Letting go · goal disengagement
When to let a goal go.
Some goals stop being yours, or stop being possible. People who can let those go, and put the energy into something they can reach, tend to fare better than people who hold on.
What the research found
Carsten Wrosch and colleagues looked at how people handle goals they can no longer reach, across three studies. Two things went with higher well-being: being able to step back from a goal that couldn’t be reached, and being able to take up a new one. The two worked best together.
These were studies of people as they were, not experiments, so they don’t prove that letting go causes the gain. They do suggest that holding on to an impossible goal isn’t the virtue it can feel like.
A goal left hanging keeps pulling
E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that a goal people meant to pursue, but hadn’t finished, kept intruding on their thoughts and hurt their work on an unrelated task. Making a specific plan for the goal made those effects disappear.
Their studies were about goals people still meant to pursue, not ones they were giving up. Read beside the work on letting go, they point the same way: a goal left undecided costs attention, so decide. Make a plan that fits, or let it go.
How to tell which
Ask whether the goal is still yours, or one you think you should want. Ask whether it has moved at all in the last month, and whether what stops it is in your hands. And ask whether a smaller version would fit the life you have now.
Letting go isn’t losing the time you gave it. What you learned stays with you, and the goal can come back when there’s room.
On your chart
When a goal hasn’t moved in weeks, Goalaxi’s assistant offers a note, Maybe let this one go, with two answers side by side: make a plan that fits, or let it go. Either way is a good answer, and nothing changes until you choose.
A goal let go is released into the archive with every day it moved, and you can restore it any time. Or save it as a wish, still in view at the rim of the chart, to try when there’s room.
Sources
- Wrosch, Scheier, Miller, Schulz & Carver, 2003. Adaptive self-regulation of unattainable goals: Goal disengagement, goal reengagement, and subjective well-being Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(12), 1494–1508
- Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011. Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667–683