March 25, 2025
by Stephen T. Messenger
This week the weather finally became nice, and I grabbed my bike for a ride. Not having ridden since the fall, my body certainly wasn’t ready to sit in the saddle for a long, hard workout. Yet, I found myself magnetically pulled five miles towards a mountain pass and then an additional 2.5-mile, 1,000-foot climb up the Appalachians.
I was not completely ready for this, and my legs were screaming up the incline that occasionally hit a 15% slope. There were multiple times I was ready to quit, but I trudged on, fighting back my mind’s desire to throw in the towel, turn around, and head home.
As my lungs burned, it made me wonder about the science of not quitting. We’ve been told from an early age to never give up and finish what we’ve started. If you’re like me, I’ve been value-programmed to keep going no matter what, but have occasionally stopped reading a terrible novel, not finished a workout, or lost interest in doing a puzzle.
The decision to quit in the moment, however, is more nuanced than “I don’t feel like it.” It has to do with three independent aspects of our psyche that are competing to get us to quit or keep going. If we can lean into one of these positive aspects, we have a better shot at not quitting.
The Psychology of Quitting
Stopping an activity affects the cognitive, emotional, and social aspects of our minds. If we feel like quitting in the moment, it’s probably because of one of these. At the same time, one or more of these can override the other desires to quit.
Cognitive is the rational side where our mind is debating whether to quit by using logic to balance out the pros and cons. It weighs the current struggles we’re going through with future benefits. If the benefits outweigh the pain, our mind makes a logical decision to continue the activity. During my bike ride, my brain was screaming to stop and found no benefits of continuing the climb.
Emotional is how we feel about our decision. Here we consider emotions such as anxiety, boredom, excitement, fear, or triumph. A decision to continue may intensely pull at the heartstrings like when we’re running a race sponsoring a cancer survivor or feeling the triumph of closing out a crossword puzzle. My emotions riding up the hill were centered around a feeling of satisfaction if I made it to the top.
Finally, the social aspect of quitting is how our family and friends may applaud, judge, celebrate, or criticize our actions. We all have a circle of acquaintances with whom we share life, and we typically want to make proud. Our decisions can be influenced by what we predict they will think of us, good or bad. On my bike ride, I knew about halfway up the hill I was going to write about this, and my actions to my social circle will be a story of either success or failure.
Putting the Decision to Quit into Practice
When we combine the cognitive, emotional, and social impact in our decision on whether to quit in the moment, we gain a holistic look at the impacts of our decisions.
Social Decision to Continue. Chief Petty Officer Douglas “Mike” Day and his Seal Team raided the house of a high-level al-Qaeda official in Iraq’s Anbar province on April 6, 2007. Upon entering, insurgents from less than 10 feet away opened fire hitting him 16 times, 11 in his body armor. The remaining five bullets directly impacted his exposed areas along with a grenade blast.
His retold his thought process afterward, first thinking: “God get me home to my girls, and then extreme anger. Then I just went to work. It was muscle memory. I just did what I was trained to do.” He took down three bad guys, completed the mission, and walked to the medevac helicopter.
I’m speculating here, but cognitively he probably thought stopping to take care of his wounds would be smart and emotionally he wanted to withdraw to get medical help. But socially he was fighting for his Navy Seal teammates and his family. He made the social choice to continue instead of giving up.
Emotional Decision to Continue. Derek Redmond was a British Olympic 400-meter sprinter in the 1992 Summer Games. He missed running four years earlier after tearing his Achilles an hour before the race, a devastating setback. Five surgeries and four years later, he was ready.
Halfway into his semifinal run, his hamstring tore. He could have chosen to stop right there, avoiding significant injury, but instead he hopped on one foot within his lane. His dad ran out of the stands to support him, and they completed the race together in an emotional moment.
Physically speaking, Redmond should have stopped, as I’m sure his brain was telling him. While socially his country was watching, he had already lost the race. His emotions wanted him to finish though, and with his dad carrying him along, they finished together.
Cognitive Decision to Continue. When Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell reported over 200,000 miles from the Earth, “Houston, we have a problem,” the NASA ground crew leapt into action. An explosion took out the crew’s regular supply of oxygen, water, electricity, heat, and light.
Engineers and mission controllers worked around the clock to solve three main problems of power conservation, removing carbon dioxide from the module, and plotting a course home. It took two days of no sleep to solve this. Their teamwork saved the lives of three astronauts.
I would imagine that the team was emotionally exhausted and wanted to quit, and while social was a factor, it wasn’t the external pressure that kept them going. It was the cognitive belief from this team of engineers that their brains could solve these problems in the face of mental exhaustion to bring their people home.
Don’t Give Up
The desire to either continue or quit comes down to the three aspects: cognitive, emotional, and social. In every situation they vary. Next time we feel like giving up, we should think about these three aspects independently. This allows us to weigh out the risks and rewards, emotional impacts we are facing, and the effect on our family and social network.
Once we look at these objectively, we can make better decisions. Of course, never quitting is a false narrative. There are times when it’s smart to stop and try again another day.
For example, a cross-country drive from a driver with heavy eyelids puts those around them at risk. A hiker deciding whether to summit or turn back before dark without a light or adequate supplies should probably plan better and turn around. Finally, a bike rider climbing that hill who fears they will collapse from exhaustion and would need help getting back may want to make a U-turn halfway up the mountain.
Ultimately, it’s smarter to plan realistic goals and tackle those challenges as they come without stopping, and the decision to quit must not be taken lightly. It comes down to focusing on the cognitive, emotional, and social reasons that we should continue. In any grand endeavor, something inside us will always encourage us to quit, yet something else will encourage us to continue. We must fight that urge to the furthest extent possible and complete the mission so long as it’s safe to do so.
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