How to Prevent Regret from Ruining Your Life

Is "No regrets" an amazing motto for life? Probably not. Regret is a natural response to making mistakes. If you genuinely had no regrets, you'd never learn from experience. It wouldn't matter to you whether you caused problems for your future self or hurt other people. At the other extreme, some people are paralyzed by regret. Instead of learning from their mistakes, they are unable to move on from them. If you feel that your past mistakes are holding you back, it's easy to see why "No regrets" sounds so attractive. But you can't live without any regrets; you need to find a way to use them, to learn from them and to move on.

Regret is only possible because of what psychologists call "counterfactual thinking." This is the human ability to think about something that's already happened and to imagine that it had been different. Suppose that you have an argument with your partner. You start shouting and you storm out of the house. Later, when you're calm, you replay in your mind what you did. Only this time you picture what might have happened if you'd suggested taking time out instead of starting to yell. This ability to imagine the past differently, or to think, "If only..." is what enables you to learn from experience.

Counterfactual thinking is a powerful tool for learning, but it doesn't work unless you can look at two (or more) options and decide that one of them is better. When you realize that the decision you made is not as good as the one you're imagining, you feel unhappy and uncomfortable. This is regret, and it's a powerful feeling. It has to be powerful because the purpose of regret is to make you feel so bad about what you did that you wish you'd done something different. It's a feeling so strong that it makes you want to change the past.

Of course, you can't change what's already happened, so you're stuck with the discomfort of regret. Some people are unable to live with this feeling, so they deny that there's a problem. They declare that it's all the other person's fault, that they've done nothing wrong, or that they never wanted that relationship in the first place. These are all common ways of avoiding regret and are often a sign that a person's self-image is so fragile that imagining they could have been wrong is too much for them to bear.

Another possibility is that you continue to feel regret, and it becomes part of your identity. You start to think of yourself as someone who makes mistakes, someone who hurts other people, or someone who doesn't have the skills to maintain a relationship. Your future becomes entirely defined by your past. This is especially common in situations where it's not possible to make up for whatever harm was caused, for example, if someone has died or if a relationship has broken down entirely.

The best use of regret is to adopt what's known as an "action-oriented" approach. While someone who just keeps on living with the sense of regret is described as "state-oriented," an action-oriented person sees the mistakes of the past as instructions for what to do differently in the future. 

You feel the pain of regret, but you believe that you don't need to keep on feeling that way. You use your ability to think counterfactually, and you imagine what could have been different. You then use this imagined past to make a plan for the future. The plan might be that you seek some professional help, or that you ask for support from your friends, or that you will learn relaxation techniques or do some exercise or drink less alcohol. The plan that you make will depend on your unique circumstances. But an action-oriented approach means that you take responsibility for your own mistakes and you build a better future on your desire not to go through regret again.

This approach means that you don't deny your mistakes or try to blame everyone else. You admit that you did something wrong and you feel regret. But it also means that you don't stay in that place of regret forever. Once you've made changes, you can move on. If you naturally tend to be more state-oriented than action-oriented, you might find yourself thinking, "I'm such a bad person because of the harm that I caused in the past." If you realize you're thinking that way, you need to remind yourself that yes, you did cause harm in the past, but you've made changes to yourself and the way you live your life, and you're no longer the same person. Your feeling of regret has done its job: you've learned from it, and now you can let it go.

It's virtually impossible (and extremely unhealthy) to live without any regrets. Regret is a natural response to having made a mistake; it's such an uncomfortable feeling that it drives you to change. Don't avoid regret by blaming everyone else; don't live forever with a sense of regret that never sparks change. Instead, take your regrets and use them to make changes to yourself so that you can have a better future.

Jocelyn Aleiadih, LCSW

www.yourlifepathcenter.com