Health Letting go
Why giving up can also be liberating
Status: 02.05.2024 | Reading time: 2 minutes
Quelle: Getty Images/Westend61
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Stick with it, persevere – many people have internalized that. However, giving up is seen as failure. It can be an opportunity. A psychologist explains how you know when you should let go.
“We are raised to believe that perseverance and determination are good things,” says psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, author of “On Giving Up.” And that’s also true: “If you want to learn to play the piano, you can’t just give up when it’s difficult.”
On the other hand, you can and should ask yourself: Do I really want to learn to play the piano? Or do I just do it because I don’t want to give up and torture myself and convince myself that I’ll get through it?
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“In the same way, it might be good to give up relationships or interests if you realize that they are no longer alive for you. “But people find it extremely difficult because we shouldn’t give up,” said Phillips in an interview with the US news site CNN.
But in the theater the tragic heroes are the ones who never give up, “and by never giving up they only cause chaos.” But when we give up something that burdens us or makes us unhappy, we create space for new, more fulfilling things that we can do instead. And that can be a liberating and healthy process, according to Phillips.
Three things that can help you let go
1. Consider whether something or someone makes you feel good: “Everyone has a different idea of what they want or what a good life is,” says Phillips. “If there was a criterion or test, it would be: how alive something or someone makes you feel.”
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2. Endure negative feelings: If you want to give up a habit like smoking or drinking too much alcohol, you first have to ask yourself why you are drinking, for example. “To stop drinking, you may need to figure out what your drinking was for in the first place, the solution, or the self-healing. This is difficult.”
Stopping is the first step. Then comes the question of how that makes you feel, and that could include missing you and suffering – “not forever, but temporarily. You have to be able to endure that, and you need a little support from other people.”
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3. Dare to try something: “You have to experiment,” says the psychologist. “The risk is probably always that you give up too soon, too quickly – but the other risk is that you take too long to give up.”