The Last Supper

(5 minute read)

Every January, millions of people decide they're going to change something.

Lose weight. Exercise more. Stop smoking. Drink less. Start the business. Leave the job. Write the book. Learn the language. Become a slightly better version of themselves.

Or perhaps they don't wait for January. Perhaps they wait for Monday. The first of the month. After the summer. Once work calms down. Once the kids are older. Once they've saved enough. Once they feel ready.

Human beings spend an extraordinary amount of time planning change. Which raises an obvious question: if we truly hated it, why would we keep trying to create it?

I've always been quietly amused by what happens in the hours and days just before one of these fresh starts.

There is a final, enthusiastic burst of the very thing we're about to leave behind.

One last takeaway. One last cigarette (or packet). One last weekend doing absolutely nothing productive. One last bottle of wine because, well, Monday is a new beginning and it would be a shame to waste a perfectly good Sunday evening being virtuous.

I can think of more than a few occasions where I have embraced this tradition with genuine commitment - melting into the sofa with pizza, Pringles, and enough nicotine to suggest I was preparing for a particularly harsh winter rather than simply trying to make a healthier choice forty-eight hours later.

It is funny. But it is also interesting. And as it turns out, it is also very well documented.

Researchers at the Wharton School of Business spent years studying why people are so much more likely to pursue change at specific moments - the start of a new week, a new month, a new year, a birthday, a holiday. They called it the Fresh Start Effect. What they found was that these moments function as psychological landmarks. They create a mental dividing line between the past and the present, allowing us to leave our previous failures - the missed gym sessions, the broken resolutions, the version of ourselves we weren't entirely proud of — on the other side of the line, in what they described as a different "mental accounting period." In other words, the new beginning doesn't just feel symbolic. It genuinely changes how we relate to our own history. The slate doesn't get wiped clean, exactly - but it does get filed away somewhere less visible.

Which is rather clever of us. And also explains why the pull of Monday morning is so persistent. It isn't weakness or wishful thinking. It is a genuine psychological mechanism, doing what it is designed to do.

But it doesn't fully explain the pizza and Pringles.

For that, we need to go somewhere slightly more unexpected: a laboratory, some pigeons, and a behavioural psychologist named B.F. Skinner.

In a now-famous series of experiments, Skinner trained pigeons to peck a button in exchange for food. They learned quickly and reliably; press button, receive pellet. Simple enough. But then Skinner changed the rules. He stopped dispensing the food.

The pigeons did not simply stop pecking. First, they pecked more. Harder. Faster. With what can only be described as increasing urgency and bewilderment. Before the behaviour eventually faded, it intensified, sometimes dramatically. Behavioural psychologists came to call this an extinction burst: when a behaviour that has previously been rewarded suddenly stops being rewarded, the instinctive response is to try harder before eventually giving up.

The burst isn't a sign of failure. It is a predictable, almost mechanical phase of the process, the system testing its old rules one final time before releasing them.

And here is the thing about Last Supper Mode: it is, in many ways, an extinction burst in fancy dress. The final packet of cigarettes, the last takeaway, the ceremonial Sunday evening on the sofa - these aren't failures of willpower. They are the brain doing what brains do before they let something go. Trying harder, one last time, before stepping into whatever comes next.

But, like a lot of things related to what makes us human, there is something else going on beneath the extinction burst, and this is the part I find most interesting.

The reason change is genuinely hard - not just uncomfortable, but structurally difficult - is that habits are not just behaviours. They are, over time, part of identity. James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, puts it this way: we don't just do things, we become them. The smoker isn't just someone who smokes - they are a smoker. The person who has had a glass of wine with dinner every evening for fifteen years isn't just someone with a habit - the habit is woven into their sense of who they are, what their evenings look like, how they unwind, how they socialise, what they reach for when things get hard.

This means that changing a behaviour isn't just a practical adjustment. It is, in some small or not-so-small way, a renegotiation of identity. And identity, understandably, does not go quietly.

Last Supper Mode, then, is not just about indulgence. It is a farewell. A way of saying goodbye to a version of ourselves we have been for a long time - even when that version isn't entirely serving us. Even when we genuinely want to be free of it. There is still something tender in the leaving.

This behaviour - what I've come to think of as Last Supper Mode - suggests something worth paying attention to.

We treat the eve of change like a farewell. And in a way, we are right to. We are mourning, in advance, the version of ourselves that is about to shift. The habits, the routines, the comforts, the familiar patterns that have defined a particular chapter of life.

None of that suggests we dislike change. If anything, it suggests we're preparing for it in a ritualistic, albeit slightly chaotic way. We are marking the moment. Honouring what was, before stepping into what might be.

What Last Supper Mode actually reveals is that the thing we're most attached to isn't the habit or the situation itself. It's the certainty it represents. The known. The predictable. The version of ourselves we understand, even when that version is due a significant update.

Change asks us to let go of a self we know for a self we haven't met yet. And that gap - the space between who we are and who we're trying to become - is where most of the discomfort lives.

So we linger at the threshold a little longer. We have one more of whatever we're giving up. We press pause on becoming.

And then, eventually, mostly, we step through anyway.

There’s something beautifully human about it all - the planning, the procrastinating, the extinction burst dressed up as a ceremonial last hurrah. I think it’s worth smiling at these patterns, knowing they simply deserve our kindness .

Change is rarely as clean or as immediate as we'd like it to be. Most of us circle the edges of it for a while before we commit. Most of us need a few Sunday evenings on the sofa before Monday actually means something.

That's not weakness. That's not lack of motivation or poor willpower or some personal failing that needs fixing.

That's just how it tends to work.

If you find yourself in a longer-than-expected version of Last Supper Mode - circling something you know needs to change but not quite ready to step through - that's a good place to start a conversation. I'd be happy to explore it with you. Send me a message through my contact page or check out our Instagram page @comeaboutcoaching.