Photo by Caroline Selfors on Unsplash
Why do we hold on to things that don't serve us?
Letting go isn't easy.
Ask your local hoarder why they can't get rid of their marinara-stained white sweater from the eighth grade.
Studies on people with hoarding disorder have found that the brain region responsible for decision-making is where the trouble begins. When hoarders were asked to discard junk paper, their anterior cingulate cortex (their brain's de facto decision-maker) went into overdrive.
We all engage in a little hoarding at times, whether it's physical items or emotional baggage.
So, what's the problem with that?
The Psychology Behind Letting Go of Things That Are Bad for You
Letting go, especially in relation to emotionally-laden items or indicators of self-worth (i.e., your job, your "power" relationship, your home, your car), is a huge decision.
It can feel nearly impossible to make decisions to release us from that which causes us anxiety, shame, depression, and, ultimately, also comfort.
Letting go of a negative in your life that causes you stress, such as a toxic relationship or an unfulfilling job, could free you up and improve your sense of wellbeing and your mood, self-esteem, and confidence.
We then see ourselves and our world in a much-improved way. So get your metaphorical trash bags ready to practice some self-compassion by letting go of grudges, limiting beliefs, toxicity, and fear.
10 Items to Let Go (+ Why)
I'm about to get a little woo-woo here, but stay with me.
Picture yourself in this present moment. Imagine you're leaving on a trip tomorrow and you need to leave three things that are ultimately harmful to you behind. Is it guilt? Is it anger you harbor towards an ex? Is it resentment for a sibling?
Let's explore ten common items to let go of, how to do it, and how doing so can improve our mental health.
1. Negativity
When my now-husband and I were dancing through our first fight, he told me that I was "always so negative," and it hit hard. As a born and bred New Yorker, I believe I come by it honestly. We complain about potholes, weather, people, weather, other people, delayed trains, and, of course, New Jersey drivers.
At that moment, I had to do two painful things: admit that he was right (hell) and try to flip my negativity on its head.
Negativity begets negativity. When you become stuck in a loop, your negative emotions take hold of everything—and they cast a big shadow.
How to Let Go of Negativity
This is a practice, but it can be done.
When we were younger, my siblings and I would get into normal "kid" squabbles. As a result, we might launch an unusually mean insult. When my mother would overhear these insults, she would say two words, "Unnecessary comment."—and that shut us down every time.
I used this trick when dealing with my own negativity. If I could identify a comment as unnecessary, I could choose to shelve it and let the thought fizzle out.
Over time, I cared less and less about trivial negative observations. I replaced it with work on myself or with identifying why I felt compelled to say negative things aloud all the time.
However, don't cast all negative emotions aside. Feel it out. If you're having a tough time, honor your emotions, write them down, feel them out, talk about them, navigate your own grief process, and move on.
In time, I created space for positive thoughts and new opportunities—all because I wasn't dwelling on negativity.
I'm still very much a work in progress, though.
2. Toxic People
Close your eyes and picture the toxic person. You know who it is. Sometimes the picture that develops is tough to take, especially when it's a parent or another family member. Yikes.
How to Let Go of Toxic People
I'm no psychologist, and I am certainly not telling you to cut off relations with your mom. In fact, I'd recommend diving into some talk therapy if your mother is the source of toxicity in your life.
Depending on the role of a toxic person in your life, you can demote or remove them from their current stature. If the toxic person is a significant other, it's often painful to let go.
As a person who has let go of an extremely toxic partner, I'm here to say that the pain and suffering you'll avoid in the long-term are unimaginable. Toxic relationships are often toxic because they run on extremes; the lows are the lowest, but the highs soar.
To let go of a toxic friend, reduce contact. Take time for yourself. Don't be available every time they need to unload their troubles onto you. Instead, replace the time you might spend with a toxic person on your own self-care. Try restorative activities like exercise, reading, or learning a new skill to rebuild your own inner strength.
Often, when we remove a toxic person from our call list, we find that our circumstances change—and unexpected opportunities open up.
3. Being Busy All the Time
Many of us grew up in the era of toxic positivity. You've got this. You're a girlboss. Hustle harder.
While the intentions for these "positive mantras" usually come from a good place, they are sometimes wielded as weapons of shameful faux empowerment.
There's a huge difference between being busy and being productive.
According to a University of California Irvine study, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after a distraction. This means that any time we get an email and stop what we’re doing to look at it or any time we get an instant message from a coworker, our time is filled with refocusing our attention to the task at hand. While this feeling of busyness can lead you to believe you’re doing a lot, it doesn’t produce results.
Our busyness is an irritating byproduct of the hustle culture. If you're not busy, you're not doing it right.
How to Let Go of Busyness
The best way to let go of busyness? It's prioritization, folks!
If your busyness is wrapped up in non-essential items, you're on an express train to burnout.
Keep a log of how you spend your days, on a daily basis. Just like building a financial budget, budgeting your time and energy requires crossing a lot off your list.
To reduce your busyness, you'll want to do the following:
- Practice saying "no"
- Prioritize three to five important tasks
- Eliminate distractions
- Conduct a time/energy spend
- Repeat
4. Guilt for Taking Downtime
If you've ever read about MLMs or pyramid schemes, you're familiar with this notion. There's no rest for the weary—none.
Taking downtime is not laziness. Also, what is laziness? Laziness sounds pretty incredible to me, and I want more of that!
We've recently been re-trained to take our downtime, but not until we've absolutely worn ourselves out. Let's take it when we want it. Let's take it when our friend wants to watch Bridget Jone's Diary for the eleven-millionth time or when our child wants to snuggle up to nap on the couch.
How to Let Go of the Guilt for Taking Downtime
It's tough to let go of this guilt. As a working mom, I know there are always, always approximately 1,000 things I could be doing, but they can wait. Right?
For this one, I'd like to take the (Not Safe For Work) Logan Roy approach.
If anybody has feelings about me taking an afternoon to snuggle with my son with Season 1 of The Real Housewives of New York, they can get lost. Rest is crucial to our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing, which brings me to my next point.
5. Ignoring Our Health
When the dentist extracted my wisdom teeth, he took a lot of my wisdom with it.
That's a dental joke, which has been a bit of a thing this year, where I returned to the dentist after a shamefully long hiatus. While I'm in the midst of spending what could have been a nice European vacation on two crowns I never wanted, I learned a lesson or two.
Obviously, we know that health and wellbeing are all that matters—and yet, we are distracted from that fact by the frenetic activity of everyday life.
How to Let Go of Not Prioritizing Your Health
Aye, this is a tough one, because we all know better!
As someone who struggles with this, I had to tap the experts to get expert advice—to increase my willingness to sit in more doctors' offices, pay more copays, and make sure that my physical health is okay.
Annual checkups and exams are crucial to keep an eye on your overall health. Regular checkups help to establish a baseline and to curb potential problems before they start. For example, if I had kept up on my own dental preventative care, I wouldn't be scurrying off to have very expensive holes drilled into my teeth upon writing this article.
We have one body and, unless you're a very advanced five year old reading this, likely one set of teeth left. Protect them and keep them well as they carry you through life.
6. Comparison
Comparison is your enemy—well, most of the time.
If you've ever logged into a social media account, they're basically designed to elicit comparison—and most of what we're digesting is fictional, anyway.
There are times when comparison can actually be a good catalyst for motivation or change.
This could happen when your coworker leaves the job that you both hate together. It can happen when you see someone make a scary move to improve their life. When comparison is a source of healthy inspiration, I'm all for it.
It's the darker comparison that gets tricky. It's when it breeds icky feelings of resentment or jealousy.
How to Let Go of Comparison
Like many unproductive habits, letting go of comparison traps means recognizing what's causing them. Sometimes, we purposefully look into something that we know will upset us. It's like Googling your ex's new partner and finding that they're "better" than you (okay, but not really).
Identify what makes you feel bad and turn it around. If you're envious of a friend's success, talk to them about it. Find out what they did to turn things around. If you can't stop "stalking" an ex, well, just stop. There's nothing to be gained from it.
Instead, use the time to work on your confidence. Google yourself instead. When we're feeling low, we have a tendency to lean into that by queuing up sad songs and by searching for content that will make us feel even worse.
Create a list of pick-me-ups instead. Replace feeling worse with a dedication to building yourself back up to feel better. Here are some ideas:
- Create a smile file (I'd recommend miniature pigs, videos of babies laughing, and something you've created that makes you feel proud).
- Create and repeat confidence mantras.
- Replace negative self-talk with positive affirmations.
- Call your happiness people (here are a few people to add to your confidence team).
7. Limiting Beliefs
A fixed mindset is stationary. It's not moving anywhere, for one reason or another. Whether due to a past painful experience or a lack of courage, a fixed mindset gets you nowhere.
Limiting beliefs are the ideas that you can't do something for some obscure reason. It's saying things like, "I'm not a numbers person," or "I don't *do* camping."
We all have some limiting beliefs—and more than we might think we do.
How to Let Go of Limiting Beliefs
The first part of letting go of limiting beliefs is in cultivating a curious mind. Instead of saying, "I can't take this manager position," it's asking, "What could I be like as a manager?"
It's diving into why you have this belief in the first place. Did someone close to you tell you that you're not a good singer? So what? Get up and try karaoke.
I had my own limiting belief that I "couldn't drive." As women, we're basically told that to begin with, so it doesn't inspire much confidence. I lived in New York City for ten years, where I rarely needed to drive. From there, I moved to San Francisco where I didn't need to drive, either.
Late at night, I would even have anxiety about driving my (non-existent, mind you) children to soccer practice. There's no way I could ever do it! Finally, when I turned thirty (30!) I dove into what was going on with my extreme limiting belief.
- Why was I so scared?
- Was this limiting belief serving me?
- What would happen if I tried driving?
And folks, I now live in Los Angeles, which might be the most terrifying place to drive—so we can all rise above our limiting beliefs. Try it. It's so liberating.
8. Past Failure
Past failures have absolutely no impact on the chances of future success.
Past failures live on how much attention you give them. There's a big difference between learning a lesson from a failure and allowing it to stop you from trying again.
How to Let Go of Past Failures
Failure is a learning opportunity whenever you let it be so.
When a relationship ends, you learn what priorities are important to you. When you make a spelling error in an important email, you make sure to proofread it closer. When you miss a meeting, you make sure to sync your calendar.
Failures are actually integral to learning. Studies have shown that failures, especially in the workplace, should serve as learning opportunities.
While most organizations like to share their secret sauce to success, the best secret is that failure—and the growth from it—provides life's best-learned lessons. Rather than regarding a failure as a waste of time or a personal deficiency, it's a time to learn how to do things better.
Instead of letting go of past failures, per se, reevaluate and reframe them. What did you learn? How have you grown? What do you do differently as a result?
When we let go of failures as "just failures," we can look back without wincing—and see how far we have come.
9. Perfectionism
We are never going to be perfect, and that is perfectly okay. We have spoken about the perfectionist trap at length.
If you're a self-described perfectionist, you likely don't want to do away with your perfectionism. The freedom is in the acceptance that perfection is...basically unachievable.
How to Let Go of Perfectionism
We love this piece on creating goals as a perfectionist—all by eliminating the perfectionist aspect of it.
Perfectionists, by definition, never make a mistake. While you'll love to explain how detail-oriented you are in an interview setting, you probably also waste a lot of time.
Perfectionists need to dip their toes into imperfections to get started. This could mean not triple-checking or quadruple-checking an email before sending it every time.
When an email goes out with the dreaded "your" instead of "you're," you'll come to the realization that the world did not catch fire immediately.
I'm not saying to ditch your spelling or grammar. Rather, I'm suggesting that your perfectionism is an anchor stopping you from trying new things because you might not be able to execute them perfectly the first time around.
10. The Dream Job (That's Actually a Nightmare)
...but it was supposed to be the dream job. The problem with the dream job is that it doesn't really exist, not in a long-term sense.
Many professionals have this experience at some point in their careers, where they land in a place that was supposed to be perfect.
As we settle into the job (the one with the title and the salary at the company), we realize it's not great. Instead of accepting that it could never have been perfect to begin with, we allow negative thoughts to seep in.
- Why can't I just be happy?
- What's wrong with me?
- Why can't I be grateful for this opportunity?
How to Let Go of the Dream Job
There are many reasons for jobs just not working out. When we accept a job offer, we often approach the opportunity with excitement and endless motivation. From there, we might see a few red flags or some toxic-adjacent behavior.
You can practice gratitude on a daily basis and still have negative feelings about a job. It's okay to have been off the mark when aiming for the perfect job. The process of letting go often includes one element that many humans hate—admitting that we were wrong.
