The Power of Regret

We all have regrets, and that’s not only ok, it’s a natural human emotion that helps us thrive, if you are willing to let it.

That’s the message of the latest best-seller by Dan Pink.

Join us as we explore regret, why we have it, and how it helps us live a better life.

Part One: Regret Reclaimed

We’ll start our journey by looking at how regret makes us human, and why it makes us better.

Regret Makes Us Human

Scientists have been studying regret for over seventy years and have come to two conclusions:

• Regret makes us human; and
• Regret makes us better.

At its core, regret is a negative emotion, with two additional elements – comparison and blame.

First, when we compare our current state with “what might have been if only…,” we get regret.

Second, negative emotion becomes regret when we assign blame to ourselves.

At Leasts and If Onlys

There are two ways to think about the past.

The first one – at leasts – are rare. An “at least” would sound something like “at least I ended up with a bronze medal – unlike that other athlete who blew it in the last seconds of the race and ended up off the podium.”

The second one – if onlys – is typically how we think about the past. An “if only” would sound something like “if only I had put in a few more training sessions leading up to the event, I would have won the gold medal.”

So, first things first – when you find yourself stuck in the “if only” rut, it’s not just you. It’s everybody.

But it begs the question: are we all just self-sabotaging masochists? Surely there must be some good to come out of this behavior that otherwise leaves us dejected and distressed.

Right?

Why Regret Makes Us Better

Yes, regret does make us better, if you know how to utilize it properly.

Regret can do three things that you probably want more of in your life:

• improve decisions;
• boost performance;
• deepen meaning.

The key, Pink suggests, is that when it comes to regret, we have to view our feelings (especially the negative ones that come when we think about the past) as a tool for thinking.

If you commit to not dodging or wallowing in your emotions, and instead confront them, you can use them as a catalyst for better future behavior.

Part Two. Regret Revealed

We’ll continue our journey by looking at what regret looks like in the real world, and the four different types of regrets.

Regret on the Surface

Pink put together the largest study of regret ever attempted and called it the American Regret Project. He polled 4,489 adults, whose demographics and psychographics matched the composition of the entire US population.

They asked a lot of questions, but the big one was this:

Regrets are part of life. We all have something we wish we had done differently—or some action we wish we had taken or not taken. Please look back on your life for a moment. Then describe in 2 or 3 sentences one significant regret you have.

As it turns out, people regret a lot of things. Relationships gone bad, poor romantic choices, bad career moves, education paths gone astray, and more.

After Pink both interviewed many of his survey respondents live and categorized the regrets that people had, he found that almost all of them could be categorized into one of four categories he calls the four core regrets: foundation, boldness, moral, and connection regrets.

Let’s look at them in turn.

Foundation Regrets

Foundation regrets sound like “If only I’d done the work.”

Most of our education, money and health regrets are different expressions of the same core regret: the failure to be prudent or responsible in some area of our life.

Human beings require a certain level of stability. Without it, we find it incredibly hard to pursue our goals.

So how to we get ourselves into situations where we feel like we’ve wasted entire stretches of our lives without accomplishing anything?

Unfortunately, even though our brains are often compared to computers, they are really not like computers at all. They very often give us the wrong answers without us noticing.

One trick our brains play on us is getting us to value “right now” too much, and “later” too little. This becomes particularly troublesome when it blinds us to the understanding of the compounding effects of our choices.

This causes the foundation of our lives to become unstable, and when our futures don’t live up to our hopes, regret follows.

Boldness Regrets

Boldness regrets sound like “If only I’d taken that risk.”

One of the most consistent findings of academic research (and of Pink’s own research) is that people are much more likely to regret the things that they didn’t do than the things that they did.

That’s because the consequences of actions we take are specific and concrete. We can get our arms around them and deal with them.

On the other hand, the consequences of actions we didn’t take are general and abstract. We’ll never know what might have happened, and so our minds can’t effectively put them to rest.

At the heart of all of our boldness regrets is the failure to become the person we could have become. If only we had asked out the girl. If only we had taken that job opportunity in a different country. If only…

The lesson for boldness regrets, as Pink points out, is simple. Do the things. Start the business. Take the trip. Ask out the boy.

Moral Regrets

Moral regrets sound like “If only I’d done the right thing.”

Most of us want to be good people, but life gives us plenty of opportunities to be otherwise. When we take the low road, we often don’t feel bad immediately – it’s often a slow burn into the future.

Even though moral regrets made up only 10% of the respondents to the survey, they hurt the most and last the longest.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University, and along with many of his peers in other fields, has created what they call “moral foundations theory” which gives us a way to think about the different dimensions of morality.

There are five pillars to the theory:

1. Care/harm. We devote a lot of time to protecting children because they are vulnerable. As a result, evolution has created in us an ethic of care. People who defend the vulnerable are kind, those who hurt them are cruel.
2. Fairness/cheating. Our success as a species depends greatly on cooperation. This means that we value those that we can trust, and dislike those who breach it.
3. Loyalty/disloyalty. Our survival depends on the cohesiveness of our group. Being true to your team, sect, or nation is valued, and turning your back on them is reviled.
4. Authority/subversion. Hierarchies help our societies operate and protect us from aggressors. People who undermine those hierarchies place everybody in the group in harms way. That’s why traits like deference and obedience are valued.
5. Purity/desecration. Our ancestors had to deal with all sorts of nasty pathogens, and formulated ways to avoid them with what experts call a “behavioral immune system.” This is the concern that causes most of the politically charged moral issues like gay marriage, pornography and abortion.”

The lesson to take home about moral regrets, Pink says, is “when in doubt, do the right thing.”

Connection Regrets

Connection regrets sound like “If only I’d reached out.”

This is the largest category of regrets, and they come from relationships that have come apart at the seams, or that are left incomplete.

Although our actions give our lives direction, other people give it purpose. Connection regrets come from our failure to recognize and honor this critically important principle.

The longest running study of lifetime wellbeing is the Study of Adult Development at Harvard Medical School. It’s more commonly known as the Grant Study for one of its creators. It started in 1938, and followed 268 undergraduate men for nearly eighty years.

George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist headed up the study for more than 30 years. After eight decades and millions of data points collected from the men in the study, he summarized their findings on human flourishing in five words: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”

Not just love in a romantic sense, but from parents, children, siblings and friends.

The lesson to learn from connection regrets is to do better next time. Even better, do something now. If you have a relationship to mend, do it now. Say what you feel, even if “going first” is awkward.

Part Three. Regret remade

Now we move on to what to do with our regrets so that we can help them work for us, instead of against us.

Undoing and At Leasting

If our regrets make us human, how do we use them to become better and happier people?

For action regrets, we need to take immediate steps to make the situation better. Here’s how to do it in two steps.

Step #1: Undo it. If the action can be undone, undo it. Even if some damage has been done, you still might be able to fix the situation.

Step #2: At Least it. Like Dan Pink, going to law school may have been a mistake, but I too met my wife while there. With situations like that in mind, ask yourself the following three questions:

• How could the decision I now regret have turned out worse?
• What is the one silver lining with this regret?
• How would you complete the following sentence? “At least…”

Disclosure, Compassion, and Distance

Like we discussed earlier, the worst things we can do with negative emotions are to ignore them or to wallow in them. Instead, we should remember that those emotions are information for us to think about, and that thinking ultimately leads us to doing.

Here’s a three step process for disclosing regrets, reframing the way we view it, and take away a lesson to help us make better decisions in the future.

Step #1: Self-disclosure

The first step in this healing process is to disclose the regret. It feels awkward and shameful, but it helps. In fact, study after study shows that disclosing our regrets – either by telling somebody about them or even just writing about them – brings about a whole host of physical, mental and professional benefits.

Yes, but won’t it make other people think less of me? Actually, quite the opposite. One major scientific review concluded that “people who engage in intimate disclosures tend to be liked more than people who disclose at lower levels.”

So, here’s your homework:

• Write about your regret for fifteen minutes three days straight;
• Tell someone about the regret in person or by phone. Establish a time limit to avoid repetition and dwelling on the issue too much.

Step #2: Self-compassion

This technique was pioneered about twenty years ago by Kristin Neff – a psychologist at the University of Texas.

At the core of the process is recognizing that “being imperfect, making mistakes, and encountering life difficulties is part of the shared human experience.” Or, said another way, we neutralize negative experiences by normalizing them.

Here are three questions you can ask yourself in order to do that.

• If a friend or relative came to you with the same regret, would you treat that person with kindness or contempt?
• Is this type of regret something that other people may have experienced, or are you the only person to ever go through it?
• Is this a life-defining moment, or is it an unpleasant moment or season?

The goal here is to be aware of your regret, but not over identifying with it.

Step #3: Self-distancing

People who are able to provide distance between themselves and the regret events are able to find insight and closure. Here are three ways to do it.

• Distance through space. Imagine you are a neutral expert analyzing your regret in a clean examination room. What went wrong? What is your prescription? Write yourself an email outlining the steps you need to take to learn from the regret.
• Distance through time. Use your natural capacity for mental time travel and imagining it’s ten years from now and you are looking back with pride about how you responded to the regret. What did you do?
• Distance through language. This one involves abandoning the first person. Imagine your friend is confronting the same regret you are dealing with. What lesson does the regret teach them? What would you tell them to do next? Be specific and heed the advice.

Anticipating Regret

Finally, our tour through the world of regret wouldn’t be complete unless we talked about how to avoid regret in the first place.

This requires us to think about how we might feel in the future if we don’t act appropriately now – and use the resulting negative emotion to improve our behavior before it becomes a problem.

But keep in mind that our goal should not always be to minimize regret. That’s because regret avoidance can lead us into decision paralysis. If we acted as though our goal was to eliminate regret, we’d never get out of bed in the morning.

Instead, our goal is to optimize it, and Pink gives us what he calls the Regret Optimization Framework to deal with it. It’s based on four principles:

1. In many situations, anticipating regrets can lead us to better behavior and thus, happiness.
2. However, we frequently overestimate them, distorting our decisions.
3. If we go too far and focus on regret minimization, we can make the situation even worse.
4. At the same time, human beings consistently express the four core regrets because they connect with fundamental human needs. Regrets are part of the path to the good life.

Here’s the simple rule to decide a course of action to optimize regret. Ask yourself whether you are dealing with one of the four core regrets. Then:

• If you’re not, satisfice. Make a decision quickly and move on;
• If you are, spend time deliberating. Time travel into the future and ask yourself which choice will help you build your foundation, take a sensible risk, do the right thing, or create/maintain a meaningful connection. Then, choose the option that reduces the regret the most.

Conclusion

Regret makes us human, but it can also make us better. If you know what types of regrets you are likely to have in your life, have a plan to both deal with them when they arise and minimize them before they happen, you’ll be on the path to a life well lived.