machado: regrets, have you had a few? perhaps too many to mention?
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what we feel bad about can help us live better and perhaps make decisions in the future that don't leave us regretful. getty
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“regret is my prison.”
this was what a woman who lives a few houses down said to me after her sister passed away. she had been sick for a few years — cancer — and the woman said she felt haunted by the things she wished she had done. she should have insisted that she see a doctor sooner, she said. and stood her ground when her sister decided to forgo treatment because it made her sick. plus, she never believed that the herbs her sister said would shrink the growing tumour on her esophagus would work, and told her so.
still, she bought a bag of the stinky green bits every saturday morning from a stooped man who worked out of a wooden stand with wheels in toronto’s chinatown. when her sister visited, she would steep the dried leaves in their mother’s old blue teapot, leaving a mug full of the brown liquid beside the recliner where her sister liked to sit, always suggesting that she call her doctor — which would start an argument. when her sister became too ill to travel, and more obsessed with treating her disease with alternative remedies, the woman didn’t visit. she didn’t even call, she said, though she wanted to. then her sister’s neighbour phoned one day to say she had died alone.
there’s not much you can say to someone weighed down by regret
there’s not much you can say to someone weighed down by regret — especially the big kind — but you can listen and empathize. that extra piece of chocolate cake, a missed opportunity to say something brilliant in a meeting, those are things that can be laughed off, the superficial sting fading over time. it’s the other stuff — the last words never spoken, not trying hard enough with a true love, being too scared to do that thing that you always wanted to do — that can, well, take you down.
i am sure — i hope — that deep down, my neighbour knows that there was nothing she could have done to change the outcome. that, while she disagreed with how her sister decided to treat her disease, she had given her small gifts of support and love, like buying and serving the tea she wanted despite her opinions. perhaps she would know this someday, and forgive herself, but not now, because her grief is just too thick and intoxicating for her to see it just yet. she said that sometimes all she can think about is regret.
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and the thing is, it’s a feeling that’s almost impossible to avoid. we come face-to-face with potential regret every day: every time we have to make a choice — latte or tea? variable or fixed? cardigan-wearing jack or the tattooed guy on the motorcycle? — there’s always the risk that in the end, we will feel the soul-sucking emptiness of a missed opportunity, either big or small.
it sounds awful.
but bestselling author daniel h. pink has another perspective. the author of the power of regret, actually likes regrets — the more, the better — because he believes they are powerful, that they can help us move forward and find greater meaning in our lives.
pink, who in a recent interview with behavioural scientist called regret “cognitively complex,” defines the negative emotion as one “that’s triggered when we think of something from our past and wish we had done something differently, done something in a different way, not done something, taken an action, not taken an action.” he also notes that it’s an emotion that requires “mental time travel.”
“you have to get in a time machine in your head and travel back to the past,” he told behavioural scientist. “then you have to imagine the counterfactual to what really happened, and then get back in your time machine, come back to present day, and see the present day reconfigured because of the decision you made.”
when put that way, regret seems a bit pointless — and so exhausting.
so why, if at the core of regret is us imagining a pseudo outcome based on what we can only hope and wish would have happened, do we allow it to take up so much space in our minds?
pink says he became interested in studying regret after noticing that when he shared the things he regretted, other people leaned in, eager to share theirs and the feelings that came along with them. he launched the world regret survey in 2020, which so far, has collected 23,000 regrets from people in 109 countries, to see if he could identify patterns to help people move forward while feeling regret, despite the turmoil. (he’s still taking regrets if you want to add yours.)
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what he found was that the things people regret most have to do with relationships, specifically, failing to maintain them — what he classifies as “connection regret.” and though he also identified three other “core regrets” — foundation regrets (a failure to be responsible), boldness regrets (a failure to take chances) and moral regrets (a failure to do the right thing) — ignoring that nagging feeling to reconnect faded relationships is by far the one causing us the most discomfort and taking up the most emotional energy.
it’s an observation that has led pink to conclude that just three words can save most of us at least some of the pain of regret: always reach out.
“i’m not somebody who’s been super good about reaching out,” pink says of himself. “now my own mode as a human being is that if i’m at a juncture where i’m saying, ‘should i reach out or should i not reach out?’ i know the answer.”
you know that old friend you keep thinking about? just reach out
interestingly, not reaching out also made it onto the list of regrets that bronnie ware, an australian palliative care nurse, collected from her dying patients. ware, who wrote the top five regrets of the dying, told the guardian that many of her patients begin to recognize how valuable their friends were as they face death.
“many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years,” she said. “there were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. everyone misses their friends when they are dying.”
her patients had other regrets too, like wishing that they had worked less and spent more time with family, that they had the courage to express their feelings, and that, instead of choosing what was comfortable, that they would have embraced the change that would have made them happier. but what caused the most anguish were unfulfilled dreams.
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“most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made,” said ware. “health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it.”
but according to pink, there are ways to avoid deathbed regrets — or at least shorten the list. first, we need to reframe the way we think of what we regret. instead of focusing on the thing that we did or didn’t do, he suggests we consider regrets as “photographic negatives” of what a good life would look like to us. that is, understand that what we feel bad about tells us what we value most — it’s information that can help us live better and perhaps make decisions in the future that don’t leave us regretful.
so what do we do now in this moment with our burning regrets? pink outlines a three-step process in his book to help us harness the pain of regret for good. the first is self-disclosure — either writing down, or telling others about, the thing you regret, which, he says, helps to lighten its weight.
the second step is self-compassion, a concept that comes from research by a university of texas psychologist named kristin neff who recognized that humans are often a lot harder on themselves when they make a mistake than they would be to a friend, or even a stranger. so instead of scolding ourselves, pink suggests treating ourselves with the same kindness and forgiveness that we would a friend, which not only takes the edge off of regret, but also helps us realize that we aren’t alone in experiencing it.
self-distancing — putting distance between us and what we regret using space, time and language — is the third step. space, according to pink, is removing ourselves from the situation and trying to see the regret from a neutral observer point of view. using time, we look ahead to the future and consider whether or not what we regret would still feel as painful. finally, recounting regrets to ourselves using second-person language is a way to replace distress with meaning.
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and though i am all for lightening the load of regret, what seems to be missing among his solutions for shifting regret from a negative thing to a life improvement tool is recovery. his steps to move forward from regret seem palatable if one was obsessed with the road less taken, or choosing the wrong life partner, but what about those dealing with traumatic regret? check out some of the regrets in this 2017 story from the guardian, which include someone whose mother passed away as soon as she left to go home, survivors of abuse who didn’t tell anyone, especially when they could have protected a sibling, and the daughter who regretted not calling her dad the night before he had a fatal heart attack. add the woman down the street who didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to her sister. these are the things that keep you up at night. truly.
then again, pink’s advice about being gentle and forgiving with ourselves, as we would with a friend, certainly is critical. as is reminding ourselves of his time travel analogy. when we feel regret, we are going back into the past, imagining that we made a different decision and then envisioning how much better the outcome would have been. except that, in many cases, this alternate ending is nothing more than our own fabrication, our best guess, our hope and our wish — who knows how things really would have turned out? and yet, we torture ourselves with the ‘what-ifs.’
i sent a note to pink asking for advice on moving past the giant regrets — the ones take your breath away and bring tears to your eyes. in the meantime, in these first few days of 2023, if you find yourself slipping into reminiscing mode, hopefully you can use some of his suggestions to welcome the new year powered by regret, instead of hindered by it. and if by any chance, you have been wondering about a long-lost/estranged/ex peep, why not reach out? at least then you can strike one regret off of your list.
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lisa machado is the executive producer of healthing.ca. follow her @iamlisamachado.
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