Top highlights from The Power of Regret
When feeling is for thinking and thinking is for doing, regret is for making us better.
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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.
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Connection regrets are the largest category in the deep structure of human regret.
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Foundation regrets sound like this: If only Id done the work.
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Moral regrets sound like this: If only Id done the right thing.
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Only 1 percent of our respondents said that they never engage in such behaviorand fewer than 17 percent do it rarely. Meanwhile, about 43 percent report doing it frequently or all the time. In all, a whopping 82 percent say that this activity is at least occasionally part of their lives, making Americans far more likely to experience regret than they are to floss their teeth.[17]
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Self-disclosure is intrinsically rewarding and extrinsically valuable. It can lighten our burden, make abstract negative emotions more concrete, and build affiliation. 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.
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Some people find illeism annoying (although it doesnt bother Daniel Pink). But its existence as a style of speech and narration exemplifies the final step in the regret-reckoning process. Talking about ourselves in the third person is one variety of what social psychologists call self-distancing. When were beset by negative emotions, including regret, one response is to immerse ourselves in them, to face the negativity by getting up close and personal. But immersion can catch us in an undertow of rumination. A better, more effective, and longer-lasting approach is to move in the opposite directionnot to plunge in, but to zoom out and gaze upon our situation as a detached observer, much as a movie director pulls back the camera. 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 strategizeto examine the regret dispassionately without shame or rancor and to extract from it a lesson that can guide your future behavior.
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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.
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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.
Daniel H Pink,
The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward
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The lesson is plain: Speak up. Ask him out. Take that trip. Start that business. Step off the train.
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And the most common harm was bullying. Even decades later, hundreds of respondents deeply regretted mistreating their peers.
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But the most common negative emotionand the second most common emotion of any kindwas regret. The only emotion mentioned more often than regret was love.
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Self-compassion emerged in part from Neffs 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. Thats counterproductive, she has shown. Rather than belittling or berating ourselves during moments of frustration and failure, were better off extending ourselves the same warmth and understanding wed offer another person. Self-compassion begins by replacing searing judgment with basic kindness. It doesnt 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.
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First, we can distance through space. The classic move is known, unsurprisingly, as the fly-on-the-wall technique.
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The second way to self-distance is through time. We can enlist the same capacity for time travel that gives birth to regret to analyze and strategize about learning from these regrets.
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The third method of self-distancing, as Julius Caesar and Elmo teach us, is through language. Kross, Ayduk, and others have carried out some fascinating research concluding that 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.
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Perhaps youre familiar with the First Law of Holes: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. And perhaps youve ignored this law.
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The psychological concept is known as escalation of commitment to a failing course of action. Its one of the many cognitive biases that can pollute our decisions.
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We dont 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.
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Connection regrets sound like this: If only Id reached out.
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Regret can improve decisions. To begin understanding regrets ameliorative properties, imagine the following scenario. During the pandemic of 202021, you hastily purchased a guitar, but you never got around to playing it. Now its taking up space in your apartmentand you could use a little cash. So, you decide to sell it. As luck would have it, your neighbor Maria is in the market for a used guitar. She asks how much you want for your instrument. Suppose you bought the guitar for $500. (Its acoustic.) No way you can charge Maria that much for a used item. It would be great to get $300, but that seems steep. So, you suggest $225 with the plan to settle for $200. When Maria hears your $225 price, she accepts instantly, then hands you your money. Are you feeling regret? Probably. Many people do, even more so in situations with stakes greater than the sale of a used guitar. When others accept our first offer without hesitation or pushback, we often kick ourselves for not asking for more.[2] However, acknowledging ones regrets in such situationsinviting, rather than repelling, this aversive emotioncan improve our decisions in the future. For example, in 2002, Adam Galinsky, now at Columbia University, and three other social psychologists studied negotiators whod had their first offer accepted. They asked these negotiators to rate how much better they could have done if only theyd made a higher offer. The more they regretted their decision, the more time they spent preparing for a subsequent negotiation.[3] A related study by Galinsky, University of California, Berkeleys, Laura Kray, and Ohio Universitys Keith Markman found that when people look back at previous negotiations and think about what they regretted not doingfor example, not extending a strong first offerthey made better decisions in later negotiations. Whats more, these regret-enhanced decisions spread the benefits widely. During their subsequent encounters, regretful negotiators expanded the size of the pie and secured themselves a larger slice. The very act of contemplating what they hadnt done previously widened the possibilities of what they could do next and provided a script for future interactions.[4]
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Create a failure rsum. Most of us have a rsuma written compendium of jobs, experiences, and credentials that demonstrate to prospective employers and clients how qualified, adept, and generally awesome we are. Tina Seelig, a professor of practice at Stanford University, says we also need a failure rsum, a detailed and thorough inventory of our flops. A failure rsum offers another method for addressing our regrets. The very act of creating one is a form of disclosure. And by eyeing your failure rsum not as its protagonist, but as an observer, you can learn from it without feeling diminished by your mistakes. A few years ago, I compiled a failure rsum, then tried to glean lessons from the many screwups Id committed. (Disclosing these embarrassments to myself will be sufficient, thank you very much.) I realized Id repeatedly made variations of the same two mistakes, and that knowledge has helped me avoid those mistakes again.
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3. Study self-compassion.
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But the truth is different. Youre much more likely to have a Silver Emma moment than a Bronze Borghini one. When researchers have tracked peoples thoughts by asking them to keep daily diaries or by pinging them randomly to ask whats on their mind, theyve discovered that If Onlys outnumber At Leasts in peoples livesoften by a wide margin.[7] One study found that 80 percent of the counterfactuals people generate are If Onlys.
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If our lives are the stories we tell ourselves, regret reminds us that we have a dual role. We are both the authors and the actors. We can shape the plot but not fully. We can toss aside the script but not always. We live at the intersection of free will and circumstance.
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Mentally subtract positive events. To take the hurt out of a regret, try a mental trick made famous in the 1946 movie Its a Wonderful Life. On Christmas Eve, George Bailey stands on the brink of suicide when hes visited by Clarence, an angel who shows George what life in Bedford Falls would be like had he never been born. Clarences technique is called mentally subtracting positive events.
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At the heart of all boldness regrets is the thwarted possibility of growth.
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Said a forty-eight-year-old Ohio man: I regret not being more adventurous... taking time to travel, explore, and experience more of what the world has to offer. I let the fear of disappointment rule me and allowed others expectations to be more important than my own. I was always the good soldier and worked hard to please those around me. I have a good lifeI just wish I had more experiences to share with others. Someday..
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Moral regrets make up the smallest of the four categories in the deep structure of regret, representing only about 10 percent of the total regrets. But for many of us, these regrets ache the most and last the longest. They are also more complex than the other core regrets.
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The most telling demonstration of this point came from several dozen people from all over the world who described their regrettheir failure to be boldwith the same five words: Not being true to myself.
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Take this fifty-three-year-old Californian: I regret not coming out as a gay man sooner. It definitely impacted how I showed up and my performance and connectedness with my colleagues.
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Moral regrets make up the smallest of the four categories in the deep structure of regret, representing only about 10 percent of the total regrets.
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Haidt and his colleagues call this idea moral foundations theory.[4] Drawing on evolutionary biology, cultural psychology, and several other fields, they show that beliefs about morality stand on five pillars: Care/harm: Children are more vulnerable than the offspring of other animals, so humans devote considerable time and effort to protecting them. As a result, evolution has instilled in us the ethic of care. Those who nurture and defend the vulnerable are kind; those who hurt them are cruel. Fairness/cheating: Our success as a species has always hinged on cooperation, including exchanges that evolutionary scientists call reciprocal altruism. That means we value those whom we can trust and disdain those who breach our trust. Loyalty/disloyalty: Our survival depends not only on our individual actions, but also on the cohesiveness of our group. Thats why being true to your team, sect, or nation is respectedand forsaking your tribe is usually reviled. Authority/subversion: Among primates, hierarchies nourish members and protect them from aggressors. Those who undermine the hierarchy can place everyone in the group at risk. When this evolutionary impulse extends to human morality, traits like deference and obedience toward those at the top become virtues.[5] Purity/desecration: Our ancestors had to contend with all manner of pathogensfrom Mycobacterium tuberculosis to Mycobacterium lepraeso their descendants developed the capacity to avoid them along with whats known as a behavioral immune system to guard against a broader set of impurities such as violations of chastity. In the moral realm, write one set of scholars, purity concerns uniquely predict (beyond other foundations and demographics such as political ideology) culture-war attitudes about gay marriage, euthanasia, abortion, and pornography.[6] Moral foundations theory doesnt say that care is more important than purity or that authority is more important than fairness or that you should follow one set of foundations instead of another. It simply catalogs how humans assess the morality of behavior. The theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. But its descriptive power is considerable. Not only did it reshape my understanding of both human reasoning and modern politics; it also offered an elegant way to interpret our moral regrets.
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THE FIVE REGRETTED SINS Deceit. Infidelity. Theft. Betrayal. Sacrilege.
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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.
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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.
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Regret is the quintessential upward counterfactualthe 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 worsebecause by making us feel worse today, regret helps us do better tomorrow.
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Self-compassion begins by replacing searing judgment with basic kindness.
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This is one of the central findings on regret: it can deepen persistence, which almost always elevates performance.
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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.
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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 didnt take than the chances we did.
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When we behave poorly, or compromise our belief in our own goodness, regret can build and then persist.
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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.
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While self-flagellation seems motivatingespecially to Americans, whose mental models of motivation often begin with howling, red-faced, vein-popping football coachesit often produces helplessness. Self-compassion, by contrast, prompts people to confront their difficulties head-on and take responsibility for them, researchers have found.
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If one person embodies this approach to work and lifethe apex predator of the anticipated regret food chainthat person is Jeff Bezos. Hes one of the richest people in the world, thanks to founding Amazon, one of the largest companies on the planet. He owns The Washington Post. He visits outer space. Yet in the domain of our most misunderstood emotion, he is best known for a concept that he calls the Regret Minimization Framework.
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Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, have found that asking people simply to act like an extrovert for one week appreciably increased their well-being.
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As the Harvard Gazette summarized in 2017: Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives.... Those ties protect people from lifes 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] Men whod 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. People with strong marriages suffered less physical pain and emotional distress over the course of their lives. Individuals close friendships were more accurate predictors of healthy aging than their cholesterol levels. Social support and connections to a community helped insulate people against disease and depression. Meanwhile, loneliness and disconnection, in some cases, were fatal.
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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 neednt drag us down; it can lift us up.
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framing regret as a judgment of our underlying characterwho we arecan be destructive.
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All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With boldness regrets, the human need is growthto expand as a person, to enjoy the richness of the world, to experience more than an ordinary life.
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At the heart of all boldness regrets is the thwarted possibility of growth. The failure to become the personhappier, braver, more evolvedone could have been. The failure to accomplish a few important goals within the limited span of a single life.
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Regrets in this subcategory werent limited to childhood malice. People described insulting work colleagues, ghosting romantic interests, and threatening neighbors. Most hurts were delivered with words, though a few were with fists. And for all the American associations of behavior like bullying, these regrets were international.
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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.
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Whats more, the regrets people expressed were less about renouncing the group than falling short of ones obligations to it.
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4. Subversion The fewest moral regrets involved the Authority/Subversion foundation. A handful of people regretted dishonoring my parents and being disrespectful to my teachers
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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.
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Desecration Regrets about violating sanctity were more numerous than regrets about subverting authority. These regrets were also emotionally intenseespecially when they centered on one of the most fiercely contested issues of the last sixty years: abortion.
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He regrets not having the experience of hardship and sacrifice, of depending on others for survival and of their relying on him. If youre serving someone, it means youre not serving yourself,
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A fifty-year-old woman in Arkansas said: I had an abortion at age twenty. That is the biggest regret of my life. My second-biggest regret is that I had another one at age twenty-five.
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