The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

by Daniel H. Pink

that is not some gauzy daydream, a gooey aspiration confected to make us feel warm and cared for in a cold and callous world. That

We shouldn’t doubt the sincerity of people who say they have no regrets. Instead, we should think of them as actors playing a role—and playing it so often and so deeply that they begin to believe the role is real. Such psychological self-trickery is common. Sometimes it can even be healthy. But more often the performance prevents people from doing the difficult work that produces genuine contentment.

conclusions: Regret makes us human. Regret makes us better.

she lay in bed, life about to slip from her battered forty-seven-year-old body, her final words were, “Every damn thing you do in this life you have to pay for.”[23] Does that sound like a person with no regrets? However, if Piaf had reckoned with her regrets, if she had confronted them rather than tried to wriggle past them, she would have discovered something more important: Every damn thing you do in life can pay off for you. Because, as we’re about to discover, regret doesn’t just make us human. It also makes us better.

If Only counterfactuals degrade our feelings now, but—and this is key—they can improve our lives later.

Our cognitive apparatus is designed, at least in part, to sustain us in the long term rather than balm us in the near term. We need the ability to regret our poor decisions—to feel bad about them—precisely so we can improve those decisions in the future.

“Always trust your feelings,” this perspective says.[23] They are to be honored—sat upon a throne and revered. Emotions are the one real truth. They

They’re beautiful because of the imperfections. The cracks make them better.

Educational/academic” regrets were most frequent.

Opportunity breeds regret,” they wrote, and “education is open to continual modification throughout life.”[9]

are

With this category of regrets, something similar might be happening—a foundation attribution error. We attribute these failures, in ourselves and others, to personal choices when they’re often at least partly the result of circumstances we can’t control.[*]

That means that the fix for foundation regrets, and a way to avoid them, is not only to change the person, but to reconfigure that person’s situation, setting, and environment. We must create the conditions at every level—society, community, and family—to improve individuals’ foundational choices.

all require a basic infrastructure of educational, financial, and physical well-being that reduces psychological uncertainty and frees time and mental energy to pursue opportunity and meaning.

always taking the safe path and not offending people. I could have taken more risks, been more assertive, and had more life experiences.

have found that asking people simply to act like an extrovert for one week appreciably increased their well-being.[2]

have an instantaneous, visceral, emotional response about right or wrong—and then we use reason to justify that intuition.[2] The rational mind isn’t a black-robed jurist rendering unbiased pronouncements, as I’d thought. It’s the press secretary for our intuitions. Its job is to defend the boss.

“provided both behavioral and neural evidence that self-disclosure is intrinsically rewarding.”[3]

“our species may have an intrinsic drive to disclose thoughts to others.”[5] Self-disclosure is especially useful with regret.

relive and relieve. By divulging the regret, we reduce some of its burden, which can clear a path for making sense of it.

writing about negative experiences like regret, and even talking into a tape recorder about them, for fifteen minutes a day substantially increased people’s overall life satisfaction and improved their physical and mental well-being in ways that merely thinking about those experiences did not.

writing and talking about triumphs and good times drained some of their positivity.[6]

writing about emotional difficulties, even solely for your own consumption, can be powerful. Among the benefits: fewer visits to physicians, long-term improvements in mood, strengthened immune function, better grades for students, finding jobs more quickly for the unemployed,

unless carefully managed and contained, self-criticism can become a form of inner-directed virtue signaling. It projects toughness and ambition, but often leads to rumination and hopelessness instead of productive action.

“People who self-distance focus less on recounting their experiences and more on reconstruing them in ways that provide insight and closure,”

As a result, self-distancing strengthens thinking,[30] enhances problem-solving skills,[31] deepens wisdom,[32] and even reduces the elevated blood pressure that often accompanies stressful situations.[33]

write an email to yourself—using your first name and the pronoun “you”—outlining the small steps you need to learn from the regret.

“If I were replaced tomorrow, what would my successor do?” [46]

Look back on the year that’s about to end and list three regrets.

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” Viktor Frankl, 1946

One problem with using anticipated regrets as a decision-making tool is that we’re pretty bad at predicting the intensity and duration of our emotions.[23] And we’re particularly inept at predicting regret.

We often overestimate how negative we’ll feel and underestimate our capacity to cope or balm our feelings with At Leasts.

If we focus too much on what we’ll regret, we can freeze and decide not to decide. Likewise,

we should devote time and effort to anticipate the four core regrets: foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, and connection regrets. But anticipating regrets outside these four categories is usually not worthwhile.

Regret—that maddening, perplexing, and undeniably real emotion—points the way to a life well lived.

At Least It. Find the silver lining: think about how the situation could have turned out worse and appreciate that it didn’t.

you are dealing with one of the four core regrets, project yourself to a specific point in the future and ask yourself which choice will most help you build a solid foundation, take a sensible risk, do the right thing, or connect with others.

We can toss aside the script but not always. We live at the intersection of free will and circumstance.