Knowing When to Let Go is the Secret to Well-Being
Knowing when to let go is the secret to well-being. However, letting go of things makes many people uncomfortable. There’s a good reason for this. We live in a society that encourages us to always get and keep, not let go.
Psychologists‘ offices are full of people who don’t feel comfortable with their reality. Many of them are surprised by the fact that they’ve gotten a lot of what they’ve wanted out of life. It might be a good job, specific comforts, or a stable relationship. There are many possible goals here. Despite the fact that they have what they desired at some point, they ultimately don’t feel good.
Perhaps the secret isn’t precisely getting something. It’s possible that the solution to that eternal dissatisfaction is learning when to let go. In other words, there should be a balance between the enthusiasm for getting what you want and gratitude for what you have.
Feeling bad
All human beings want to feel good. And when we feel good, we want to feel even better. This is a type of positive dissatisfaction that has ultimately allowed for the development of knowledge, science, and civilization. We want to solve the problems our reality poses in order to be better off.
Nevertheless, nowadays “getting” and “being” have become practically synonymous. What you are depends on what you can get. “Being someone” means having recognition, money, prestige, or fame. The point is that those things make people “important”. You’re no one if you don’t have something that puts you above others.
Nowadays, there seems to be an epidemic of unhappiness. It’s not a coincidence that the rates of psychological illnesses have risen in the last decades. Nor is it strange that more people than ever seem to be complaining about their lives.
Knowing when to let go and how
An important part of everything lies in the fact that life, whether we like it or not, often pushes us to let go. This happens almost every day. If you do one thing, you have to let go of another. You have to pick. If you want a large and marvelous house, you’ll probably have to set your family time aside to devote yourself to working harder. If you want a stable relationship, you’ll have to give up on the other men or women who cross your path.
That’s the thing many people don’t understand or perhaps don’t want to accept. They assume that they’ll only feel good when they have everything they want all at once. They don’t care about letting go. What they want is to know how to get, accumulate, and stockpile everything.
Nevertheless, all the decisions you make in life involve letting go of something else. Every achievement has its price. It’s impossible to have everything. This is why it’s essential to know when to let go and how.
Happiness is inside us
People tend to fool themselves into thinking they’ll be happier if they get this and don’t lose that. We want the complete package and, when we don’t get it, we feel unhappy. We want what we let go of instead of enjoying what we now have thanks to what we sacrificed. We’re always choosing. And many times we don’t even realize it.
Perhaps you’re angry with yourself for not embodying that ideal “being” you haven’t even defined. Thus, you demand more and more from yourself or even insult yourself. You want a better job, a better status, total harmony in your relationships, cover-page-worthy children, and many other things. W e make our lives a living hell in pursuit of the things we lack.
If one thing is clear, it’s that you’re either going to be happy with what you have or you won’t be happy at all. When you truly have internal balance, that greedy anxiety of being or having more will go away. Reaching that balance will only be possible if you acquire the ability to let go.
