Sometimes the best way to reach a goal may be to quit an old one

In the classic story The Little Engine That Could, a small blue locomotive laboriously chugs up a hill. She’s hauling cars stuffed full of toys and food for children on the other side. The train engine wills herself up the steep incline by chanting: “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”

Stories of sticking things out, often under tough circumstances, are common in the United States and other industrial countries. As a society, “we value perseverance and persistence,” says Andreea Gavrila. She’s a psychology expert at Université du Québec à Montréal in Canada.

The new year is a time people often set resolutions. Clean out your house. Start a new hobby. Exercise more. But rather than always choose something new to do, researchers suggest, maybe consider the opposite.

“It’s time to reassess at the end of the year, ‘What is something I don’t need in my life anymore?’” says Rachit Dubey. He studies computation and human motivation at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Past goals may have become impractical to work toward. Maybe they felt too hard or cost too much. Or they just no longer match what you want for your life now. Continuing to work toward goals that don’t fit can trigger physical and mental health problems, research shows. But the idea of quitting has a bad rap. So sometimes, letting go can be tougher than persevering.

Research on quitting is fairly new. Scientists are just starting to learn when and how people can best quit goals. Often, Gavrila says, quitting a goal can take months or even years. “Think of a relationship,” she says. Breaking up with a goal and moving on can be messy and painful. But if you can really let go of a long-held pursuit, you might free up the mental space and energy for new goals and dreams.

Hardwired to stick it out

Goals serve an important role in our lives. “It’s in human nature to set goals because goals give us direction. Goals represent some desired future end state,” says Nikos Ntoumanis. He’s a motivation science expert at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.

But not all targets are equally helpful. Struggling to work toward a goal that doesn’t fit can create guilt and stress. And the time and effort spent trying may prevent you from seeing other — maybe better — options.

Dubey and his team showed this with a simple online game. They recruited more than 3,500 players. Each had 100 chances to push a button of a given color. Sometimes the push delivered a point. Other times it didn’t. Some of the buttons were more likely to give points than others — but the players weren’t told this. At any time, someone could request a new button color to see if they could snag more points. But they couldn’t go back to a color they’d tried before. (This was meant to mimic real-life choices that can’t be undone.)

The research team also developed a math formula to figure out the best possible strategy. Then they compared it to how the human players had behaved.

Players stuck with a given color much longer than they should have. The team reported this in the September 2025 Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. And most people only tried a few buttons before picking a final color.

Even in this no-stakes game, people struggled to move on from things that weren’t working out, Dubey says. What would happen in real-life settings, where the emotional stakes are higher? There it’s even harder, he suspects.

That’s why Dubey often advises people to take a hard look at their goals.

“If something is consistently disappointing you, maybe try to get the emotions out of it,” he says. “Be more ruthless to quit.”

The idea of quitting may feel strange. It’s natural to resist giving up. Once you’ve spent time, money or energy on something, you want to see it pay off. This is called a “sunk-cost” bias.

That bias may be hardwired in our brains. In studies, birds and rodents tend to stay with one task even when switching would give more reward. Researchers have also studied people with a type of brain damage that impairs their sense of future time. In a video game, these people were more likely than those with unharmed brains to swap one strategy for another. The damaged area, part of brain’s prefrontal cortex, may play a role in staying committed to a goal, the results suggest. The team reported this in July 2024 in Nature Human Behaviour.

Motivation from within

So if quitting is sometimes the best option, how do we go about it? Researchers are still sorting out how people can best work through that difficult process.

In fact, the same tools that help people persevere at something may also help them quit, research suggests. That’s because there are two parts to the quitting process. To revisit Gavrila’s relationship analogy, there’s the initial breakup, and then there’s moving on. And moving on without second-guessing your decision may depend on what drove you to quit in the first place.

When it comes to sticking with a goal, a person’s source of motivation seems to be a key indicator for whether they’ll succeed. Consider two people who want to stop eating meat. One person is doing it because their friends keep bugging them about the ethics of eating animals. That message of guilt and shame seldom leads to long-term changes. The other person wants to give up meat to feel healthier. Such inner drive can help a person stay committed.

More recently, researchers have asked whether an inner resolve to quit can similarly help someone make a clean break.

It’s common to get stuck on a decision to quit, Gavrila says. After someone leaves a team they no longer enjoyed, they may doubt their choice as they struggle to figure out what else to do. Or after a breakup, someone may continue to follow their ex’s every move on social media.

A 2022 study assessed how well people move on from goals in real life. Researchers surveyed more than 500 university students over nine months and more than 400 community members for three months. At the start of the study, the team asked participants about a long-term goal they were giving up. They also asked how important the goal was to the people’s lives. To assess inner drive, participants rated statements such as, “This goal no longer reflects who I am.” Statements like “People have been telling me I have to let this goal go” assessed outside pressures to quit.

As the study went on, the team weighed how much participants had disengaged from their goal. They also gauged how “stuck” a person was through statements like “I feel torn about letting go of this goal.”

People who were quitting primarily due to outside pressures tended to get more stuck than those who were self-driven. That was true in both groups of participants, the team reported in Motivation and Emotion.

People don’t just wake up one day and say, “I’m done” and seamlessly move on to their next adventure. “There’s all this difficulty in letting go of the goal,” says Gavrila, who was not involved in that study. “It’s very messy.”

But what’s clear is that clinging to an outgrown goal can do more harm than good. Cutting some ties can clear space in your life to pursue things that really matter to you. And finding a new path forward may first require the courage to say, “I think I can’t.”