Why Regrets Matter and What We Can Do About Them

You’ve got no regrets? You got to be kidding!

All of us have regrets in our lives, be it at work, in school, or in our interactions with others.

Very often, the people who loudly proclaim that they have no regrets are the very same people with the biggest regrets. They include Edith Piaf, the acclaimed singer of the famous French song “No Regrets”, who ended up having many deep regrets in her life (and died at the young age of 48).

Regrets are shunned by most self-help gurus, who prefer to help us think positively, erase the past, and “live the good life.” Unfortunately, such advice isn’t sound — not reflecting on past mistakes is the surest way to repeat them in the future!  

Admitting that we’ve screwed up — either through sins of commission or omission — isn’t something that comes easily to many of us. Our minds are naturally programmed to forget or diminish past mistakes; reliving a regret seems to bring us backward rather than push us forward.

Thanks to the book The Power of Regret by bestselling author Daniel Pink, we now have a new way to think about the utility of regrets. Contrary to popular belief, regrets can be powerful ways to improve our destiny.

Three Reasons Why Regrets Are Useful

If you could start over, would you live your life differently?  

What should you do when you find yourself in a deep hole? Stop digging!

But this is easier said than done, due to the psychological phenomenon known as the “escalation of commitment to a failing course of action.” Also known as the sunk cost fallacy, it describes our tendency to follow through on an endeavour if we have already invested time, money, or effort into it, regardless of whether the costs outweigh the benefits.

To prevent us from falling deeper into our own hole, we should reconsider regrets. Research shows that regret, when handled correctly, can offer three broad benefits.

#1 Regrets Can Improve Decisions

Regrets help us to feel bad about our poor decisions so that we can improve upon them in the future. They force us to stop, think and consider what other options we should take to reach a better conclusion.

#2 Regrets Can Boost Performance

Studies have shown that inducing regret—poking partipants with If Onlys—can enable people to solve more problems and to solve them more quickly.

By making us think about what and how we did what we do, regrets can help us to improve our performance the next time around. Even reflecting on other people’s mistakes (their regrets so to speak) can allow us to strengthen our outcomes.

(Of course, this process needs to be managed properly. Replaying a failure over and over in our heads isn’t going to be productive.)

#3 Regrets Can Deepen Meaning

Regrets that make people think counterfactually about important periods of their life endows both their major life experiences and relationships with greater meaning. (Counterfactual thinking is a psychological concept that gets people to think of possible alternatives to life events that already occurred: “If Only” and “At Least” being the mode of such thought.)

When people consider counterfactual alternatives to life events, they experienced higher levels of religious feeling and a deeper sense of purpose than simply recounting the facts of those events.

The Four Core Regrets

According to the book, people experience regret across many domains—family relationships, romantic choices, career moves, educational paths, health, and more. These can be divided into four main categories.

#1 Foundation Regrets 

These cut across many categories are often due to our failure to be responsible, conscientious or prudent. Foundation regrets leave you thinking: “If only I had done the work then.”

Many of life’s finance, education, and health-related regrets fall into this category.

How to Overcome: Think ahead. Do the work. Start now. Help yourself and others to become the ant (rather than the grasshopper).

#2 Boldness Regrets 

These are the regrets that occur because of the chances that we didn’t take—the regrets of inaction.

They may include the opportunities to start our own business, pursue the love of our life, learn a new language, play a new instrument, do a sport, help somebody in need.

They leave you thinking that “if only I had taken that chance.”

How to Overcome: Speak up. Step out. Ask him/her out. Take the trip. Start the business. Get off the train.

#3 Moral Regrets

Although these represent only about 10 percent of regrets, moral regrets may haunt us the longest. Ethical regrets are times when we took the low road and comprised on our values—they’re often more painful than other forms of regret, and leave you wondering, “If only I had done the right thing.”

These fall into 5 areas:

1.      Harming/hurting others (eg bullying others)

2.      Cheating of others

3.      Disloyalty to a group or a spouse or an organisation

4.      Subversion, eg dishonouring parents or being disrespectful to teachers

5.      Desecration like degrading the sanctity of life

How to Overcome: When in doubt, take the high road.

#4 Connection Regrets 

Making up the biggest category, connection regrets happen when you neglect the people whom you encounter in your life. They include regrets about fractured, broken or unrealised relationships with friends, lovers, family members, or spouses.

These regrets sound like, “If only I had reached out,” and fall into two categories:

·        Open Door Regrets: You can still do something about it, although it likely involves exerting significant uncomfortable effort.

·        Closed Door Regrets: The opportunity to address it with the other person is gone due to circumstances impossible to change (eg through a death or changing life situation).

How to Overcome: If it’s a closed-door regret, do better next time. If it’s an open door regret, do something now.

Six Effective Ways to Manage Regrets

As a general guide to managing your regrets, consider these five strategies recommended in the book.

#1 Undo It — Addressing Regrets of Action

Imagine that you said something nasty to a friend, or suddenly slapped her because she pointed out something true about you which you didn’t want to reveal. Most of us would regret such acts.

When we undo what we’ve done, we improve our current situation. However, undoing isn’t the same as erasing a regret.

To address regrets of action, ask yourself these questions:

• If I’ve harmed others, as is often the case with moral regrets and sometimes the case with connection regrets, can I make amends through an apology or some form of emotional or material restitution?
• If I’ve harmed myself, as is the case for many foundation regrets and some connection regrets, can I fix the mistake? For example, can I begin paying down debt or logging a few more hours at work? Can I reach out immediately to someone whose connection I severed?

If the action regret can be undone, try to do that—even if a light physical or metaphysical bruise remains.

But if it can’t be undone, fear not. You’ve got another possibility.

#2 At Least It — Find the Silver Lining

The other way to address the present is not to repair our previous actions but change how we think about them.

At Leasts don’t alter our behavior or boost our performance in the future, but they do help us reassess the present. Several women in the World Regret Survey listed marrying a previous husband as their greatest regret. But those who were mothers also cherished the children who came from that ill-considered marriage.

“I regret marrying a loser,” they would say, “but at least I’ve got these great kids.”

Finding a silver lining doesn’t remove the cloud. But it offers another perspective on that cloud. Think about how things could have turned out worse.

“At least I got a good deal.” “At least I have beautiful children from my marriage.” “At least I have a roof over my head and food on the table.”

#3 Self-Disclosure — Relive and Relieve

Disclosing our thoughts, feelings, and actions—by telling others or simply by writing about them—brings an array of physical, mental, and professional benefits.

Denying our regrets can tax our minds and bodies. Gripping them too tightly can tip us into harmful rumination.

The better approach is to relive and relieve. By divulging our regrets, we can reduce some of its burden and sting.

#4 Self-Compassion — Normalise and Neutralise

After you disclose your regret, you are more exposed—to yourself and others.

What should you do then? Dress yourself down? Pump yourself up?

The answer is to focus on self-compassion. This is where you extend yourself the same warmth and understanding that you’d offer another person.

Replace searing judgement with basic kindness. Recognise that “being imperfect, making mistakes, and encountering life difficulties is part of the shared human experience.”

By normalising negative experiences, we neutralise them.  

#5 Self-Distance — Analyse and Strategise

This last strategy helps you to analyse and strategise—to examine the regret dispassionately and objectively without shame and rancour, and extract from it a lesson that can guide your future behaviour.

Think of it as changing your role from scuba diver to oceanographer, from swimming in murky depths of regret, to piloting above the water to examine its shape and shoreline.

By distancing yourself from your regretful act (or failure to act), self-distancing “strengthens thinking, enhances problem-solving skills, deepens wisdom, enhances problem-solving skills, deepens wisdom, and even reduces the elevated blood pressure that often accompanies stressful situations.”

There are three ways to do so:

1. Space: Adopt the “fly-on-the-wall” technique to look at it as a passive neutral observer
2. Time: Consider the implications of that negative situation in 10 years rather than a week later. Mentally visit the future and examine the regret retrospectively, so that the problem will seem smaller, more temporary, and easier to surmount.
3. Language: Use a third-person language to describe yourself (rather than first person). Or you can also use a universal “you” to do so.

#6 Anticipate Regrets — Before They Occur

Exploit your “loss aversion” (where the find the pain of losing something is greater than the pleasure of gaining an equivalent thing) to anticipate your potential regrets. Envision how awful you might feel in the future if you don’t act correctly now.

Ask yourself: “In the future, will I regret this decision if I don’t do X?” Answer the question. Apply that answer to your current situation.

In a way, this is akin to conducting a “pre-mortem” or an “obituary party”—where you try to envisage what would happen in the future if things went wrong—and then work to address it here and now.

To ensure that we do not always minimize regret, but optimize regret, we should use the Regret Optimization Framework:

1.      Satisfice on most decisions: If you are not dealing with one of the four core regrets, make a choice, don’t second-guess yourself, and move on.

2.      Maximise on the most crucial decisions: If you are dealing with one of the four core regrets, project yourself to a specific point in the future. Ask yourself which choice will most help you build a solid foundation, take a sensible risk, do the right thing, or connect with others.

Conclusion

Regret make me human. Regret makes me better. Regret gives me hope.

A quintessential part of the human experience, regrets come in small and big portions. They can be anything from waking up too late resulting in us missing a train, to not spending more time with our children when they are young.

While regrets are painful, pretending that they do not exist may result in even more painful consequences.

The solution is to learn from the blunders we made in our lives so that we can address them, avoid making the same mistakes, and heal the hurts that exist.

Walter is the founder and editor of Cooler Insights—a critically thinking content marketing, social media marketing and brand storytelling agency. Fuel your business with the latest insights in digital and content marketing.