Why Letting Go Is Not the Same as Giving Up

There is a worry that sits under a lot of talk about letting go.

If I let go, won't I just stop trying? Won't I end up not caring about anything?

It is a fair question. And I think the answer is the most misunderstood part of the whole idea. You let go of the feeling, not the goal. You let go of the result, not the effort.

The Worry Is Reasonable

The words do not help. In everyday English, letting go sounds like loosening your grip on something you want. Letting go of a dream. Letting go of a plan.

So when someone says let it go, it can sound like this. Stop caring. Lower your hopes. Accept less.

A lot of what you read online makes this worse. Plenty of it describes letting go as releasing whatever no longer serves you. That is true in places. But it leaves the real question hanging. How do you know it no longer serves you? And what if you just want an excuse to stop?

I think the worry is reasonable. If letting go meant caring less, it would be a bad idea. It would be giving up with a nicer name.

That is not what I mean by it. And it is not what the book that taught me meant either.

What You Are Actually Letting Go Of

The technique I use comes from a book called Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender, by David Hawkins. It changed my whole perspective, and it gave me something I could use every day.

The word surrender puts people off. In plain words, it just means you stop fighting a feeling.

What you let go of is the feeling. Not the thing the feeling is about.

Say you are working towards something and you get a knockback. Disappointment turns up. Maybe some fear that it will never happen.

Giving up would be this. It is too hard, I am stopping.

Letting go is this. Here is disappointment. It is sitting in my chest. I am not going to argue with it or push it down. I will stay with it until it runs out.

Then, with the feeling gone, you look at the goal again. Often it is still there. Often you still want it. The only thing that changed is that you are no longer carrying the knockback around with you.

There are only four things you can do with a hard feeling. Suppress it, vent it, escape it, or let it go. The first three just manage it. Only letting go removes it. The full technique is in how I let go of negative thoughts and feelings every day.

What Giving Up Really Looks Like

Here is the twist. Giving up is often what happens when you do not let go.

Think about the last time you quit something you cared about. My guess is it was not a calm decision. It was a heavy one.

The feelings had piled up. Frustration, doubt, a sense that it was pointless. In the end the weight of them was bigger than the pull of the goal.

So you stopped. Not because you looked at it clearly and decided. Because carrying the feelings was tiring, and quitting was the fastest way to put them down.

That is escaping. It is one of the three ways of managing a feeling. It works for a while. Then the feeling turns up somewhere else, often as a quiet sense that you let yourself down.

Letting go does the opposite. It puts the feelings down without putting the goal down. That is why I think it is closer to the opposite of giving up than to a version of it.

Put in the Work, Let Go of the Result

There is a second thing you let go of, and it is the bigger one. The result.

I call the way I try to live THE WORK. It has three pillars, in this order. Thoughts, lifestyle and meditation. The belief underneath all three is simple. Put in the work. Let go of the result. Take what comes.

I believe letting go of the result leaves you free to live in the moment. You feel relaxed. You are not lost in thoughts about why not me, or why not this way. Leave the result to God, the universe or the divine, whatever you call it, and put in the work.

But the two halves always travel together.

Letting go of the result without doing the work is just waiting. That is where letting go turns into giving up. You stop trying and call it acceptance.

Doing the work while gripping the result is force. And force runs out. You push, you strain, you check every day whether it has happened yet. Then one day you crack, and you decide the crack proves something about you. It does not. I wrote about that in why being disciplined is a negative mindset.

The results you are given follow from the life you choose to live. Put in the work and you see the fruits of it, maybe not as you expected, but as they come.

That is not giving up. It is the most useful way I know to keep going.

Letting Go Does Not Mean Aiming Lower

Letting go of the result is not the same as aiming low. I think it is closer to the opposite.

When you are gripping the result, a big goal is frightening. Every day it has not happened feels like a small failure. So people shrink their goals to something safe, just to stop feeling like they are failing.

When you have let go of the result, you can aim high. Build the goal around who you want to become, not around what feels safe. Then do the work towards it every day, and stop checking the scoreboard.

I wrote about goals that give you energy rather than drain it in how to set goals that give you energy. Letting go of the result is what makes those goals bearable to hold.

I want to be honest here. Letting go of the result is easy to say and hard to do. You will catch yourself gripping. Checking. Hoping.

When I notice it, I do the same as with any feeling. Find it, sit with it, let it pass. Then back to the work.

When Stopping Is the Right Call

None of this means you should never stop anything. Sometimes stopping is right.

The question is not whether you stop. It is what you stop from.

If you stop in the middle of a wave of frustration or doubt, that is usually giving up. The feeling made the decision.

If you let the feeling go first, look at the goal clearly, and find you really do not want it any more, that is different. That is a decision. It is not failure.

I was in the same line of work for twelve years, on and off. I quietly lost interest in it. There was no breakdown, just a slow fade I mistook for how work was supposed to feel. Now I work in sales, and I love it, which surprised me.

That slow fade is worth noticing. Moving on from something you have quietly stopped caring about is not giving up. Staying only because you are scared to stop can be a quieter kind of giving up. On yourself.

The Grey Area: When Life Is Just Full

There is one version of this that loads people with guilt, so I want to name it.

Sometimes the practice stops, not because you gave up, but because life got full.

That is what happened to me. My first was born, and for the six years since, the practice was gone. The meditation, the yoga, all of it fell away. Two kids under school age is a real limit on what you have left, and I was stuck.

It would be easy to read that as six years of giving up. I do not think it was. The practice stopped because I had no room for it, and stuck followed from the practice stopping. That is a sequence, not a flaw in who I am.

I have only started again properly now we are out of the toddler years. Not because I finally found the discipline.

If you are in a full season, the honest answer is often that the big version has to wait. But the smaller version is always there. Five minutes still counts. Never nothing. That keeps the door open without asking more of you than you have.

How to Tell Which One You Are Doing

If you are not sure which one you are doing, three questions help.

Is the feeling still loud? If you are deciding while frustrated, hurt or afraid, you are probably giving up. Let the feeling go first, then decide.

Am I dropping the effort, or the grip? Letting go keeps the effort and loosens the grip on the result. Giving up drops the effort and often keeps the grip, which is why it hurts so much.

Does this make me feel stronger and more open, or smaller and tighter? Letting go usually feels lighter, even when it is sad. Giving up usually feels like shrinking.

If it feels worse straight after you let a feeling go, that is common too. It is not a sign it failed. I wrote about that rebound in why you feel worse straight after letting go of a feeling.

And if you are using meditation to do this and it keeps stirring up more than you can handle, read why meditation can make you feel worse. Talk to someone trained too, alongside this rather than instead of it.

Common Questions