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Forget the past; seize the future. Bypass the bitter; savor the sweet.
A good life has a singular focus (forward) and an unwavering valence (positive). Regret perturbs both. It is backward-looking and unpleasant—a toxin in the bloodstream of happiness.
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.
human beings also hold what amounts to a portfolio of emotions. Some of these emotions are positive—for example, love, pride, and awe. Others are negative—sadness, frustration, or shame. In general, we tend to overvalue one category and undervalue the other.
That’s because negative emotions are essential, too. They help us survive. Fear propels us out of a burning building and makes us step gingerly to avoid a snake. Disgust shields us from poisons and makes us recoil from bad behavior. Anger alerts us to threats and provocations from others and sharpens our sense of right and wrong. Too much negative emotion, of course, is debilitating. But too little is also destructive.[10]
Regret makes us human. Regret makes us better.
“Regret is created by a comparison between the actual outcome and that outcome that would have occurred had the decision maker made a different choice,”
regret is better understood less as a thing and more as a process.
Human beings are both seasoned time travelers and skilled fabulists. These two capabilities twine together to form the cognitive double helix that gives life to regret.
It takes a few years for young brains to acquire the strength and muscularity to perform the mental trapeze act—swinging between past and present and between reality and imagination—that regret demands.[5] That’s why most children don’t begin to understand regret until age six.[6] But by age eight, they develop the ability even to anticipate regret.[7] And by adolescence, the thinking skills necessary to experience regret have fully emerged.[8] Regret is a marker of a healthy, maturing mind.
Comparison lives at regret’s core.
One influential study found that roughly 95 percent of the regrets that people express involve situations they controlled rather than external circumstances.
live, it seems, is to accumulate at least some regrets.”
our ability to mentally travel through time and to conjure incidents and outcomes that never happened—enables what logicians call “counterfactual thinking.” Split the adjective in two and its meaning is evident.
“Counterfactuals are . . . a signature example of the imagination and creativity that stand at the intersection of thinking and feeling,”
Counterfactuals can point in either of two directions—down or up. With “downward counterfactuals,” we contemplate how an alternative could have been worse. They prompt us to say “At least . . .”—as in, “Sure, I got a C+ on that exam, but at least I passed the course and don’t have to take it again.” Let’s call these types of counterfactuals At Leasts. The other variety are known as “upward counterfactuals.” With upward counterfactuals, we imagine how things could have gone better. They make us say “If only . . .”—as in, “If only I’d attended class more often and done all the reading, I’d have
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At Leasts deliver comfort and consolation. If Onlys, by contrast, make us feel worse.
thoughts about the past that make us feel better are relatively rare, while thoughts that make us feel worse are exceedingly common. Are we all self-sabotaging masochists?
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.
“There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen, 1992
We increase funding in a hopeless project because we’ve spent so much already. We redouble efforts to salvage an irredeemable relationship because we’ve already devoted a few years to it. The psychological concept is known as “escalation of commitment to a failing course of action.” It’s one of the many cognitive biases that can pollute our decisions.
getting people to think about a previous escalation of commitment, and then to regret it, decreased their likelihood of making the error again.
when people look back at previous negotiations and think about what they regretted not doing—for example, not extending a strong first offer—they made better decisions in later negotiations.
The main effect, several studies show, is on our “decision hygiene.” [5] Leaning into regret improves our decision-making process—because the stab of negativity slows us down. We collect more information. We consider a wider range of options. We take more time to reach a conclusion. Because we step more carefully, we’re less likely to fall through cognitive trapdoors like confirmation bias.
Regret can “emphasize the mistakes we made in arriving at a decision, so that, should a similar situation arise in the future, we won’t make the same mistakes.”
While some of us parents are still trying to improve our decision-making, the capacity for regret might be a fundamental part of how our sons and daughters learn to reason and make decisions themselves.
This is one of the central findings on 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,” Galinsky (from the negotiation studies) and Gordon Moskowitz explain. It infused people’s subsequent deliberations with more strength, speed, and creativity.
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.
when people consider counterfactual alternatives to life events, they experience higher levels of religious feeling and a deeper sense of purpose than when they simply recount the facts of those events.[17] This way of thinking can even increase feelings of patriotism and commitment to one’s organization.[18]
But she eventually discovered that every time she had a regret, “it was in part because I was trying to remove meaning from the equation.”
Thinking is for doing.[21] We act in order to survive. We think in order to act.
Alas, stashing negativity in your emotional basement merely delays the moment when you must open the door and face the mess you’ve stored inside. Blocked emotions, writes one therapist, can even lead to “physical problems like heart disease, intestinal problems, headaches, insomnia and autoimmune disorders.”[22] Burying negative emotions doesn’t dissipate them. It intensifies them, and the contaminants leach into the ground soil of our lives.
Too much regret is dangerous, sometimes devastating. It can lead to rumination, which severely degrades well-being, and to the regurgitation of past mistakes, which can inhibit forward progress. Excessive regret is linked to an array of mental health problems—most prominently depression and anxiety, but also post-traumatic stress disorder.
This is especially true when regrets become repetitive. Repetitive thought can worsen regret, and regret can exacerbate repetitive thought, creating a descending spiral of pain.[26] Rumination doesn’t clarify and instruct. It muddies and distracts. When feeling is only for feeling, we build a chamber from which it’s difficult to escape.
When it comes to regret, a third view is healthier: Feeling is for thinking. Don’t dodge emotions. Don’t wallow in them either. Confront them. Use them as a catalyst for future behavior. If thinking is for doing, feeling can help us think.
framing regret as a judgment of our underlying character—who we are—can be destructive. Framing it as an evaluation of a particular behavior in a particular situation—what we did—can be instructive.
The key is to use regret to catalyze a chain reaction: the heart signals the head, the head initiates action. All regrets aggravate. Productive regrets aggravate, then activate.
“The opportunity and the feeling that I got out of that loss, and that fullness and that wholeness, is the greatest privilege I could have ever asked for.” Because of the pain, she sees the rest of her life with greater urgency and purpose. “If you have a broken heart, it means you have done something big enough and important enough and valuable enough to have broken your heart.”
“Education is the number one regret at least in part because in contemporary society, new and further education of one sort or another is available to nearly all individuals,” they concluded. If you didn’t finish college, you might be able to return. If you needed additional training or skills, the right courses might be available. If you didn’t earn a graduate degree in your twenties, maybe you can pursue one in your forties or fifties. “Opportunity breeds regret,”
What do people regret? Lots of stuff. Why do they have those regrets? Something about opportunity. The outcome remained intriguing, but unsatisfying.
Beginning with a 1957 book called Syntactic Structures, 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. Our lives require some basic level of stability. Without a measure of physical well-being and material security, other goals become difficult to imagine and even harder to pursue. Yet sometimes our individual choices undermine this long-term need.
Boldness regrets. A stable platform for our lives is necessary, but not sufficient. One of the most robust findings, in the academic research and my own, is that over time we are much more likely to regret the chances we didn’t take than the chances we did.
Moral regrets. Most of us want to be good people. Yet we often face choices that tempt us to take the low road. When we travel that path, we don’t always feel bad immediately. (Rationalization is such a powerful mental weapon it should require a background check.) But over time, these morally dubious decisions can gnaw at us.
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.
Foundation regrets arise from our failures of foresight and conscientiousness. Like all deep structure regrets, they start with a choice. At some early moment, we face a series of decisions. One set represents the path of the ant. These choices require short-term sacrifice, but in the service of a long-term payoff. The other choices represent the path of the grasshopper. This route demands little exertion or assiduousness in the short run, but risks exacting a cost in the long run. At that juncture, we choose the path of the grasshopper.
Foundation regrets sound like this: If only I’d done the work.
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best time is today.
