also known as the "post-holiday blues": a temporary downturn in mood and motivation after the holidays. This is a real emotional response to loss of structure, social engagement and novelty at the end of the celebrations. It reflects the rapid diminishment in the boost you get from a break, after returning to your everyday roles and responsibilities.
When the external sources of pleasure and novelty disappear, the internal reward circuits of dopamine and expectancy systems are left under-stimulated, leaving many people feeling hollow, listless or anxious. It's not laziness; it's your brain recalibrating to a lower "set point" of stimulus and social reward.
3. January Threatens Identity Stability
January is marketed as a time of identity transformation. But research suggests that threatening or shifting self-concepts, especially rapidly, can provoke anxiety. A 2020 study from Frontiers in Psychology shows that anticipating future loss (of the present state) can raise anxiety and reduce enjoyment because it changes your temporal focus and increases emotional tension about the future.
In other words, when you look at January and think "I should be the person who goes to the gym, reads more, earns more, is happier," you're not just planning a behavior change. You're threatening a complete overhaul to your current identity. As a result, your brain works overtime to reconcile the person you are with the person you want to be. That mismatch itself becomes a target for stress.
This identity tension ties directly into the notion of psychological uncertainty, uncertainty about who you are, what you value or where you're going. Cognitive theories of self-concept show that when people face situations where their identity feels unstable (e.g., big life shifts like starting a new year), they are more prone to anxiety as the self system works harder to resolve that uncertainty.
What To Do About January Anxiety
To avoid letting your January anxiety get the better of you, there are four key strategies you can leverage:
- Stabilize identity through small wins. Rather than a sweeping identity overhaul ("Be a whole new person"), focus on identity-congruent behavior, or small actions that align with your values. Choose one behavior that reflects who you already are, and do it regularly. The consistency reinforces your existing identity, while still building forward momentum.
- Replenish emotional energy. Since post-holiday emotional fatigue can have a measurable impact on affective dynamics, it's important to deliberately schedule recovery activities. Small, pleasant activities that restore affect, such as light exercise, creative hobbies or social time with supportive people, help rebuild psychological resources. Focus on routines that nourish rather than drain you.
- Reframe resolutions into systems. Rather than one big goal, design small, immediate systems that generate early wins, like habit stacking, micro-goals or "if-then" plans reduce the intention-action gap that drives January stress. Instead of "I will exercise more," try "I will walk for 10 minutes after lunch today."
- Embrace gradual transition back to work. Don't expect emotional restoration overnight. Your nervous system needs time to recalibrate after high social stimulation and disrupted rhythms. To ease the transition, block social "downtime slots" in your calendar (e.g., a weekly social walk or meditation class).
January anxiety is a psychological response to identity threat, uncertainty, exhaustion, social pressure and unresolved endings. New beginnings don't have to be loud, ambitious or immediate. Sometimes the bravest way to begin is slowly, with rest, reflection and kindness toward the self that made it this far.
January anxiety hits harder for the sensitive ones. Take the Anxiety Sensitivity Scale to know if you fall into that category.
Identifying your symbolic guardian animal can help you understand how you can use (January) anxiety as a bespoke superpower for your personality. Take the science-inspired Guardian Animal Test today.
A similar version of this article can also be found on Forbes.com, here.