Letting Go Without Giving Up
Where to put your energy instead
August 26, 2026
In April of 2025, I got a sudden sharp pain in my upper middle back. A 10 out of 10.
I went to the ER. They checked for an aneurysm, a blood clot. Nothing showed up. They sent me home to see my PCP.
I saw a doctor — not my regular one — who ran bloodwork for my gallbladder and something else, then sent me to physical therapy, figuring it was muscular. PT didn’t help.
Three weeks after that first ER visit, I went back. The pain hadn’t stopped. Now there was numbness in my left foot. I couldn’t pee or poop. I’d lost thirty pounds!
A PA in the ER probably saved my life. Over her boss’s objections, she insisted on an MRI of my spine. It revealed a spinal infection, an abscess adjacent to my spine, and infection in my blood.
I spent two weeks in the hospital. A couple of those days I was unconscious. I went home with a PICC line and was on antibiotics for a total of three months.
I still have numbness and burning in my torso 16 months later.
Somewhere in that hospital bed, I made a choice. Not a dramatic one — nothing like in the movies. Just a quiet decision to stop fighting the reality of what was happening to my body and start paying attention to what I could actually do about it.
I couldn’t control the infection. I couldn’t control the days I lost to unconsciousness. I couldn’t undo three weeks of misdiagnosis or take back the damage already done to my spine and nerves. I couldn’t deny that I was gravely ill, with a real risk that the infection would spread to my vital organs and I might not make it home.
What I could control: my energy. My rest. Movement when it was possible. Not panicking. Gratitude for the view from my window, even in a hospital bed. Staying focused on healing and getting stronger one day at a time instead of on everything that had gone wrong to get me there and the fear that could overwhelm me.
That was surrender. Not giving up. The opposite of giving up, actually. It was focusing my energy in a way that let me actually heal.
Many people think letting go means quitting, or admitting defeat. It’s not. It’s about where you put your energy and not wasting it where you don’t actually have any control.
Giving up means abandoning something or someone that really matters to you — walking away from your values, your people, your commitments. Letting go, surrendering, is something else entirely. It’s releasing your grip on things you were never actually in control of in the first place. Maybe you have a little influence over some of them. But there’s a lot of energy most of us spend trying to control things and people we don’t actually control. And it’s exhausting. A lot of our suffering in life comes from exactly that — caring a lot, worrying a lot, trying to control things beyond our control. It’s like fighting reality.
Some of it is trying to control how other people feel and think, how they treat us, what they think of us. Some of it is time traveling to the past, focusing on what we wish we’d done differently, trying to undo things that already happened. Or time traveling to the future, worrying about outcomes we have little control over.
The effort we put into trying to control others or worrying about the past and the future is an exercise in futility. Unnecessary, wasted energy, and it drains our battery.
There’s a concept from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits training — and it’s come up in countless other places — that’s stuck with me for years and illustrates this incredibly well: the circle of control and the circle of concern.
Your circle of control is the stuff you actually have power over. Your circle of concern is everything you worry about or want to control. Usually the circle of control sits inside the circle of concern — but for a lot of us, the circle of concern is so much bigger. That gap — that part of our circle of concern that is beyond our circle of control — is where much of our stress and suffering live.
The goal is to shrink the circle of concern and grow the circle of control. Recognize what’s actually within your power and exercise it more fully. And accept that the two circles are probably never going to match up exactly — but the smaller that gap gets, the better.
What’s in your circle of control: your choices, what you actually say and do, your responses to people and situations, your values and how consistently you live in alignment with them. That’s about your integrity — my favorite word! Now, you can’t control your initial emotional reaction to something. But you can control your response after you’ve bought yourself a moment to gather yourself, calm your nervous system.
You don’t control other people’s actions, thoughts, or judgments. You don’t control the past. You don’t control outcomes in the future, though you might have some influence. What you absolutely control is your attention — where you choose to direct it. That feels harder these days because there are entire industries and devices built to steal it from you. But it’s still yours to reclaim.
There are a few areas where this is particularly hard — but still so important — to practice, day to day.
Letting go of other people’s opinions and reactions. You can’t control them. As The Four Agreements puts it: don’t take anything personally. The way people treat us and react to us is mostly about them. If there’s something useful in their reaction or feedback, consider it. Otherwise, let it go. All you can do is show up honestly, with clarity and integrity. How people receive that is up to them. Not everyone is going to like or love you — just like you don’t like or love everyone else. That’s reality. Sometimes people who love you are just having a bad day and they’re not going to react well, and that’s not about you either. Every ounce of energy spent trying to control other people’s reactions is an ounce that could go toward living your actual life.
Letting go of the past. This is trying to hold on to the version of events you wish had happened, replaying what you should have said or done, trying to rewrite something that can’t be rewritten. Acceptance of what happened isn’t approval. Letting go of the rumination doesn’t mean you think what happened was fine. It just means you’re done being at war with yourself over what already is. It’s good to reflect on the past, to learn from it, to deal with consequences you actually have some control over. But ruminating on what happened and wishing it had gone differently — that’s just more suffering.
A lot of this holding on is really about trying to undo something from the past, or make up for it. And sometimes what we actually need first is to grieve. The job that didn’t work out the way we hoped. The relationship that didn’t go the way we planned. Something was lost. Grieve it. And sometimes it’s the other way around — the letting go is what finally gives you permission to grieve. It depends on the situation. But if you’re stuck holding on to something, it’s worth asking: is there grieving here that I haven’t done yet?
Letting go of the future. Worrying about outcomes you can’t control, trying to guarantee results that aren’t yours to guarantee. You can do everything right and things still might not turn out the way you hoped. Your job is to let go of attachment to the outcome and just do your best — be authentic, act with integrity. However things turn out, that’s how they turn out.
I learned that lesson well during my activist years. Everyone told us what we were trying to do was impossible. We decided it was worth fighting the good fight anyway — we were going to do our best and let go of attachment to the outcome. That was liberating. It let me stay in a kind of flow state, take real chances, do things that scared me. And it worked. Not because we controlled the outcome. Because we stopped needing to. That’s not to say I didn’t have sleepless nights wondering about what more I could be doing — I had plenty of them. Or that I wasn’t working 16 hour days, weekends, traveling endlessly — I was! — but the freedom from attachment and expectations was empowering.
I think about this through the lens of the martial arts. Aikido and jiu-jitsu don’t meet force with force. They redirect. When you’re constantly trying to exert control over something immovable, you’re pounding against a wall. That’s not strength — that’s exhaustion. Real strength is knowing when to stop resisting what you can’t control and where to redirect your energy instead, toward something you can actually move.
That’s what I had to put into practice in the hospital. I wasn’t strong because I was fighting the diagnosis, fighting the timeline, fighting the fact that it took three weeks and a PA’s persistence against her own boss to find out what was actually wrong with me. I was strong when I chose to not fight or resist all of that and redirected everything I had toward healing.
This isn’t just about crises. It applies just as much to the ordinary stuff of daily life. This spring, I found myself caught up in chasing social media algorithms for my business: the hooks, the metrics, the constant monitoring of what was and wasn’t performing. It felt like trying to grab and hold onto something I didn’t actually control. So I let it go. I redirected my energy toward what actually felt authentic, joyful, meaningful, purposeful to me. And sure enough, I got more done, reached more people, got more clients, had more moments of joy, and felt less stress. Same energy, but redirected instead of wasted.
If any of this is relatable, here’s a practice worth trying: for the next few days, just build awareness. Notice when you’re holding onto something — ruminating on the past, spiraling about the future, fixated on someone else’s opinion of you. Name the emotion. That’s it. Just notice and name it. Write it down if that helps. Often the awareness and naming alone starts to loosen the grip.
Then, once you’ve built that awareness, practice resetting your nervous system each time you catch it. A couple of deep breaths, ideally longer on the exhale. Then, decide consciously where you actually want to put your attention next — on the present moment, something concrete you can do right now about something actually under your control.
You also may want to draw actual circles of concern and control and put the things in each that you tend to think about or worry about the most. See the gap for yourself.
Then think about ways to grow your circle of control and shrink the circle of concern.
Over time, you’ll notice faster. Eventually, some of these patterns may not show up as often at all. That’s the gap between your circle of concern and your circle of control closing.
I still have numbness and burning in my torso, more than a year later. The infection is gone. The nerve damage isn’t.
I didn’t get to control that outcome either. What I control is what I continue to do to heal my body — PT, a chronic pain program at Mass General Brigham, better sleep hygiene, exercise and eating well — and that I do not let the symptoms define each day. I keep directing my energy toward the parts of my life that are actually within my control.
That’s the whole practice. Not achieving some permanent state of letting go. Just choosing it again and again, and putting your energy where it actually belongs and can do some good.
I’m a life and leadership coach and founder of Integrity and Joy. If this resonated, I’d love to connect — book a free consultation at https://calendar.app.google/CsBx5mnpX7g9PFuP9 or find me at https://www.integrityandjoy.com. Or just reach out — I’d love to hear what resonated with you.
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