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When Letting Go Is Adaptive: Rethinking Goal Persistence in Therapeutic Practice
Practice Points:
- Persistence is not always adaptive; practitioners should help young people discern when continued striving supports development and when goal adjustment may better protect wellbeing.
- Letting go of unrealistic goals can reduce distress, but meaningful recovery and growth often require supporting re-engagement with new or modified goals.
- Goal re-engagement is facilitated by psychological and contextual resources, highlighting the importance of supportive environments, autonomy, and positive affect in therapeutic work.
- Cultivating goal-striving flexibility is a long-term protective factor, enabling young people to remain resilient and purposeful as circumstances change.
Reconsidering Persistence in Therapeutic Settings
In therapeutic settings, persistence is often treated as an unquestioned virtue. Young people are encouraged to push through obstacles and persevere despite difficulty. While persistence can be adaptive, this framing may obscure an equally important capacity: adjusting goals when continued striving becomes harmful, unrealistic, or misaligned with one’s circumstances.
A recent meta-analytic review in Nature Human Behaviour challenges the moralisation of persistence. Synthesising findings from 235 studies, the authors examined how people respond when goals become difficult or unattainable, and what outcomes follow when goals are adjusted instead of relentlessly pursued. The review reframes goal adjustment not as failure but as a core self-regulatory process with implications for long-term wellbeing.
What Do We Mean by ‘Goal Adjustment’?
The review clarified 3 related but distinct processes that are often conflated in everyday practice:
- Goal Disengagement refers to the intentional decision to let go of a goal that is no longer attainable or adaptive. This involves reducing emotional, cognitive, or behavioural investment, and is not synonymous with resignation.
- Goal Re-Engagement involves committing to new or modified goals. This could mean finding another path to the same larger aim or redefining what success is in light of changed circumstances.
- Goal-Striving Flexibility reflects how easily a person can adjust their goals or strategies as life changes. It represents a general tendency rather than a momentary decision.
These distinctions matter because each process has different triggers and outcomes; a nuance often missed when ‘giving up’ and ‘moving on’ are conflated.
What Leads People to Let Go or Move On?
According to the review, goal disengagement occurred when people had strong evidence that a goal was no longer viable. Repeated setbacks, inner conflicts, and the sense that a goal had become too costly or stressful all played a role. Feeling upset alone did not make people quit; they needed to see that the goal simply wasn’t working.
In contrast, goal re-engagement was more likely when individuals had access to psychological and contextual resources (e.g., optimism, positive affect, autonomous motivation, and supportive environments). Interestingly, both positive and negative experiences could promote re-engagement, depending on whether goals were viewed at a task level or a broader life-meaning level. This may explain why some setbacks derail people, while others facilitate growth.
Goal-striving flexibility, meanwhile, was most strongly associated with emotional security, adaptive personality traits, and supportive contexts. Chronic negative affect and maladaptive personality characteristics undermined flexibility, suggesting that flexibility is less about momentary decision-making and more about longer-term self-regulatory capacity.
What Happens After Goals Are Adjusted?
Letting go of unrealistic goals was consistently associated with reduced depression, anxiety, and stress. Disengagement can act as a psychological relief when persistence becomes counterproductive. However, while disengagement might protect against worsening distress, it did not automatically create positive outcomes.
Re-engaging with new goals had stronger benefits. People who found modified goals or new direction reported fewer mental health difficulties and greater life satisfaction & purpose. In simple terms, letting go stops the harm, while re-engaging helps people move forward again.
Perhaps most strikingly, goal-striving flexibility demonstrated the strongest and most consistent links with long-term benefits. Flexible individuals reported better psychological wellbeing, stronger social & physical functioning, and lower ill-being over time. Crucially, flexibility supported overall goal progress and helped people stay resilient to keep striving in ways that fit their changing contexts.
Implications for Therapeutic and Youth Work Practice
Taken together, these findings invite a recalibration of how practitioners think about motivation and resilience. Persistence is not inherently adaptive, nor is disengagement inherently problematic. What matters is discernment; recognising when continued striving supports development, and when adjustment better protects wellbeing.
In practice, this may involve legitimising disengagement as a psychologically healthy response, rather than framing it solely as a weakness. At the same time, practitioners play a critical role in supporting goal re-engagement by helping young people identify supportive environments, and nurturing their psychological resources. Over time, cultivating goal-striving flexibility may be a powerful yet under-recognised contribution practitioners can make.
A Note of Caution
The authors caution against over-generalisation, with many studies being cross-sectional and Western-centric. Goal adjustment may differ across cultures and lifespan. It should thus be approached with practice-based sensitivity rather than universal rules.
Concluding Reflections
This research challenges the common emphasis on endurance in psychological health. Instead, it suggests that wellbeing depends on the ability to adapt one’s striving in response to reality.
For young people facing uncertainty or repeated setbacks, goal adjustment is not a sign of weakness. It is a sophisticated self-regulation skill that deserves more attention in contemporary practice.
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Original Research:
Riddell, H., Sedikides, C., Sivaramakrishnan, H., Wan, P., Maltagliati, S., Jackson, B., Thøgersen-Ntoumani, C., Gucciardi, D. F., & Ntoumanis, N. (2025). A meta-analytic review and conceptual model of the antecedents and outcomes of goal adjustment in response to striving difficulties. Nature Human Behaviour, Article 02312. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02312-4
Author
Wu Shuang
Researcher (CYPHER)
Article Type : Research Summary
Published September 13, 2026
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