Why Everyone Needs the Ability to Let Things Go

The Ability to Let Things Go

We all know the saying: “Don’t cry over spilt milk.” Most of us understand it perfectly. Yet in real life, we do the exact opposite all the time. You let out a loud fart in a meeting, and every time the memory resurfaces, you feel you can never show your face to your colleagues again. Someone pinned the blame on you, and you only realised it later — now you stew over it, sick with regret. You confessed your feelings to someone you liked and got rejected, and now and then the memory hits, and you cringe at why you put yourself through that humiliation.

By rights, all of these things should be old news by now. But that’s just not how people work. We love to be hard on ourselves. We especially love to grab hold of the things that hurt us, embarrassed us, or put us on edge — and turn them over in our heads again and again. Moving on is hard. But if you don’t, the long-term cost is a slow, steady drain on your energy: you become twisted up inside, anxious, depressed. Today I want to talk with you about why everyone needs the ability to let things go — to move on. I hope that after reading this, you’ll stop crying over spilt milk, and walk forward without looking back.

How Bad Can It Really Get?

First, put yourself in this scene. Your partner picks up food with their chopsticks and puts it on a friend’s plate — a friend of the opposite sex. You felt a little uncomfortable at the time, but you said nothing. Back home, the more you think about it, the angrier you get. So which of these sounds most like you?

1. Once Bitten, Twice Shy

From that day on, any time your partner eats out, you have to ask: “So, was it a guy or a girl?” If there was someone of the opposite sex, you’ll hiss through your teeth: “Oh, so you were serving someone food again, were you?” When they get home, you grill them — what did you eat, where did you go, did you serve anyone? It’s not that you don’t want to trust them. It’s that you can’t stop worrying the same scene will play out again.

This reaction has a psychological engine behind it: anxiety. In the book《Unstuck》， anxiety is treated as one of the main reasons people can’t have the ability to let things go. One thing happens, and you get pulled into a catastrophic spiral. You imagine the very worst outcome, and worry yourself sick over something that hasn’t even happened.

2. Keeping a Running Tally, Stuck in Your Own Head

Your partner serves someone else. Afterwards, you replay it constantly. “Right,” you think. “I’m not swallowing this. I’ll get them back for it one day.” So the next time you argue, out it comes: “How dare you say I’m in the wrong — what about that time you were serving food to so-and-so?” Do this long enough, and the trust between you disappears. The relationship turns sour.

The engine here is rumination. After 30 years of clinical practice, psychologists Carol Kershaw and Bill Wade concluded that a huge number of life’s problems and anxieties are caused by rumination. Rumination is a persistent, looping, depressive pattern of thought. It traps you in a vicious cycle: self-focused, fixated on the past, glued to the negative — replaying it over and over with no off-switch. It can be triggered by a real shock, like your partner being physically intimate with someone else in front of you. Or it can come out of nowhere — you’re suddenly ambushed by a cringeworthy memory from your past and want to slap yourself.

3. Pessimism, Suspicion, and Self-Torture

“Oh, so you served them food — you must fancy them!” You start to suspect your partner is cheating, or heading that way, and you test them and probe them endlessly. “Who do you like more, me or X?” Or you put them down, deliberately or not: “Nobody else would put up with someone as lazy as you. Only I would.”

But whichever reaction is yours, the truth is the same — you’re torturing yourself. This one has a name too: negativity bias. In Unwinding Anxiety, Dr. Judson Brewer breaks negativity bias down into three ingredients: fear​ — you’re terrified the worst will happen; uncertainty​ — you feel you have no control over the situation; distrust​ — you sense there’s something working against you. These three are what keep you stuck, unable to move on.

So — which of the three is closest to you? The thing is, these reactions don’t only show up in romantic relationships. They turn up everywhere. A friend makes an offhand joke at your expense, and that night in bed you keep replaying it, liking them less and less, until you can’t sleep at all.

Put simply, not being able to let go is like the white bear effect​ in your own head: the harder you try not to think of a white bear, the more a white bear is all you can think about. You know perfectly well the worry is pointless, that you’re disturbing yourself for nothing. But the white bear effect is like a stone thrown into a still pond — it churns up your whole life.

What Gets Better Is You, Not Your Life

“What we pay attention to — and how we pay attention — determines the content and quality of our lives.” That’s from the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It tells us this: if you can’t let go, your life will keep hitting rough patches. But if you can shift what you pay attention to, you can raise the quality of your entire experience.

In Unwinding Anxiety, Judson Brewer offers a way to change your object of attention. Back in the 1970s, biofeedback researchers discovered that human beings can detect incredibly subtle internal sensations — heart rate, the temperature of your hands, muscle tension. Each of these maps onto a specific state of consciousness.

Here’s a common example. When your body is steeped in an uncomfortable sensation, it drags up an uncomfortable memory to match. Your hands go cold, and you remember how your ex shook your hand off when they broke up with you. Your heart starts racing, and you’re suddenly eight years old again, being scolded by your parents in public, wishing the floor would swallow you up.

But the research also shows that through training, people can raise or lower the amplitude of their brainwaves — and in doing so, avoid sliding into those awful thoughts, those bad feelings, those self-sabotaging behaviours. As the old saying goes: energy flows where attention goes.

I’ve tried getting clients to practise this in therapy. One client came to me because she couldn’t sleep and wanted to fix it. At first we tried every relaxation technique in the book, with almost no effect. Then, in one session, her mind wandered, and she drifted into a wild, free-associative daydream. When she came out of it, she told me about it, delighted. I said, “What you just did is called free association, and it can produce a state of flow.”

At our next session she told me she’d slept brilliantly that night. “The session finished at ten, and I went straight to bed and scrolled my phone. But my head was still full of that daydream from the session. I never got round to thinking about any of the bad stuff, and I was asleep in no time.”

It’s not some profound technique. All it does is move your attention away from something painful and onto something else. But that’s the whole principle of moving on: stop spending your energy on things you can’t change. Let the past be past, and you’ll naturally become easier on yourself — more at peace.

How to Be Someone Who Can Hold On — and Let Go

So — is there a faster way to move on? I went digging through the literature and found five methods that are both interesting and genuinely useful. I’d like to share them with you.

1. Warm Up Your Body, Quiet the Noise in Your Head

Warm up.​ Wrap your hands and feet in something warm. Run a hot bath. Hit the sauna. In summer, turn the air-con down low and then find another way to warm yourself up. The point of all this is to feel the shift — from cold to warm. As your body heats up, it sends your brain a message: I’m taking good care of myself. That alone can unlock better feelings.

Quiet down.​ Try alternate-nostril breathing to hush the chatter in your head. Press your left nostril shut with your right hand and take five slow breaths, each held for around ten seconds. Then switch — press your right nostril with your left hand and repeat. Breathing in alternation like this lights up different channels in the brain, pulls your focus back to the breath, and restores a bit of calm.

2. Let Your Mind Wander — and Picture Something Beautiful

In Unwinding Anxiety, Judson Brewer spends a lot of pages on the benefits of daydreaming. Picture yourself lying on a beach in a gentle breeze, watching the sunset. This kind of unreal imagining lights up the creative regions of your brain and can even produce a state of flow. Flow is that feeling of being so absorbed in something that you lose yourself in it. You can reach it by losing yourself in something you love — but daydreaming is the easier route. And in flow, people feel energised and deeply at ease. It helps us put the past down and enjoy what’s good.

3. Practise Your Connection to the World

You can use visual stimuli to feel the link between yourself and the world around you. Gaze at a photograph of the sea. Listen to waves breaking. Watch the sun come up over the horizon. When you step outside and take in the world, you also feel your own existence more keenly — and you find yourself thinking, it’s good to be alive, the world is good, and I’m good too. It’s a way out of a bad mood.

4. If You Can’t Let Go, That’s Fine — Learn to Laugh at Yourself

If you keep beating yourself up — “How could I have done something so stupid?” — try a bit of humour instead. Tell yourself, “Well, at least I provided everyone’s laugh for the day. It’s not all bad.” If you really can’t put it down, don’t force yourself to. Accept that you’re someone who does something dumb now and then, and recognise that everyone has their own embarrassing history. We’ve all been humiliated. Not all of us can look back and laugh about it. Give self-deprecating humour a try — it might just give you a different kind of ease.

5. What You’re Worried About Probably Won’t Happen — but You Can Work Towards the Best Possible Outcome

If you’re a perfectionist, you’ll always be bracing for the threat that’s coming. Not being able to move on also comes from fearing the worst. But calm down and ask yourself: has anyone around me ever actually lived through this? Has it ever happened to me before? And if it did happen, would I really be powerless to fight back? The truth is, what we’re anxious about probably won’t happen at all — yet we burn an absurd amount of energy thinking about it. So put that energy somewhere better. Ask yourself: how can I learn from this so it doesn’t happen again? What can I do for myself so I’m better equipped next time? Can I push a little harder and take my life up a level?

You can learn all of these skills—the ability to let go.

A Final Word

The positive psychologist Martin Seligman came up with the idea of learned optimism: if you weren’t born with a gift for seeing the bright side, that’s OK. You can practise looking on the bright side, over and over. Because with enough practice, optimism becomes a habit — and you shift from “the more I think about it, the angrier I get,” to “sure, I’m angry, but it’s fine,” to “what’s the big deal anyway.”

Everyone runs into trouble and hits a low point now and then. It’s a healthy way of interpreting things that gets us through. So here’s my wish for everyone: may your life be one where you can hold things when you need to, and put them down when you need to. May you neither drain yourself nor settle for less than you deserve.