“Let go of your attachments” has long been spiritual advice, the kind of line that sounds meaningful without ever quite specifying what to do about it. Two unrelated fields of psychological research have recently given that advice something more concrete to point to, and, interestingly, they’ve landed in almost the same place from very different directions.
The first comes from the scientific study of wisdom, a field that has moved well past treating wisdom as a vague virtue and toward measuring it directly. Psychologist Igor Grossmann and colleagues at the University of Waterloo define wise reasoning through a specific set of traits: intellectual humility, or recognizing the limits of your own knowledge; genuine openness to how a situation could unfold in ways you hadn’t considered; and a real effort to integrate perspectives other than your own, rather than just tolerating them. In a 2021 study published in Psychological Science, Grossmann and colleagues ran two experiments involving 555 adults, asking participants to reflect on a difficult interpersonal conflict either as themselves, immersed in the memory, or from a distanced, third-person point of view, imagining how an outside observer might see the same situation play out. People assigned to the distanced perspective consistently reasoned more wisely about their conflict afterward, scoring higher on intellectual humility and on their willingness to consider viewpoints besides their own. The researchers describe this as the first solid evidence that wisdom, at least in how a person handles a specific hard moment, can be trained through a fairly simple shift: stepping back from your own fixed, first-person attachment to how you already see things.
The second line of research comes from clinical psychology, and it approaches something similar from an entirely different angle. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, developed by psychologist Steven Hayes, is built around a concept called psychological flexibility, the capacity to hold thoughts and feelings lightly rather than treating them as fixed facts that have to be obeyed or fought. A central technique, cognitive defusion, involves learning to notice a thought, “I’m a failure,” “this always happens to me,” as a passing mental event rather than an unquestionable truth about reality. A 2015 meta-analysis by Jacqueline A-Tjak and colleagues, published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, pooled 39 randomized controlled trials covering 1,821 patients and found that ACT outperformed control conditions across a range of mental and physical health problems, with an effect size researchers considered solidly moderate. The mechanism the researchers point to isn’t eliminating difficult thoughts. It’s loosening a person’s grip on them, treating a painful or rigid belief as something to hold at arm’s length rather than something to be consumed by.
Neither field of research was built with the other in mind, and it would overstate things to say they’ve proven the same underlying mechanism. Wisdom researchers are measuring how well someone reasons through a specific interpersonal conflict after a brief exercise. Clinical researchers are measuring symptom reduction across months of structured therapy for diagnosed conditions. These are different outcomes, measured different ways, in different populations, and treating them as identical would be sloppier than the evidence supports. What they do share is a specific, narrower idea: that a certain kind of psychological rigidity, an unexamined attachment to one’s own immediate perspective or to a thought as literal truth, tends to make things worse, and that practices aimed specifically at loosening that grip, whether through self-distancing or cognitive defusion, produce measurable benefits across genuinely different domains.
It’s worth being honest about the limits here too. The wisdom study measured a short-term shift after a brief writing exercise, not a permanent change in how wise someone is across their whole life. The ACT meta-analysis, while large, is still working with effect sizes that mean the therapy helps meaningfully rather than curing everyone completely, and not every study included used identical methods. Neither literature claims that letting go of attachment is a single switch a person flips once and is done with. Both describe it more as a skill, practiced repeatedly, that seems to compound.
What the two bodies of research add up to, taken honestly, is a specific and useful reframing of an old piece of advice. “Letting go of attachments” doesn’t have to mean abandoning care about outcomes or relationships. In both the wisdom research and the clinical research, what actually seems to help is narrower: loosening the grip on the idea that your own immediate, first-person read on a situation, or a single painful thought, is the whole and final truth of it. That specific kind of release, not disengagement in general, is what the data keeps turning up as worth practicing.
