There is something truly unique about the way honey holds onto itself, about its unwillingness to let go of what was once one. As the string reluctantly thins out, it leaves behind a sticky trace, a course of action that can’t be changed no matter whether we try to tear the honey apart or carefully loosen it from itself. There are things in life that feel like they are glued together by this gooey, golden liquid, threads of honey that slowly weaken, becoming barely noticeable before they finally break. And yet, even those connections, characterised by their reluctant nature to separate, can come apart.
Maybe you have experienced one of those connections yourself. Maybe it had to come apart for whatever reason, and you were left to clean up the mess it left behind. Acknowledging loss is already emotionally distressing, and overcoming it is even more so. But it’s something we’re all capable of — if anything, humans are built to adapt.
The Art of Letting Go
When we water a flower constantly for months, we expect it to blossom. When we spend months learning how to play the guitar, we expect to eventually be able to play our favourite songs. When we commit to a workout routine, we expect our muscles to grow. When we invest a lot of time and effort into a relationship, we expect emotional fulfilment and reciprocated admiration. Most of the time, this concept luckily works, though not everything is within our control. Every so often, things come to an end for reasons we can’t grasp. Despite the ease eventually found in letting go and letting be, it is a shaking experience.
Studies have shown that grieving after a breakup involves complex emotional and neural changes, differentiating themselves from both sadness and depression. The disturbing truth is that this type of emotional stress temporarily and sometimes even permanently alters our brain chemistry.
It has also been proven that grieving commonly leads to decreased activity in certain prefrontal cortical regions, those that are normally involved in problem-solving, regulating emotions, and clear thinking. It is incredibly important to make rational decisions when dealing with loss. We will come back to this later, something that is severely altered by being emotionally overwhelmed.
The world we live in is a tremendously complex one; we can go as far as to say, at times too complex for our brains to comprehend. In order to somehow deal with this large amount of information we are constantly confronted with, our minds rely on something called heuristics. Stay with me, I know it sounds like a complicated word. Heuristic comes from heuristic processing, which is a quick and superficial way of processing based on mental shortcuts. Essentially, heuristics are nothing other than mental shortcuts. Their purpose is to save time and mental energy, making our brains as efficient as possible. Quite clever. As a side note, the opposite of heuristic processing is systematic processing, characterised by a deep, analytical evaluation of arguments.
Now, all of this efficiency is great, but it often comes, as you might already have guessed, at the cost of accuracy. And a lack of accuracy primarily leads to one thing: biases. Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking that influence our judgements, decisions, and perceptions. While there are countless cognitive biases nonstop used by our brains, let’s focus on one of them in particular. It’s a bias that makes letting go feel like losing an arm and a leg. One keeps us clinging to a sinking ship simply because we built it with love and time ourselves. Maybe you have already come across it, I am talking about sunk-cost fallacy.
Sunk-cost fallacy is a cognitive bias where individuals continue with a losing cause simply because they’ve already invested time, effort, or resources. They avoid cutting ties because that would mean confronting reality and admitting to ourselves that past efforts were in vain.
Speaking of confronting reality, acknowledging that things don’t come to an end out of the blue, but most of the time were a long time coming, is uncomfortable. And understandably, to be honest, we don’t like to be uncomfortable, hence why we avoid it at all costs.
You can come for me for saying this, but the only way out is through. If we never face this bias and continue to stay in a situation simply because it has been costly, we are often enough guaranteeing ourselves a life with less happiness, frustration, and a lack of growth. While the truth can hurt, as does accepting loss and moving forward, it will never compare to what living in an illusion feels like. Might want to choose wisely what you want for yourself.
Let’s circle back to rationality here. Evidence-based decision-making, clear and rational thinking, in other words, are both crucial in overcoming this cheeky cognitive bias. Like I mentioned earlier, the brain regions supporting this rational thinking show decreased activity post-breakup. But decreased activity doesn’t mean any activity at all. There are ways out. Always. And even when sometimes it feels good to soak in the sadness, there are loads of things we can do to feel better.
Why Mental Flexibility Is the Key
I have some good news. Despite our nature, prone to clinging to things rather than letting them go, even when objectively no longer serving, detachment can actually be learned.
The goal here isn’t to become completely unfazed by any type of loss, suppressing emotions and finding ourselves in a spot of constant emotional unavailability. That’s not a fun spot to be in. Letting go doesn’t mean carelessly walking away; it means putting out the match before the flame reaches your finger. It’s a skill that builds emotional resilience and helps not make us feel like our life will come to an end when this one relationship, friendship, or job does. It may not take the pain away, but it makes it less consuming.
How do we learn this, though, you fairly wonder? Detachment can be practised through small acts, like letting go of old clothes or changing how we have our coffee in the morning. It can be as small as tossing the bottle of prosecco, which we have saved for a special occasion, that unfortunately hasn’t presented itself in the past five years (I know that’s a tough one).
By doing this, we help our mind become more flexible to change. This is particularly interesting as it can prepare us for a situation where we have to let go of a bigger emotional investment. It will help not to resist letting go in the first place, be less scared when we do so, and regret it way less in the future. Mental flexibility is great and beneficial for so many different situations in life.
If we can learn how to let go without allowing it to consume us, the idea of moving on suddenly doesn’t sound so terrible anymore. Even honey will eventually separate from itself.