Why You Can’t Let Go: The Desire Path in Your Mind

You take the same route every morning, even though there is a faster one. You keep the lane, the habit, the agreement with yourself that stopped fitting long ago. And when someone asks why, you hear yourself say: “Oh, that is just how we do it.”

It is a small sentence. But there is a world behind it. Because holding on to something that no longer fits you feels, strangely enough, safer than letting go.¹ Today I want to take you deeper than we have gone in this theme so far, to the two forces that pin you in place. Not to give you a trick. But so that you understand yourself better and look at yourself a little more gently.

The first force: the path already walked

You know those little paths people make straight across the grass, beside the official pavement? In English they are sometimes called desire paths. One person walks there, then another, and one day there is a bare track. No one decided it. It arose through repetition.

Your brain works the same way.

Deep in your head sits a region called the striatum, part of the basal ganglia. MIT professor Ann Graybiel has shown, over many years, what happens there when you repeat something often enough. The brain cells begin to form a fixed pattern, a path. At first an action costs effort and attention. But after enough repetition the path takes over, and you do it automatically, while thinking of something else entirely.²

How much of your day goes like this? More than you think. Research by psychologist Wendy Wood, using diary studies in which people wrote down what they were doing every hour, arrived at roughly 43%, almost half of what we do, we repeat in the same surroundings, often without consciously thinking about it.³

Read that again. Almost half.

And here comes the part that struck me when I read it. Graybiel and her colleagues showed in rats that once such a pattern has settled in the striatum, it is still stable weeks later.⁴ She put it this way to MIT News in 1999: “The process doesn’t seem to go in reverse, or else we don’t have access to the means to reverse it.”⁵ The old path does not disappear when you stop walking it. It is still there. Quiet. Waiting. That is why, under stress or tiredness, you fall back so easily into old habits, the path was never really gone.

Important, and honest: this is not a weakness. Your brain is not lazy. It is, in fact, clever. If you had to consciously think out every action anew, you would be exhausted before breakfast. The habit is a gift. It only becomes a prison when the path takes you somewhere you no longer want to be.

The second force: the bill you already paid

There is something else that holds us, and it is more treacherous.

Imagine, this comes from a classic study by Arkes and Blumer in 1985. A company has put almost all its money into building a plane meant to become invisible to radar. Just before the finish it turns out: a competitor has a better aircraft, cheaper. Stop or continue?

When people heard how much had already gone in, 85% chose to continue with the hopeless project. Another group was given the same choice, but without that earlier amount being mentioned. There, only 10% still wanted to invest.⁶

The same money. The same bad bet. The only difference was the feeling: we have already put so much into it, we cannot stop now.

This is called the sunk cost trap, the trap of costs already sunk. Arkes and Blumer showed it outside the lab too. They gave theatregoers, at random, a ticket at full price or at a discount. Those who had paid full price went on to attend more performances afterwards. Not because the programme was better, it was the same for everyone. But those who had paid more felt it more strongly: I must not waste this.⁶

Why do we do this? The deepest explanation comes from Kahneman and Tversky, who showed in 1979 that a loss weighs about twice as heavily as an equally large gain.⁷ Giving up something you already paid for feels like a loss. And loss hurts so much that we would rather plough on, in the hope that it will come right after all.

And then this, which changes everything

Perhaps you are thinking now: this is just a thinking error, I am too clever for that.

But in 2018, researchers did something surprising, published in the journal Science. They tested not only humans, but also mice and rats. And what did they find? Animals, too, kept waiting longer for a reward the longer they had already waited for it. Exactly the same trap.⁸

Let that sink in. A mouse has no ego, no pride, no “what will others think”. And yet it does it.

That means holding on is not a stupid human mistake. It is a deep, ancient mechanism, baked into living creatures that have already invested in something. So you are not weak when you keep hanging on. You are a human being, with a brain that does what brains have been doing for millions of years.

And that is exactly why it is so important to learn to recognise it. Because what you cannot see, you cannot change.

A few quiet questions, to carry with you

I am not giving you a list of steps here. I am giving you something more honest: questions. Read them slowly.

Which path do I walk every day, not because I chose it, but because it simply lies there?

Where do I stay, only because I have already put so much into it? A training, a habit, a relationship with an idea about myself that stopped fitting long ago?

And the hardest: if I were allowed to choose again today, with a clean slate and without that past, would I still choose this?

Do you feel the difference in that last question? It takes the old bill out of the equation. Because that is the heart of it: what you have already paid is gone. No choice made today changes anything about yesterday’s money, time or effort. The milk is spilt. The only honest question is: what is, now, from here, the best path?

The way out is not more willpower

Here I want to protect you from something, because it is the most common mistake. We think: I just have to try harder, more discipline, more willpower.

But the research points the other way. People who seem to have their lives well in order are not mainly suppressing temptation. Brian Galla and Angela Duckworth found across six studies that it is beneficial habits that carry the link between self-control and good outcomes.⁹ And a habit hangs on a place: Wood’s diary research showed that repeated behaviour arises above all in the same familiar surroundings.³ So they do not change themselves by brute force; they change the field in which the path lies. They lay out the running shoes. They take the temptation out of the house. They make the desired path the easiest path.

Letting go, then, is not about forcing yourself. It is about learning to separate two things: the old path from the new, and what you already paid from what is wise now.

This is, for now, my closing of this theme: mind, habit, mindset. If there is one common thread running through everything I wrote about it, it is this: you do not have to endure what happened to you or what you were taught. You may make a way out. Not by fighting your brain, but by understanding it, and then walking a new path. Patiently, day after day, until it becomes the obvious one.

Remember, last time, that made bed? This is the same lesson, one layer deeper. Not blind repetition. But noticing, and choosing.

So carry this question with you, this week:

Which path in your life is no longer a choice at all, but habit? And what would happen if you, very gently, just once dared to walk beside the path?

Related reading

• Discipline Doesn’t Begin with Making the Bed
• Yesterday Is History: The Science of Letting Go
• Why Rest Has Become Unbearable
• You Are What You Repeatedly Do

---

Sources

The numbers in the text refer to this list.

1. Samuelson, W., & Zeckhauser, R. (1988). Status quo bias in decision making. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1(1), 7–59. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00055564
2. Graybiel, A. M. (2008). Habits, rituals, and the evaluative brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 31, 359–387. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.29.051605.112851
3. Wood, W., Quinn, J. M., & Kashy, D. A. (2002). Habits in everyday life: Thought, emotion, and action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1281–1297. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.6.1281
4. Jog, M. S., Kubota, Y., Connolly, C. I., Hillegaart, V., & Graybiel, A. M. (1999). Building neural representations of habits. Science, 286(5445), 1745–1749. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.286.5445.1745
5. Halber, D. (1999, September 22). Work probes why habits are hard to make, break. MIT News. https://news.mit.edu/1999/habit-0922
6. Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(85)90049-4
7. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291. https://doi.org/10.2307/1914185
8. Sweis, B. M., Abram, S. V., Schmidt, B. J., Seeland, K. D., MacDonald, A. W., Thomas, M. J., & Redish, A. D. (2018). Sensitivity to “sunk costs” in mice, rats, and humans. Science, 361(6398), 178–181. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aar8644
9. Galla, B. M., & Duckworth, A. L. (2015). More than resisting temptation: Beneficial habits mediate the relationship between self-control and positive life outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(3), 508–525. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000026

Sources on this site are cited in APA style, with a DOI wherever one exists. Why I made that choice →