The fear of letting go is partly an accounting error: the sunk cost fallacy shows we cling to failing plans because of what we already spent, and research on goal disengagement finds that releasing an unreachable goal, then redirecting the effort, tends to improve wellbeing

People escalate their commitment to a failing course of action in proportion to what they have already invested in it. A good deal of the fear of letting go is not wisdom about the future. In a 2003 paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Carsten Wrosch and colleagues studied what they called goal disengagement and goal reengagement. They were the ones who pulled their effort out of the closed-off goal and redirected it into a new one. The part no study can decide for youThat leaves the genuinely hard judgment, which the research illuminates but cannot make.