Regret is often considered undesirable, but it is a vital emotion that helps us grow. How can we harness its powerful lessons?
It sounds like a scene from a great romantic story.
In 1981, while a young American named Bruce was traveling on a train in northern France, a beautiful brunette named Sandra boarded the train in Paris and sat next to him. The conversation came easily, and they quickly laughed and held hands.
When they reached her destination—a station in Belgium—they kissed, and Bruce impulsively considered jumping off the train with her to see where life would take him. Instead, he quickly wrote down his name and the addresses of his parents on a piece of paper.
Almost the moment the door closed, Bruce regretted not going on instinct. After returning to the United States, he received a letter from Sandra. "Maybe it's crazy, but when I think of you, I'm smiling," it said, but mysteriously, there was no reply address. In the decades since that encounter, Bruce has never stopped thinking about what would happen if he stepped down.
This anecdote is just one of 16,000 accounts collected by author Daniel Pink in his World Regret Survey. By analyzing this data and utilizing the latest scientific experiments, Pink has been able to identify four different types of regrets and the types of events that are most likely to lead to each.
Pink's new book, The Power of Regret, outlines the study, which helps us understand the key role regret plays in our lives, from fostering friendships and making responsible decisions to weighing risks. It also highlights which regrets are the deepest and suggests that we live in peace with our disappointments and mistakes through many ways.
Like many negative emotions, regret is often seen as a feeling of pure unwelcome welcome – a feeling we should eliminate as much as possible. Just think of Edith Piaf's most famous songs, or many other artists — from Emmylou Harris to Robbie Williams — who sang the philosophy of living a "regretless" life.
However, psychologists have shown that it can be a very useful emotion. "I think it would be a very, very bad idea to eliminate regrets in life," said Aidan Feeney, a professor of psychology at Queen's University Belfast. "It's a mechanism for learning how to improve decision-making — a signal that maybe you need to rethink your strategy."
Regret, he notes, is a complex emotion because it involves counterfactual thinking. It requires the ability to imagine alternative courses for events that have already occurred and the ability to compare and contrast these different results to determine which one you prefer. Because of this complexity, young children often can't feel regret, and this emotion tends to arise around the age of six or seven.
Feeney's own research has tested that emotions are essential for understanding delayed gratification — and we now postpone the ability to get a small reward for a larger reward. He teamed up with Teresa McCormack to give away two boxes to a group of six- to seven-year-olds. The boxes are equipped with timer locks, one opens after 30 seconds and the other after 10 minutes. (The sand timer placed next to each box shows the kids how long they have to wait to unlock it.) Children are told they can choose a box to receive a prize.
The task is a bit unfair because the kids don't know what's in each box, which means that most people choose the box that opens first, which contains two candies. Only after they had made their decision were they told that they could have had four candies if they had waited for another box to open – doubling their prize.
After the children learned of this fact, the team tested whether they regretted making the wrong decision. The next day, the psychologist again presented the same task to the children. They found that children who had already developed feelings of regret were more likely to wait for greater rewards than children who had not yet accepted the emotion.
Regret seems to help them become more patient so that they can subdue temptation and enjoy the pleasures of the moment. This delayed gratification is a basic form of self-control that is considered very important for people's success in life. For example, if you can postpone the fun of playing computer games to study exams, you are more likely to get a place at a good university, which in turn will lead to a more stable financial situation in the future.
About 20 percent of respondents said they "always" regretted it
There are many other examples in the psychology literature of the benefits of regret. For example, regretting bad business negotiations helps people get better deals in the future. If we rush to make a decision, the feeling of regret ensures that we consider broader messages in the future.
These findings should help us reconstruct emotions more aggressively, Pink said. "As teachers, we should see regrets and try to tell us something important.
The basic role of regret in our cognition may explain why so many people experience it so often. Pink pointed to a 1984 study that looked at conversations between undergraduates and married couples. In these recordings, regret is the second most discussed emotion after love. The findings are in line with one of Pink's own questionnaires, which asked how often people experience regret. About 20 percent of respondents claimed to have "always" felt this emotion.
Pinker analyzed the specifics of his World Regret Survey and found that most people's biggest regrets fall into one of four different camps:
The Foundation's regret revolves around the failure to take responsibility, which betrays our need for stability. This will include regrets about truancy, overspending or neglecting health – bad habits that have negative long-term consequences for life.
Bold regret comes from over-caution. As Bruce discovered on the train traversing France and Belgium, we are sometimes faced with potentially life-changing opportunities.
Moral regrets are concentrated on other people, and we hurt them through our own failures. Cheating on a partner is one of the most obvious and common examples.
Contact regret involves losing relationships with family, friends, or co-workers, often due to simple neglect.
"These four categories of regret are expressed over and over again around the globe," Pink said.
Interestingly, connection regret proved to be the most common experience in pink surveys. In his view, when we feel that distance is being established, we should always reconnect. "If you're wondering if you're going to contact someone — it's just that the question has been answered at that critical moment," he said. "For me personally, that's the biggest lesson.
Similarly, the prevalence of bold regret shows us the dangers of being too risk-averse; Sometimes the impulse is right. That doesn't mean we should actively embrace danger on a whim — but in many cases, "people see more danger than they actually do," Pink said. This is especially true for situations where shyness or timidity prevents us from seeking a once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity or approaching a potential interest in love. We may want to escape disappointment or embarrassment, but in return we will always wonder "what if?"
Pink suggests that a strategy to avoid future regrets is to use "pre-event analysis" – you deliberately imagine the worst potential outcome before making a decision. This technique is especially useful for avoiding moral and foundational regrets when you fail to act in a way that respects your values and keeps your future health and well-being.
Pink's research also provides us with a way to deal with the regrets we already have. Given its benefits, we certainly don't want to suppress this feeling completely, but certain strategies can help us regulate our emotions so that we can listen to its message without indulging in the sadness of past mistakes.
Pink says the first step is disclosure. They worsen when we seal up painful feelings, but talking through situations helps us look at it more analytically. If you don't want to share your regrets with another person, research shows that writing a private article can be just as productive. It puts emotions into words and seems to help us deal with our feelings more constructively.
Second, you can practice self-compassion instead of falling into toxic self-criticism. To do this, you should stop beating yourself up with statements like "I'm a loser," which define your mistakes as signs of a congenital, irreparable flaw. Instead, you can try to identify the contextual factors that may have prompted you to make the wrong decisions, and remember that you're not alone. "Sometimes we think that our experience is more unique than it really is. You might think you're the only one who's ever had that regret," Pink said. "But believe me, you're not that special.
Sometimes we think our experience is more unique than it really is... But believe me, you're not that special — Daniel Pinker
In the study of Kristin Neff, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, people who cultivate self-compassion tend to recover more quickly from stress and grief, and crucially, they are more likely than those who are self-critical to change their behavior in the future, so they don't make the same mistake twice. In other words, once you recognize your mistakes, it's okay to reduce your slack.
Finally, Pink advocates a psychological strategy called self-alienation — in which you try to take some sort of external view of your problem. For example, you might imagine giving advice to a friend with a similar problem. Repeated studies have shown that, like the practice of self-compassion, this can help us look at our situation more philosophically without flooding our minds with emotions.
It may never be too late to start healing. In his book, Pink interviews some of the participants in the World Regret Survey. Through these conversations, he had heard that some people were now trying to make up for past betrayals, while others had suddenly decided to get in touch with lost friends. The survey seems to help them accept their feelings and prompt them to take action.