Letting Go of Stress

Letting go of stress is something we all need to do from time to time. Some people seem to be able to let go of stress effortlessly. It drops away from them like water off a duck’s back. For others, stress clings to them like tar, sticky and suffocating, impossible to shake.

You’re probably in the second category, or you wouldn’t be reading this. There’s a metaphor used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, an evidence-based approach developed by the psychologist Steven Hayes and popularised in Russ Harris’s The Happiness Trap, that might make letting go of stress a little easier.

The Tug of War

Imagine you’re playing a tug of war with some huge monster. What this monster really is, is all of your stress, your anxieties, your worries, everything that’s keeping you up at night, making you feel bad inside, and making your chest tight during the day.

You’re holding tightly onto one end of the rope. The monster’s holding tightly onto the other end. And between the two of you, there’s a huge bottomless pit filled with blackness, pain, and despair.

Every morning, you wake up, take hold of the rope, and start pulling as hard as you can. But as you do this, the monster on the other end of the rope pulls back even harder.

No matter how hard you pull, the monster pulls you ever closer to the pit. You’re locked in this endless losing battle. Every morning you crawl out and do battle with the monster again. You think you can win by pulling harder, but the harder you pull, the harder the monster pulls back, and the monster always wins.

There’s only one thing to do: drop the rope.

By dropping the rope, you let go. The monster’s still there, as are all of your worries. But simply by letting go of the struggle, you’re no longer tied up in the fight. And now you’re free to do what you need to do.

Why This Metaphor Matters

This isn’t just a nice story. It’s describing a fundamental pattern in how humans handle stress. We engage with it. We fight it. We try to defeat it through sheer force of will. And in doing so, we often make it worse.

There’s a well-known piece of research where people were told not to think about a white bear. Predictably, they thought about the white bear more, not less — and the effect got stronger, not weaker, when people were tired or under load (Wegner, 1994). That’s the monster pulling harder the harder you pull, demonstrated in the laboratory, and it’s exactly the mechanism this metaphor is describing: the more you fight a thought or a feeling, the more grip it tends to get.

Studies on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy show consistently that psychological flexibility — the ability to disengage from unproductive struggles — predicts better mental health outcomes than persistence in unwinnable battles. Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is stop fighting.

Some people spend years fighting anxiety: trying to reason with it, challenge it, defeat it through logic, until every anxious thought becomes a battle. Every worry becomes an enemy to be conquered. They end up exhausted, and the anxiety wins. They can’t understand why trying harder doesn’t work.

The problem is the fighting itself. Every time you engage with an anxious thought as though it’s an emergency, you metaphorically pull on that rope. You teach your brain that these thoughts are real threats. You hang on to them for longer, and the struggle makes them stronger.

What Dropping the Rope Actually Means

Dropping the rope doesn’t mean giving up. It doesn’t mean accepting defeat. It doesn’t mean pretending your problems don’t exist. The monster’s still there. The pit of dread and despair is still there. But you’re no longer actively engaged in a battle you can’t win.

This is about strategic disengagement — recognising when a fight is costing you more than any possible victory could be worth. Understanding that some battles can’t be won through direct confrontation and require an entirely different approach.

Cognitive defusion, a key component of ACT, works by creating psychological distance from thoughts, which reduces their power over your behaviour. When you stop engaging with every stressful thought as if it’s a crisis requiring immediate response, those thoughts lose some of their grip.

You need to learn to drop the rope when anxious thoughts appear instead of fighting them; simply acknowledge them and move on. I’m having the thought that something terrible might happen — that’s interesting, now what do I actually need to do right now? The thought is still there. You’re just not struggling with it anymore.

Why We Keep Pulling

So if dropping the rope works, why don’t we do it? Quite simply, because it feels like giving up, because we’re taught that persistence is virtuous, that winners never quit, that we should fight for what matters.

So we keep pulling, even when we’re losing, even when we’re exhausted, and even when the fight itself is causing more damage than the thing we’re fighting. We keep pulling because letting go feels like failure. People will often endure significant discomfort to avoid the feeling of surrendering, staying in losing battles because the alternative — accepting they can’t win this way — feels worse than the battle itself.

This is why stress becomes chronic. This is often why anxiety persists. This is why people burn out. Not because the stressors are insurmountable, but because the fight against them is exhausting. They’re spending all their energy pulling on a rope in a battle they can’t win.

What Happens When You Drop the Rope

Here’s what’s interesting. When you drop the rope, the monster doesn’t actually do anything. It just stands there holding its end. The battle only exists because you’re pulling.

Your stressors don’t get worse when you stop fighting them; they still exist. Some of them still need to be addressed. But you can’t address them whilst you’re exhausted from pulling on that rope. You need your energy for solutions, not for battles.

Accepting your emotional response to a difficult situation and focusing your energy on what’s actually within your control tends to produce better outcomes than pouring your energy into fighting the feeling itself. That’s the core of ACT, and it’s well evidenced: accept what you feel, then act on what you can actually change.

The Forgetting Problem

People forget how to switch off. Their minds are full, and they can’t remember letting go. They’ve been pulling on the rope so long that it feels normal. They don’t even realise they’re doing it anymore.

As discussed elsewhere in this hub, this is a form of pathological recalibration — the nervous system adapting to chronic stress until crisis mode becomes the accepted baseline. Tolerable doesn’t mean healthy. It just means you’ve forgotten what healthy feels like.

Living in the Now

When you drop the rope, you’re available for the present moment. You’re not spending all your energy fighting battles about your past or your future. You’re here now, able to engage with what’s actually happening rather than being consumed by battles about what might happen or what already happened.

This connects directly to mindfulness, to presence, to all the ideas discussed elsewhere in this hub. You can’t be present whilst you’re pulling on a rope. You can’t engage with life whilst you’re locked in combat with stress.

The Practice

So how do you actually drop the rope? You notice when you’re pulling. You recognise the sensation of being locked in an unwinnable battle with your stress. And you consciously choose to disengage.

This isn’t easy initially. Your instinct is to pull harder, to fight more, to not let the monster win. But the monster’s not trying to win. It’s just standing there. You’re the one creating the battle.

Start small. Notice when you’re ruminating about something you can’t change — that’s rope-pulling. Notice when you’re catastrophising about something that hasn’t happened — that’s rope-pulling. Notice when you’re fighting with your own thoughts about whether you should feel stressed — that’s definitely rope-pulling.

And then, just for a moment, drop the rope. See what happens. The monster doesn’t attack. The pit doesn’t swallow you. You’re just… free. Free to do what actually needs doing rather than fighting imaginary battles about what might need doing.

What You’re Free to Do

When you drop the rope, you’re free to address actual problems, free to engage with people you care about, free to do work that matters, free to rest when you need rest, free to experience moments of joy without the constant background noise of internal warfare.

The monster’s still there. Your stressors still exist. But you’re no longer wasting your energy fighting battles that can’t be won through fighting. You’re available for solutions. For life. For the present moment.

Letting go of stress isn’t about eliminating stress. It’s about recognising when your fight against stress is causing more damage than the stress itself. It’s about dropping the rope, stepping away from the pit, and getting on with what actually matters.

The monster’s still there. But you don’t have to keep pulling. You never did.

Further reading

1. Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2011). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
2. Harris, R. (2008). The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living. Trumpeter Books.
3. Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1), 34–52.
4. Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. Springer Publishing Company.
5. Folkman, S., & Moskowitz, J. T. (2004). Coping: Pitfalls and promise. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 745–774.