Have you ever been in a situation where you had an unproductive thought or emotion and could not let go, no matter how hard you tried? Several years ago, I was working with a talented colleague that didn’t have a good sense of time management.

We were collaborating on a project and they didn’t subscribe to my approach of getting things done early. They waited until the last week before the project was due to do the vast portion of their work. It drove me bonkers, because I’m a Myers-Briggs ENFJ personality type, and I have a very strong sense of J, so I thrive on productivity. I was so crazy over it that I had lost sleep, worried that we weren’t going to make our deadline. If I’m honest, we barely did, and I was half crazy over it. The night before the project was due, I couldn’t sleep at all. The project still wasn’t finished, and we had a good 12 hours left to complete it.  Like a clothes dryer, the idea of failing on this project turned over and over in my head for hours until I finally fell asleep at 4:30 in the morning. When I woke up two hours later – wrecked – I realized that while my feelings were valid, I needed a better strategy to let go of unproductive thoughts and feelings.

Over the next several months and many more sleepless nights, I compiled an approach that helped me decompress enough to return to a state of peace no matter how wound up I would get. This is what I discovered:

First, I needed a journal to write all this down. The simple catharsis of writing out (in detail) what I was thinking and feeling was actually half the battle for me. What follows are the questions I used to help me let go:

1. What are you thinking about and refusing to let go?
2. What are you feeling (mad, sad, glad, afraid, embarrassed, or some other feeling)?
3. Are my feelings valid and warranted, or false, inaccurate, or an over-reaction?
4. Is there anything I can do about it right now, or can it be done later?
5. If my feelings are inaccurate, what should I be feeling or thinking?
6. Are there any conversations I need to have to resolve this?
7. What can I do or think about to replace my unproductive thought or feeling?
8. What can I do to make myself feel good or normal again?

Ultimately I had to make a firm decision that I was going to let go of these unproductive thoughts and feelings. I actually had to speak my decision out loud.

Easier said than done, I know. There was a time in my life where I would hang on to unproductive thoughts and feelings for days and even weeks for no good reason. I will admit, it was my (very rational) wife who actually helped coach me through some of those times in our early years of marriage. Thank God for her. So over time I began to adopt some of the questions she would ask me, and actually turned it into a process that I now use repeatedly to help myself and others. So, if I can learn to let go, and I really hang on to things, you can certainly do it. If you’ve walked through the questions above and did all this genuinely, you will get some well-earned peace, perspective, and clarity of mind.

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