The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

by Daniel H. Pink

We can undo many such regrets: we can make amends, reverse our choices, or erase the consequences.

We can also respond to action regrets by using At Leasts to help us feel better ...

We’re more apt to repair what we did than what we didn’t do.

many inaction regrets are inherently difficult to undo.

When we undo what we’ve done, we improve our current situation.

with action regrets that are bringing you down, ask yourself: How could the decision I now regret have turned out worse? What is one silver lining in this regret? How would I complete the following sentence? “At least . . .”

the optimal response to most regrets, action and inaction alike—is to use the regret to improve the future.

we can convert our regrets into fuel for progress. They can propel us toward smarter choices, higher performance, and greater meaning.

Rather than ignoring the negative emotion of regret—or worse, wallowing in it—we can remember that feeling is for thinki...

STEP 1. SELF-DISCLOSURE: RELIVE AND RELIEVE

Self-disclosure is especially useful with regret. Denying our regrets taxes our minds and bodies. Gripping them too tightly can tip us into harmful rumination. The better approach is to relive and relieve. By divulging the regret, we reduce some of its burden, which can clear a path for making sense of it.

to begin to harness your regrets to improve in the future, try any of the following: Write about your regret for fifteen minutes for three consecutive days. Talk about your regret into a voice recorder for fifteen minutes for three consecutive days. Tell someone else about the regret in person or by phone. Include sufficient detail about what happened, but establish a time limit (perhaps a half hour) to avoid the possibilities of repetition and brooding.

STEP 2. SELF-COMPASSION: NORMALIZE AND NEUTRALIZE

self-esteem can foster narcissism, diminish empathy, and stoke aggression.

It can also promote bias toward one’s own group and prejudice toward other groups.[14]

Self-compassion begins by replacing searing judgment with basic kindness. It doesn’t ignore our screwups or neglect our weaknesses. It simply recognizes that “being imperfect, making mistakes, and encountering life difficulties is part of the shared human experience.”[15] By normalizing negative experiences, we neutralize them. Self-compassion encourages us to take the middle road in handling negative emotions—not suppressing them, but not exaggerating or overidentifying with them either. Self-compassion is also something that people can learn.[16] And when they master it, the benefits are considerable.

self-compassion is associated with increased optimism, happiness, curiosity, and wisdom;[17] enhanced personal initiative and emotional intelligence;[18] greater mental toughness;[19] and deeper social connections.[20] It can protect against unproductive mind-wandering,[21] and help students cope with academic failure.[22] It also correlates with less depression, anxiety, stress, perfectionism, and shame[23]—and reduces symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.[24]

self-compassion can even promote better physical health, including improv...

self-compassion delivers the benefits of self-esteem without its drawbacks. It can insulate us from the debilitating consequences of self-criticism, while short-circuiting self-esteem’s need to feel good through vanity an...

Self-compassion, by contrast, prompts people to confront their difficulties head-on and take responsibility for them,

ask ourselves three questions: If a friend or relative came to you with the same regret as yours, would you treat that person with kindness or contempt? If your answer is kindness, use that approach on yourself. If your answer is contempt, try a different answer. Is this type of regret something that other people might have endured, or are you the only person ever to have experienced it? If you believe your stumble is part of our common humanity, reflect on that belief, as it’s almost always true. If you believe the world has it out for you alone, please reread Chapters 7–10. Does this regret represent an unpleasant moment in your life, or does it define your life? Again, if you believe it’s worth being aware of the regret but not overidentifying with it, you’re on your way. If you believe this regret fully constitutes who you are, ask someone else what they think.

STEP 3. SELF-DISTANCING: ANALYZE AND STRATEGIZE

Talking about ourselves in the third person is one variety of what social psychologists call “self-distancing.”

After self-disclosure relieves the burden of carrying a regret, and self-compassion reframes the regret as a human imperfection rather than an incapacitating flaw, self-distancing helps you analyze and strategize—to examine the regret dispassionately without shame or rancor and to extract from it a lesson that can guide your future behavior.

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

Shifting from the immersive act of recounting to the more distanced act of reconstruing regulates our emotions and redirects behavior. 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]

we can distance through space. The classic move is known, unsurprisingly, as the “fly-on-the-wall technique.” Rather than examine your regret from your own perspective—“I

view the scene from the perspective of a neutral observer.

We can enlist the same capacity for time travel that gives birth to regret to analyze and strategize about learning from these regrets.

prompting people to consider how they might feel about a negative situation in ten years reduced their stress and enhanced their problem-solving capabilities compared to contemplating what the situation would be like in a week.[37]

Mentally visiting the future—and then examining the regret retrospectively—activates a similar type of detached, big-picture perspective as the fly-on-the-wall technique. It can make the problem see...

When we abandon the first person in talking to ourselves, the distance that creates can help us recast threats as challenges and replace distress with meaning.

getting people to write about their challenges using third-person pronouns like “she,” “him,” and “they” rather than first-person pronouns like “I,” “me,” and “my” increased their intellectual humility and sharpened the way they reasoned through difficulties.[41]

to gain the benefits of self-distancing, try any of the following: Imagine your best friend is confronting the same regret that you’re dealing with. What is the lesson that the regret teaches them? What would you tell them to do next? Be as specific as you can. Now follow your own advice. Imagine that you are a neutral expert—a doctor of regret sciences—analyzing your regret in a clean, pristine examination room. What is your diagnosis? Explain in clinical terms what went wrong. Next, what is your prescription? Now 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 your regret involves your business or career, try a technique from the late Intel CEO Andy Grove, who reportedly would ask himself, “If I were replaced tomorrow, what would my successor do?” [46] Imagine it is ten years from now and you’re looking back with pride on how you responded to this regret. What did you do?

It’s also possible to move forward by looking forward—by foreseeing regrets before they occur.

Regret is a retrospective emotion. It springs into being when we look backward. But we can also use it prospectively and proactively—to gaze into the future, predict what we will regret, and then reorient our behavior based on our forecast.

Anticipating our regrets slows our thinking. It applies our cerebral brakes, giving us time to gather additional information and to reflect before we decide what to do.

When we envision how awful we might feel in the future if we don’t act appropriately now, that negative emotion—which we simulate rather than experience—can improve our behavior.

Anticipating regret offers a convenient tool for judgment. In situations where you’re unsure of your next move, 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.

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.

Overestimating regret has another consequence: it can cloud our decisions.

Anticipating regret can sometimes steer us away from the best decision and toward the decision that most shields us from regret—as

Regret aversion can often lead to decision aversion,

herein lies a problem. The wobbly beam in Bezos’s Regret Minimization Framework is that constantly trying to anticipate and minimize our regrets can become a form of unhealthy maximizing. Applying this framework at all times and in all realms is a recipe for despair.

to gain the benefits of anticipated regret without becoming caught in its downdraft? The solution is to focus our aspirations.

Our goal should not be to always minimize regret. Our goal should be to optimize it.

In many circumstances, anticipating our regrets can lead to healthier behavior, smarter professional choices, and greater happiness. Yet when we anticipate our regrets, we frequently overestimate them, buying emotional insurance we don’t need and thereby distorting our decisions. And if we go too far—if we maximize on regret minimization—we can make our situation even worse. At the same time, people around the world consistently express the same four core regrets. These regrets endure. They reveal fundamental human needs. And together, they offer a path to the good life.

The Regret Optimization Framework holds that 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.

WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR REGRETS: A RECAP For an Action Regret Undo it. Apologize, make amends, or try to repair the damage. At Least It. Find the silver lining: think about how the situation could have turned out worse and appreciate that it didn’t. For Any Regret (Action or Inaction) Self-disclosure. Relive and relieve the regret by telling others about it—admission clears the air—or by writing about it privately. Self-compassion. Normalize and neutralize the regret by treating yourself the way you’d treat a friend. Self-distancing. Analyze and strategize about the lessons you’ve learned from the regret by zooming out in time, in space, or through language. To Use Anticipated Regrets in Your Decision Making: 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. Maximize 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 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.

Open the hood of regret, and you’ll see that the engine powering it is storytelling. Our very ability to experience regret depends on our imagination’s capacity to travel backward in time, rewrite events, and fashion a happier ending than in the original draft. Our capacity to respond to regret, to mobilize it for good, depends on our narrative skills—disclosing the tale, analyzing its components, and crafting and recrafting the next chapter.