When’s best to exit?

Extract from ‘Letting go is hard to do’:
The results show that the mental difficulty of letting go is expected to be more severe if the anticipated exit time is in the more distant future.

A plausible explanation is that the respondents planning exit in the near future have already addressed the issues of giving up and letting go. If they had not, very possibly the planned exit time would have been pushed forward to the more distant future. Hence, it might not be the exit time that affects the mental difficulty but rather the other way around: until the mental difficulty is more or less resolved, an exit time in the near future cannot be set.