You have undoubtedly heard this before—from friends, family, or even yourself, who say: I just wish I could let it go! The “it” may be anger, resentment, or regret; things that erupt from the past, some emotional creature or situation that was never put to rest and continues to haunt them or you, creating obsessive thoughts and painful feelings that run like an undertow in their or your lives, steadily dragging their victims down.

We envision the process of letting go as being like a helium balloon we’ve been clutching for so long, and finally, somehow, we release our grip, and it floats away out of mind forever.

Or, if you think of letting go as a personal campaign you have to work out, make happen, the image is more like wrestling with some 400-pound creature that you need to shove out the front door of your consciousness. But the art of letting go isn’t about balloons or muscle, but something else:

Realize it’s not about changing your thoughts and emotions.

We commonly believe it is our thoughts and emotions that drive our behavior: If they hadn’t treated me this way, or if I didn’t feel so resentful, angry, etc., I could be more accepting and loving toward my friend, my partner, and my children. Thinking this way makes changing your thoughts and feelings the solution: getting them to see things the way I do, or figuring out a way to let go of the balloon or push the 400-pound creature out the front door of my brain is the only way out.

Realize that your behaviors are what keep your feelings in place.

While this is understandable, it’s a tough road. Both thoughts and emotions are slippery: Our thoughts, while often seem valid, can change on a dime; our emotions are not something we can directly control (you can’t, for example, will yourself to feel happy). What we can control is our behavior.

Thoughts create beliefs that are hard to shake, fueling the emotions that shape our behaviors. But it is the resulting behaviors that often keep the problem alive: Your beliefs about their behavior create a story—my partner doesn’t care about me, my child is unappreciative—about their intentions that make sense to you, which in turn makes you feel angry, resentful, or regretful. But then this translates into your behavior, making you angry or critical, or pulling you away and causing you to avoid, only further escalating the problem, aggravating the relationship, and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: They push back or pull back, only adding to and confirming what was already there.

Focus instead on changing your behavior.

Because you can only directly change your behavior, start there. Give up on the story and on trying to manhandle your emotions, and focus instead on your behavior. This is how you break this self-fulfilling, dysfunctional loop. To really let go, act as if you have let go.

Start by imagining what this would look like in a concrete way if the resentment, the regret, and the anger were suddenly gone. Now, do it. Yes, this has a fake-it-till-you-make-it quality. Your anxiety and emotions will momentarily rebel—what are you doing; they don’t deserve this—but hang in there and do it anyway.

If you do, you drain the fuel, break the loop, and over time, the emotions will catch up and fade. You are changing the past through the present, which is the only thing you have control over. This is the secret to letting go.

You may still think about the past and still have pangs of negative feelings.

These may come and go—especially if you’re stressed by other problems in your life. You can notice them, but they will no longer derail you because they no longer shape the fabric of your everyday life.

By acting, by changing your behavior, you’ve let go of the balloon; the creature you’ve tried for so long to push out the front door of your mind will now be smaller and less threatening.

You’ve done your best. You simply won’t care so much. You’ve let go.