Why giving up on goals is good for you, and how to know which to ditch

This was meant to be a big year for me. I planned to run a marathon, gain a diploma in Spanish and begin work on my next book – all while growing my social media following to promote my journalism. Even when I have felt frustrated or stressed, I have tried to keep slogging on. Our culture, after all, is steeped in the idea that determination is a virtue. When the going gets tough, the tough get going; winners never quit, and quitters never win; if at first you don’t succeed…

“We really value people who have goals, and we don’t like people who give up on goals,” says Kentaro Fujita at The Ohio State University. “Our heroes are never the ones who gave up and did something else. It’s always the people who tenaciously persist.”

Yet there seems to be increasing cynicism towards excessive self-improvement. It became apparent during the early years of the covid-19 pandemic, when critics rallied against the “hustle mentality” that was leading us to view a global disaster as an opportunity to set new targets. More recently, there has been a proliferation of social media posts lamenting the “grindset”, a term that entered Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary earlier this year. Now, a growing body of research is highlighting the serious advantages of knowing when to quit, including better physical and mental health.

The challenge is choosing which goals to keep and which to ditch. We could call this process “productive quitting” – as opposed to the unintentional slippage that often leads us to abandon objectives against our will – and the research can equip us with some mental tools to help.

Our obsession with self-discipline can be traced to the writer and political reformer Samuel Smiles. In 1859, he published an influential polemic on middle-class improvement through self-discipline. He called it Self-Help, launching a whole genre of manuals on perseverance and productivity that continue to line our bookshelves.

Until recently, the psychological literature appeared to side with Smiles, with a huge body of research demonstrating the benefits of determination and the best ways to cultivate it. “The central focus has been on how to keep people sticking to their goals,” says Fujita.

The concept of grit, defined as a combination of passion and perseverance, offers a case in point. People with grit tend to agree strongly with statements such as “I finish whatever I begin” and to disagree with statements such as “I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one”. Such attitudes can be enormously beneficial when we have the time, resources and talent to succeed, with abundant research showing that grit correlates with greater achievement in many different domains.

Persistence’s dark side

Often, however, our circumstances severely limit our chances of realising our dreams. This has led some researchers to question whether dogged persistence can sometimes have a dark side. Psychologist Carsten Wrosch at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, was one of the first to explore this possibility. He was inspired by his earlier research on people whose romantic relationships ended later in life, he says. As you might expect, many people had hoped they would find lifelong love and felt enormous disappointment at the dissolution of their partnerships. While some kept on yearning for another long-term relationship, many focused on alternative life goals, such as building stronger friendships – and they were far happier because of it.

Wrosch wondered whether this flexible attitude would be relevant for other ambitions, so he designed the Goal Adjustment Scale (GAS). It invites you to imagine that you are forced to stop pursuing an important goal, then asks you to rate your agreement with statements such as “it’s easy for me to stop thinking about the goal and let it go” (see “Are you a good quitter?”).

The best outcomes are seen in people who find it easy to both quit goals that are no longer working and to find new objectives that give their life meaning. For example, in one early study, Wrosch and his colleagues found that students who readily disengaged with their old projects and re-engaged with new ones scored far better on many measures of well-being, including their sense of purpose and overall life satisfaction. Those who stubbornly stuck to their initial goals, in contrast, tended to be less content with their lives – as were those who weren’t at all inclined to try something new.

Multiple studies have since extended these results. For instance, a study published in 2024 showed that people who score highly on both elements of the GAS are significantly less likely to experience anxiety than people who don’t.

Some of the most surprising discoveries concern our physical health. Wrosch and his colleagues have shown that a greater tendency for goal disengagement is associated with a lower risk of complaints such as headaches, constipation and eczema. Accepting defeat may even protect you from infection. Wrosch and his colleague, Joelle Jobin, analysed six years of data from the Montreal Aging and Health Study. During the study, 131 participants, all older adults, reported how often they had had the common cold. When the pair compared this with their GAS scores, they found a clear correlation between the two, with greater goal disengagement predicting a lower rate of infection. The link appeared to be emotional distress: the quitters were less likely to feel depressed, which in turn predicted a smaller chance of catching the virus.

This may seem remarkable, but our state of mind can powerfully influence our physiology through many well-accepted mechanisms. Testing people on four separate days, Wrosch and his colleague Michael Scheier at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania found that those who struggled to disengage from unfulfilling goals had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, for instance, which is known to suppress the immune system. They also had higher levels of inflammatory molecules such as C-reactive protein, which are known to cause wear and tear on our tissues. The result could be a heightened susceptibility to all kinds of conditions, including cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s. “That doesn’t mean that they will have a heart attack anytime soon,” says Wrosch. “But if those levels of inflammation remain elevated over years and decades, [that person] might be at a much higher risk in midlife or old age.”

At first, Wrosch’s work raised some eyebrows among other psychologists, though much of what it shows is highly intuitive. “We’ve never said that persistence is not important,” he says. “But there are circumstances in life when we can’t achieve what we want, and persistence then leads to accumulated failure. There’s an emotional outfall that comes with this, which can have adverse consequences on our biology.” The tide is now turning, as many other researchers rethink their understanding of self-control and what it means to successfully manage our motivation and willpower.

Take Fujita. Like many psychologists, his research has tended to focus on the value of persistence, but he now accepts that it can have a downside. Indeed, he recently explored the value of goal disengagement for the journal Nature Reviews Psychology. He points out that it isn’t just major events like an athlete’s injury that may lead us to give up. We all have multiple competing goals in life, with limited resources to devote to each one – and this necessarily involves some sacrifices. In this view, quitting doesn’t demonstrate a lack of character; it is simply a recognition that we need to focus our energy carefully. “I think it [often] takes as much self-control to give up as it does to stick to a goal,” says Fujita.

He admits that making these tough decisions can test our mettle. One major barrier to goal disengagement is the sunk cost bias – our reluctance to cut our losses on a project we have invested in. The result may be an “inaction crisis”, during which we dither in a period of conflict and doubt, neither fully committing to the goal nor fully disengaging.

However, this is less likely to happen if you feel a sense of autonomy over your decision to quit, as Anne Holding at New York University and her colleagues have demonstrated. They found that students who abandoned a goal – such as to lose weight or compete in university sports – were less likely to experience an “inaction crisis” if their reason to quit had been under their control, for example, if they felt the goal no longer aligned with their values or reflected who they were.

Putting it into perspective

The key, then, is knowing your priorities and recognising your personal responsibility for planning your time. For many of us, however, it can be difficult to determine which goals to abandon, which to shelve and which to pursue. “It takes a lot of self-reflection,” says Fujita. For this, he recommends using what psychologists call “construal-level theory” – although you might think of it as putting on your perspective goggles. If a particular situation feels extremely personal – the emotions it invokes are raw and you find yourself focusing on the fine details – then try to zoom out to see the bigger, more objective picture. This raises the construal level, which is known to help clarify people’s thinking about many life decisions.

There are various ways to put this into practice when deciding whether or not to abandon a goal. You may find that a temporary change of location helps. “When I’m on a plane and I’m literally 30,000 feet away from real daily life, that often helps me think about my values,” says Fujita.

Another option is to imagine yourself in the future. What would you think of your current goals in 10 or even 50 years? Fujita even suggests that you write your own obituary. Would the goal that you are agonising over now even come into it? If not, then you can probably afford to lose it. If that sounds too involved, simply listing the values that matter most to you, then ranking them from most to least important, might be a good way to start gaining some perspective.

Once you have identified a project that is no longer working, you can start to think about the purpose it served and whether you can get the same satisfaction elsewhere. If you are giving up a team sport, for example, you might try to get the same sense of social connection without the same time commitment. This strategy is sometimes called “goal shifting”. And if you are dropping one project to devote more resources to another, you can bolster your sense of autonomy by telling yourself that the sacrifice is for a good cause. This is called “goal shielding”. Evidence suggests people who do this have more success in their selected pursuit, compared with those who carry on struggling with their juggling act.

Pump the brakes

In some cases, you may need only a temporary break. “You can press pause for now but hope to re-engage with the goal in the future,” says psychologist Zita Mayer at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. This is known as “goal shelving”, and Mayer’s research conducted with Alexandra Freund, also at the University of Zurich, suggests it can help reduce people’s sense of burden without the lingering regret that can occur when we abandon our goals completely.

It may work by preserving a sense of identity attached to the goal, she says. She gives a personal example: as a child, she put a lot of time and effort into playing the violin. For now, Mayer is focusing on her scientific career, but she hopes to return to her instrument in the future. “Shelving that goal allows me to continue to identify as a musician, which is a social identity that I value a lot,” she says.

This comes with a risk, though. New research by Mayer and Freund suggests that shelved goals can lose some of their shine over time, which may be a source of regret in the future. However, there is a way to ensure that they don’t gather dust in perpetuity. It involves setting a specific if-then rule for the future called an implementation intention. Imagine you move to a new city and decide to shelve a sport you enjoy. Your implementation intention may be to revisit the decision in six months’ time – and then, if you have settled into your new home well, resume playing. And Mayer suggests choosing a significant date to revisit your decision that can signal a new chapter in your life, like your birthday.

Even with these pointers, knowing when, how and what to quit isn’t easy. “It can take a lot of trial and error to find the right constellation of activities,” says Fujita. Nevertheless, speaking to these scientists has helped me to apply Marie Kondo’s primary query for organising – what sparks joy? – to my life. By writing a fake obituary, I realised that certain goals, such as building my social media following, sparked very little joy. They were easy to ditch, with zero regrets. Others, including my hopes to run a marathon, hold more importance for me, but have been too difficult to fit around family commitments. Before writing this, I felt guilty for letting them slide. Now, I realise that shelving them is quite a relief.

I won’t achieve everything I had hoped to in 2025, but I have at least learned the value of productive quitting – and I may be happier and healthier as a result.