In the classic American folk tale The little engine that could, a small blue locomotive trudges up a hill carrying cars full of toys and food for the children on the other side. The train’s engine climbs the steep hill chanting, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” »
Stories of resistance, often in the most difficult circumstances, dominate Western society and, by extension, psychological literature, says Andreea Gavrila, a psychology expert at the University of Quebec in Montreal in Canada. “We value perseverance and perseverance.”
But this new year, instead of definition of resolutions When it comes to losing weight, finding true love, changing careers, or jumping out of a plane, Gavrila and others suggest that some people consider the opposite. “It’s time to reevaluate at the end of the year: ‘What do I no longer need in my life?'” says cognitive and computational scientist Rachit Dubey of the University of California, Los Angeles.
When goals become too costly financially or emotionally or don’t align with where one is in life, they can trigger physical and mental health problems, according to extensive research. And while quitting may get a bad rap, letting go can be more difficult than persevering, especially when the goal is tied to who the person is.
Compared to research on persistence, the literature on smoking cessation is relatively new, and knowledge about when and how to quit a goal remains nascent. What we do know is that giving up on a goal can take months or even years, explains Gavrila. “Think about a relationship. There’s a difference between breaking up with someone and leaving someone.”
In other words, letting go can be complicated and painful. But when we truly let go of a long-held pursuit, we free up mental bandwidth for new goals and dreams.
Wired to Hate Sunk Costs
Researchers who study smoking cessation do not claim that quitting is always the best option. “It is human nature to set goals, because goals give us direction. Goals represent a desired future end state,” says Nikos Ntoumanis, an expert in motivational science at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. The best result is when a goal becomes habitual and therefore requires very little willpower. For example, someone may set a goal to start exercising. They achieve this goal when exercise has become an integral part of their lives.
Sometimes, however, pursuing a goal is such a struggle that it creates undue guilt and stress. That’s why Ntoumanis and others want people to recognize that a tendency to persist no matter what can obscure other, better options.
For example, Dubey and his team asked more than 3,500 participants to play a simple online game in which they had a 100 chance of pressing a button of a given color. Sometimes the push won a point, sometimes it didn’t. Unbeknownst to the participants, some buttons were more likely to earn points than others. At any time, participants could request a new button color to see if they could get more points. To reflect real life, in which reversing a decision is often impossible, participants would not be able to revert to a previous color. The team then developed a mathematical formula to quantify a player’s optimal strategy.
When playing the game, people stuck to a given color beyond what was optimalthe team reported in September in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Participants also explored relatively few buttons before choosing a final color.
It’s striking that even in this simplistic setup, where the stakes are virtually zero, people still have trouble exploring widely and giving up easily, Dubey says. He suspects that in real-world settings, where the emotional stakes are likely higher, people are even more reluctant to give up.
That’s why Dubey often advises people to take a hard look at their goals.
“If something constantly disappoints you, maybe try to extract the emotions from it and…be more ruthless about stopping,” he says.
However, quitting smoking can feel unnatural, research shows. Humans and even other animals, such as birds and rodents, are prone to sunk cost bias or an aversion toward abandonment goals, especially those in which they have invested a lot of energy, time, or money.
Susceptibility to sunk cost bias may be innate, according to research in patients with a specific type of brain injury. People with damaged ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or vmPFC, tend to inhabit a kind of eternal present. So researchers in the United Kingdom wanted to see if their pursuit of goals – which, by design, are anchored in the future – differed from those who did not have this type of brain damage.
The team asked 23 people with damaged vmPFCs and 30 people without brain damage to play a video game inside an MRI machine. The goal of the game, which played over several rounds, was to fill a virtual net with as much seafood as possible. The problem ? Participants could fill the net with only one type of seafood: octopus, crab or fish. The quantities of each seafood varied throughout the rounds, with occasional drastic changes. Before each round, individuals could choose to stick with their current option or abandon one seafood goal and start again with another.
Compared to non-brain-damaged individuals, people with damaged vmPFCs were more likely to give up a given seafood type once another type of seafood became the big winner, the team reported in July 2024 in Human behavior.
People with this type of brain damage played more rationally and were therefore more likely to win the game. But in real life, this tendency to give up as soon as things get tough can make life incredibly difficult for these people. These people are often cognitively strong, but they may have difficulty in their daily lives, such as holding down a job, says Eleanor Holton, a cognitive neuroscientist now at Princeton University. “They can’t structure the future. It’s a jumbled mess.”
Abandoning goals can plunge people without vmPFC damage into a similarly confused state, Holton and others say. It’s hard to dismantle our long-held visions of the future. But sometimes it’s necessary, and researchers are still figuring out how to help people through this difficult process.
Motivation from within
Ironically, some research suggests that the same tools that help people persevere can also help them quit smoking. For example, goal researchers have long talked about crises of action, or moments when people hesitate between wanting to abandon a goal or wanting to stay the course. A key indicator of whether a person will stick with it has to do with what motivates them to change.
Let’s take the example of two people who want to lose 10 kilos, explains Ntoumanis. A person does it because they want their family members to stop nagging them about the extra weight. This message of guilt and shame rarely leads to long-term change. But another person may want to lose weight to feel healthier. This inner motivation can alleviate or avoid a crisis of action.
More recently, researchers have explored whether an inner drive to quit can also prevent a bout of inaction, or have questioned a decision to quit long after the fact.
During a crisis of inaction, a person wants to disengage, but they are stuck, Gavrila explains. A person who left a poorly suited graduate program, for example, may question their decision as they struggle to identify what comes next. Or, a person who broke up with a long-term partner may continue to follow their ex’s every move on social media.
To see how well people achieve their goals in real life, researchers periodically surveyed more than 500 students at a university for nine months and more than 400 individuals from a community sample for three months. At the start of the study, the team asked participants about a long-term goal they were giving up on and how important that goal was in their lives. They asked participants to rate statements such as, “This goal no longer reflects who I am,” to gauge internal motivation, and “People have told me I need to give up on this goal,” to gauge external pressures to quit.
As the study progressed, the team assessed how well participants were able to disengage from their goal. They also assessed whether a person was experiencing a crisis of inaction by asking them to rate statements such as “I feel torn about giving up on this goal.”
Participants in both samples who reported abandoning a goal primarily due to external pressures tended to getting stuck more in crises of inaction than those who reported more inner motivations, the team reported in December 2022 in Motivation and emotion.
People don’t tend to wake up one day and say, “I’m done” and smoothly move on to their next big adventure in life. “There’s this whole difficulty of letting go of the goal,” says Gavrila, who was not involved in this study. “It’s very complicated.”
Researchers are still working to determine when people should give up on a goal, the best ways to do so, and ultimately how to develop new goals for the future. Some suspect that the clues to helping people let go may lie in other social subfields, such as research on acceptance or overcoming grief.
Fill the void left behind by an abandoned goal remains an even less developed area of research, the researchers write in the 2022 Annual Review of Psychology. Early evidence suggests it may be helpful in helping people improve their mood, sense of purpose, and overall life satisfaction.
What is clear is that if a goal has served its purpose, holding on to it can do more harm than good. And finding a new path forward may first require the courage to say, “I think I can’t.” »