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January 2 - January 3, 2023
Regret is not dangerous or abnormal, a deviation from the steady path to happiness. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Regret is also valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn’t drag us down; it can lift us up.
Optimism is associated with better physical health. Emotions like joy, gratitude, and hope significantly boost our well-being.[8] We need plenty of positive emotions in our portfolio. They should outnumber the negative ones.[9]
Yet overweighting our emotional investments with too much positivity brings its own dangers.
reclaim regret as an indispensable emotion—and to show you how to use its many strengths to make better decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to your life.
Regret makes us human. Regret makes us better.
Nearly all regrets fall into four core categories—foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, and connection regrets.
“the unpleasant feeling associated with some action or inaction a person has taken which has led to a state of affairs that he or she wishes were different,”
This process begins with two abilities—two unique capacities of our minds. We can visit the past and the future in our heads. And we can tell the story of something that never actually happened.
it is so deeply imprinted in human beings that the only people who lack the ability are children whose brains haven’t fully developed
At Least counterfactuals preserve our feelings in the moment, but they rarely enhance our decisions or performance in the future. If Only counterfactuals degrade our feelings now, but—and this is key—they can improve our lives later.
Regret is the quintessential upward counterfactual—the ultimate If Only. The source of its power, scientists are discovering, is that it muddles the conventional pain-pleasure calculus.[10] Its very purpose is to make us feel worse—because by making us feel worse today, regret helps us do better tomorrow.
“When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
A look at the research shows that regret, handled correctly, offers three broad benefits. It can sharpen our decision-making skills. It can elevate our performance on a range of tasks. And it can strengthen our sense of meaning and connectedness.
Leaning into regret improves our decision-making process—because the stab of negativity slows us down.
regret: it can deepen persistence, which almost always elevates performance.
Even thinking about other people’s regrets may confer a performance boost.
Getting people to think counterfactually, to experience even vicarious regret, seems to “crack open the door to possibilities,”
To be sure, regret doesn’t always elevate performance. Lingering on a regret for too long, or replaying the failure over and over in your head, can have the opposite effect. Selecting the wrong target for your regret—say, that you wore a red baseball cap at the blackjack table rather than that you took another card when you were holding a ten and a king—offers no improvement.
The researchers concluded that it was the setback itself that supplied the fuel. The near miss likely prompted regret, which spurred reflection, which revised strategy, which improved performance.[15]
“Counterfactual reflection endows both major life experiences and relationships with greater meaning,”
The indirect paths of If Only and At Least offered a faster route to meaning than the direct path of pondering meaning itself.[16]
“My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.”[20]
Excessive regret is linked to an array of mental health problems—most prominently depression and anxiety, but also post-traumatic stress disorder.[24]
Rumination doesn’t clarify and instruct. It muddies and distracts.
people who accept, rather than judge, their negative experiences end up faring better.[29]
framing regret as an opportunity rather than a threat helps us transform it—so that it operates as a sharp stick rather than a leaden blanket. Regrets that hurt deeply but dissolve quickly lead to more effective problem solving and sturdier emotional health.[30]
The key is to use regret to catalyze a chain reaction: the heart signals the head, the head initiates action.
Kintsugi (which translates to “golden joinery”) considers the breaks and the subsequent repairs part of the vessel’s history, fundamental elements of its being.
Chomsky capsized these beliefs. He argued that every language was built atop a “deep structure”—a universal framework of rules lodged in the human brain.[1] When children learn to speak, they’re not simply parroting sounds. They’re activating grammatical wiring that already exists. Language wasn’t an acquired skill, Chomsky said. It was an innate capacity.
Foundation regrets. The first deep structure category cuts across nearly all the surface categories. Many of our education, finance, and health regrets are actually different outward expressions of the same core regret: our failure to be responsible, conscientious, or prudent.
Connection regrets. Our actions give our lives direction. But other people give those lives purpose. A massive number of human regrets stem from our failure to recognize and honor this principle.
“temporal discounting.”[1] He overvalued the now—and undervalued (that is, discounted) the later. When this bias grips our thinking, we often make regrettable decisions.
small choices about eating, exercising, studying, reading, and working produce explosive benefits or harms over time.
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best time is today.
“fundamental attribution error.” When people, especially Westerners, try to explain someone’s behavior, we too often attribute the behavior to the person’s personality and disposition rather than to the person’s situation and context.[5]
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.
foundation regrets arise from the failure to plan ahead, work hard, follow through, and build a stable platform for life,
“Regrettable failures to act . . . have a longer half-life than regrettable actions,”
when we don’t act—when we don’t step off that metaphorical train—we can only speculate how events would have unfolded. “Because regrettable inactions are more alive, current, and incomplete than are regrettable actions, we are reminded of them more often,”
The consequences of actions are specific, concrete, and limited. The consequences of inaction are general, abstract, and unbounded.
Boldness regrets endure because the counterfactual possibilities are so vast.
At the heart of all boldness regrets is the thwarted possibility of growth. The failure to become the person—happier, braver, more evolved—one could have been. The failure to accomplish a few important goals within the limited span of a single life.
Authenticity requires boldness. And when authenticity is thwarted, so is growth.
With boldness regrets, the human need is growth—to expand as a person, to enjoy the richness of the world, to experience more than an ordinary life.
“the division of the world into two domains, one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane.”[10] We don’t always agree on the boundaries between those domains. But when we forsake what we believe is sacred for what we believe is profane, regret is the consequence.
when in doubt, do the right thing.
Closed door regrets distress us because we can’t do anything about them. Open door regrets bother us because we can, though it requires effort.
we generally stink at divining what other people think and anticipating how they will behave. Worse, we don’t realize how inept we are at these skills.[3]
“pluralistic ignorance.” We mistakenly assume that our beliefs differ vastly from everyone else’s—especially when those private thoughts seem at odds with broader public behavior.
Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives. . . . Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. That finding proved true across the board among both the Harvard men and the inner-city participants.[7]
