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August 7 - September 18, 2022
StoryWorth. Each week the service sends an email that contains a single question (What was your mother like? What is your fondest childhood memory? And—yes—what regrets do you have?). The recipient responds with a story. At the end of the year, those stories are compiled into a hardcover book. Because of the poke of If Only, she said, “I seek out more meaning. I seek out more connection. . . . I don’t want to feel the way when my parents die that I felt about my grandparents of ‘What did I miss?’ ”
Don’t dodge emotions. Don’t wallow in them either. Confront them. Use them as a catalyst for future behavior.
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.
“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.”
the cracks are how the light gets in.
“Opportunity breeds regret,”
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.
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] So, to use a classic example, when another driver cuts us off on the highway, we immediately assume the person is a jerk. We never consider that the person might be speeding to the hospital. Or when someone seems uneasy while giving a presentation, we assume that he’s an inherently nervous person rather than someone who doesn’t have much experience in front of
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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.
asking people simply to act like an extrovert for one week appreciably increased their well-being.
people regret inactions more than actions—especially
Every so often you read a book that profoundly changes how you understand the world. For me, one of those books is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, written by Jonathan Haidt and published in 2012.[1]
Men who’d had warm childhood relationships with their parents earned more as adults than men whose parent-child bonds were more strained. They were also happier and less likely to suffer dementia in old age.
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. Yet the reverse was true for positive experiences: writing and talking about triumphs and good times drained some of their positivity.[6]
the evidence shows that self-disclosure builds affinity much more often than it triggers judgment.
merely 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, and more.[10]
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.[12]
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.”
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.
when people step back and assess their own situation the way they’d evaluate other people’s situations, they close this perceptual gap.
fly-on-the-wall technique helps us withstand and learn from criticism—it makes it easier not to take it personally—which is essential in transforming regrets into instruments for improvement.[35] This sort of distancing can be physical as well as mental. Going to a different location to analyze the regret or even literally leaning back, rather than forward, in one’s chair can make challenges seem less difficult and reduce anxiety in addressing them.[36]
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.
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?
Kristin Neff’s website (https://self-compassion.org), where you can measure your own levels of self-compassion. Her book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself is also excellent.
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?”
If we know what we truly regret, we know what we truly value.
