It is morning, and your heart feels weary. The day seems to be filled with long hours of work and burdens of responsibilities. Your mind is occupied with so many different emotions: sadness, bitterness, anxiety, unease, and perhaps even desperation. As an adult, we have so many things to worry about such as mortgages, jobs, children, personal growth, time for oneself, and so on. There are also many periods of crisis and panic, when we feel lost at the crossroads, unable to figure out the way ahead.
Looking deep down, one explanation for our misery can be our desires for wanting more than what we can afford, and keeping things that are out of our league. We are penniless, but we want big houses; thus we take out huge mortgages to finance our dream house just to sleep under greater strain. We are tempted to go on free spree shopping trips to buy things we do not need and stockpile them in our own closet, and max out our credit cards. We want to keep a relationship that is no longer a healthy one, and starts sabotaging our own emotional and physical life. We want our partners, parents or children to be ones that they are not. We are stuck at a dead-end job for fear of having to start all over again, or under false premise that things will get better.
In any circumstances, those noxious wishful thinking can greatly damage your life, leading to disappointment, resent and loss. Regarding personal finance, you might lock yourself in a mountain of debt and a life of stress and fear. So what to do? Well, just let go.
Let go of your unreasonable expectations of the world that it should be fair and treat you nicely
Let go of your wish to control things that you cannot control
Let go of your materialistic impulses to own things that you do not need
Let go of things that you do not have space to store in your house
Let go of the people who you feel miserable when being around
Let go of relationships that drown you of your own sanity
Letting go is difficult. Let's face it that most of us have attachment issues. We freak out when being forced out of our own comfort zones; we hate losing our financial, emotional or time investment. We lament that we have worked so hard to achieve something, how can we just let it go? Also, when is the optimal time of letting go? Again, we face with a very challenging and very personal decision. People are different; each person's story, issue, and limit are very different; hence, obviously, there is no one-size-fit-all solution. Nonetheless, there are few strategies you might consider trying:
Remember that the wrong decisions that you have made are sunk cost: the longer you stick to them, the more they cost you. There is no way to recover those lost investment.
Try letting go one small thing at a time. For example, maybe you are not ready to quit smoking cold turkey, you can try to not smoke in a specific period of a day.
Envision the brighter future that you have without your bad habits/ relationships. It is painful to let go, but probably, the end will justify the pain.
Learn to love yourself. Yourself is the most precious asset that you have. You are more important than the designer bag you dream of or the abusive partner that you are with. You should not do anything that put your own physical, mental, and emotional health in jeopardy.
Accept that loss is part of life. You cannot win forever; you do not have room to store everything. Sometimes you have to let something go to make room for more meaningful things to happen.
Practice mindfulness. Be present and appreciate everything in the present term.