The Good Quit

My friend Thea, who is in her 70s, has been on her condo board for two years. She doesn’t particularly enjoy the meetings or the topics—oh-so-scintillating issues like who isn’t picking up their dog waste or where to put a new speed bump. But when I asked her if she was running for another term on the board, she looked confused and said of course she would run again. Huh.

Or take Glenn, a 45-year-old who long ago lost interest in his book club but keeps showing up every month. He says, “I’d feel bad if I stopped going.” Huh.

Why is it that quitting things can be so hard? Not quit- ting things such as smoking or alcohol—there are complex behavioral and chemical factors involved. I mean just walk- ing away from a group, activity, or job that no longer serves us. Some people seem to have no problem with swinging through an exit door, while other people will spend literally years tethered to a situation that they feel “meh” about, at best. What is behind this uneasiness?

“We may have been taught by our parents that once you start something you must follow through,” observes Dian

Grier, a licensed clinical social worker with Choosing Therapy, an online therapy platform. “Commitment is a wonderful trait, but as we change and grow, some of these commitments may feel more like obligations and you may start to resent the commitment you made long ago.” After all, you may have changed and grown since you joined up. Or maybe the group is kind of petering out, but no one wants to admit it. That’s when the lauded attribute of stick-to-itiveness starts to work against you, trapping you in the zone of mediocre.

THE FEAR FACTOR

There are several fears that keep people inert, Grier says. “Some people refuse to quit a commitment because they fear how it may affect the rest of the members. You might fear hurting feelings, being viewed as a quitter, or the loss of social support.” She also points to the concept of sunk cost fallacy. “This is the idea that a person has invested so much time doing something, that they refuse to leave. They may think, ‘Well, I have done this for six years so I might as well continue, or all that time will have been wasted.’”

Additionally, our brains are wired to expect situations to turn out a certain way, and when there is change, the brain can perceive that as an error message—a failure. This sensation leaves the “individual with uncertain and difficult feelings,” explains Grier.

People pleasers also have a hard time with busting a move out of something, says Grier. “The need to please others is a common trait among humans, but makes living an authentic life difficult. You might ask yourself the question, ‘Do I do things to keep others happy more than I do for myself?’” If you are a people pleaser, your answer will be yes. “Getting to the root of why we are people pleasers often starts in childhood, as we try to gain approval from our parents. Some households expect children to meet the needs of the parent either emotionally or physically more than is normal. Often, people pleasers feel selfish when they take time for themselves and feel an urge to keep doing things for others. This is a major reason why we stay in activities we no longer enjoy.”

ARE YOU EMBEDDED?

Brooks Holtom is a professor of management at Georgetown University and an expert in what is called “embeddedness,” which was the subject of his doctoral thesis. While his work focuses on the workplace and how companies can retain talent, his ideas can also be used to understand life decisions beyond work.

“The more connections you have, the more likely you are to stay,” he explains. “If you have positive relationships with your coworkers and your supervisor, it’s harder to leave a job. We conceptualize this as applying to the [work] organization but it also applies to the community. If you are talking about a church or a social club or a fitness club—the more the values fit with your values, the higher the probability is you will stay. And the greater your connections are with people—we see that as both quantity and quality of the relationships—the more likely it is you’ll stay.”

Holtom says that people’s affiliations can be broken by what his research refers to as “shocks.”

“Let’s say one person in a couple gets promoted, which is a good thing, but you have to move. You didn’t choose to leave, but you need to,” he says. These shocks can also be negative events. For example, let’s say a couple divorces and one partner’s extended family is really involved in their house of worship. After the divorce, what once felt welcoming and cozy could feel awkward, which may cause the other partner to reconsider staying in the congregation.

There is a silver lining to unplanned changes, Holtom says, because they can force you to reevaluate. “Punctuating events disrupt the status quo and cause you reflect and reassess.” Even a news event, such as the murder of George Floyd, caused a lot of people to take action for social justice.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize for his work on how people make decisions, splits the process into two parts. In system 1, we make automatic, efficient, and largely unconscious decisions. What breakfast cereal are you grabbing? Which pair of socks? About 98 percent of our thinking is like this, done without much self-awareness. In system 2, we are making deliberate, conscious choices, and doing them more slowly and with a concerted effort toward assessment.

“With most of our decisions, system 1 is fine,” says Holtom. “But if you are, for example, thinking about leaving your church, it’s about thinking through your values. The opportunity to switch to system 2 thinking is valuable.” Shocks can pull us out of the fast thinking of system 1 and into deeper contemplation of how we want to chart our next course.