More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Remember that what distinguishes regret from disappointment is personal responsibility. Disappointments exist outside of your control. The child who wakes up to discover that the Tooth Fairy hasn’t left her a reward is disappointed. Regrets, in contrast, are your fault. The parents who awaken and realize they forgot to remove their child’s tooth and replace it with a reward are regretful.
One of the most prevalent cognitive biases—in some ways the über-bias—is called the “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.
All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With foundation regrets, the human need it lays bare is stability: we 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.
With boldness regrets, we choose to play it safe. That may relieve us at first. The change we’re contemplating may sound too big, too disruptive, too challenging—too hard. But eventually the choice distresses us with a counterfactual in which we were more daring and, consequently, more fulfilled.
Boldness regrets sound like this: If only I’d taken that risk.
But personality psychologists—the scientists who began studying the subject a hundred years ago—have long concluded that most people are a bit of both. Introversion and extroversion are not binary personality types. This trait is better understood as a spectrum—one where about two-thirds of the population lands in the middle.
A key reason for this discrepancy is that when we act, we know what happened next. We see the outcome and that can shrink regret’s half-life. But 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,” say Gilovich and Medvec.
Sometimes the ultimate act of boldness involves the risk of using one’s voice in ways that might rattle others but that clear a new path for oneself.
The lesson is plain: Speak up. Ask him out. Take that trip. Start that business. Step off the train.
Moral regrets sound like this: If only I’d done the right thing.
moral regrets are more likely to involve actions than inactions.
most people in most cultures agree: we should tell the truth, keep our promises, and play by the agreed-upon rules.
As Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind, the moral foundation of loyalty helps groups cement bonds and form coalitions. It shows “who is a team player and who is a traitor, particularly when your team is fighting with other teams.”
Connection regrets are the largest category in the deep structure of human regret. They arise from relationships that have come undone or that remain incomplete.
Connection regrets sound like this: If only I’d reached out.
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.
regrets about social relationships are felt more deeply than other types of regrets because they threaten our sense of belonging. When our connections to others tatter or disintegrate, we suffer. And when it’s our fault, we suffer even more.
Rifts are more dramatic. But drifts are more common. Drifts can also be harder to mend. Rifts generate emotions like anger and jealousy, which are familiar and easier to identify and comprehend. Drifts involve emotions that are subtler and that can feel less legitimate. And first among these emotions, described by hundreds of people with connection regrets, is awkwardness.
The prospect of giving compliments, Boothby and Bohns found, can make people skittish. They worry “their awkwardness is on display and that people are noticing—and judging—them for their many flaws and faux pas.” But in the experiments, people’s predictions—about themselves and others—proved way off. They drastically overestimated how “bothered, uncomfortable, and annoyed” the person receiving their compliment would feel—and underestimated how positively that person would react.[5] It wasn’t awkward at all.
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.
In some sense, both behavioral science and popular culture have focused too much attention on romance and not enough on other forms of family connection.
In the end, the problem we contend with as people is remarkably simple. What give our lives significance and satisfaction are meaningful relationships. But when those relationships come apart, whether by intent or inattention, what stands in the way of bringing them back together are feelings of awkwardness. We fear that we’ll botch our efforts to reconnect, that we’ll make our intended recipients even more uncomfortable. Yet these concerns are almost always misplaced. Sure, we’ll get rebuffed sometimes. But more often—much more often, in fact—we overestimate how awkward we’ll feel and
...more
All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With connection regrets, the human need is love. Not love only in the romantic sense—but a broader version of love that includes attachment, devotion, and community and that encompasses parents, children, siblings, and friends.
Higgins argued that we all have an “actual self,” an “ideal self,” and an “ought self.” Our actual self is the bundle of attributes that we currently possess. Our ideal self is the self we believe we could be—our hopes, wishes, and dreams. And our ought self is the self we believe we should be—our duties, commitments, and responsibilities.[1]
people regret their failures to live up to their ideal selves more than their failures to live up to their ought selves. Regrets of “coulda” outnumbered regrets of “shoulda” by about three to one. The likely reason is the contrasting emotional consequences of these two flavors of regret. Discrepancies between our actual self and our ideal self leave us dejected. But discrepancies between our actual self and our ought self make us agitated—and therefore more likely to act.
Failures to become our ideal selves are failures to pursue opportunities. Failures to become our ought selves are failures to fulfill obligations. All four of the core regrets involve opportunity, obligation, or both.
on average, may be more likely to value professional opportunities, and women, on average, may be more likely to value relationship opportunities.
A life of obligation and no opportunity is crimped. A life of opportunity and no obligation is hollow. A life that fuses opportunity and obligation is true.
What’s more, many inaction regrets are inherently difficult to undo. If in my twenties I regret not studying hard enough in high school, I can’t reenroll in eleventh grade. My only option is to focus on the future. But with regrets of action, I still have the chance to recalibrate the present—to press Ctrl+Z on my existential keyboard.
When we undo what we’ve done, we improve our current situation. That helps. But undoing a regret is not quite the same as erasing it.
The other way to address the present is not to repair our previous actions but to recast the way we think about them.
At Leasts don’t alter our behavior or boost our performance in the future, but they do help us reassess the present.
At Leasts can turn regret into relief. On their own they don’t change our behavior, but they change how we feel about our behavior, which can be valuable. And because At Leasts spring to mind naturally far less often than If Onlys, we must summon them ourselves at the right time.
The first step in reckoning with all regrets, whether regrets of action or inaction, is self-disclosure. We’re often skittish about revealing to others negative information about ourselves. It feels awkward, even shameful. But an enormous body of literature makes clear that disclosing our thoughts, feelings, and actions—by telling others or simply by writing about them—brings an array of physical, mental, and professional benefits. Such self-revelation is linked to reduced blood pressure, higher grades, better coping skills, and more.
The explanation—and the reason self-disclosure is so crucial for handling regret—is that language, whether written or spoken, forces us to organize and integrate our thoughts. It converts blobby mental abstractions into concrete linguistic units. That’s a plus for negative emotions.
Again, regret can make us better when we use emotions as a signal for our thoughts. When feeling is for thinking, and thinking is for doing, regret can perform its decision-enhancing, performance-boosting, meaning-deepening magic. Writing about regret or revealing a regret to another person moves the experience from the realm of emotion into the realm of cognition.
So, 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.
Self-criticism can sometimes motivate our performance when we criticize ourselves for particular actions rather than for deep-seated tendencies. But 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.
emerged in part from Neff’s recognition that when we stumble or fail, we treat ourselves more harshly than we would ever treat friends, family, or even strangers in the same predicament. That’s counterproductive, she has shown. Rather than belittling or berating ourselves during moments of frustration and failure, we’re better off extending ourselves the same warmth and understanding we’d offer another person.
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 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]
The people who addressed their regret with self-compassion were more likely to change their behavior than those who approached their regret with self-esteem.
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.
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.
“People who self-distance focus less on recounting their experiences and more on reconstruing them in ways that provide insight and closure,”
You may have noticed that you’re often better at solving other people’s problems than your own. Because you’re less enmeshed in others’ details than they are, you’re able to see the full picture in ways they cannot. In fact, Kross and Igor Grossmann of Canada’s University of Waterloo have shown that when people step back and assess their own situation the way they’d evaluate other people’s situations, they close this perceptual gap. They reason as effectively about their own problems as they do about others’ problems.
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 seem smaller, more temporary, and easier to surmount.[38]
“subtle shifts in the language people use to refer to themselves during introspection can influence their capacity to regulate how they think, feel, and behave under stress.” [40] 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.
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.
