How to Cope With Regret

Regret is sorrow or disappointment over something we cannot change. We want a do-over, yet we must live with what has happened. Sometimes the pain of regret can haunt a person for a lifetime. Sorrow can interfere with accomplishing goals, connecting with others, or experiencing joy.

Regrets fall into two types:

1. Inaction: things we didn't do like finish college, start a business, or ask someone special out on a date.
2. Action: things we wish we wouldn't have done like drive drunk, cheat on a spouse, or mistreat a loved one.

Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, recorded the end-of-life regrets of her patients. She shaped those notes into her best-selling book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing. Here are the top five regrets she discovered:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish I had let myself be happier.

A client, I'll call Megan, came to my office after the death of her husband. Married for 32 years, they had 3 children together. Her husband died suddenly of heart failure. Megan expressed deep regret that she had ever married him. "I feel like I wasted my life catering to an angry man. He spent our entire marriage blaming everyone else, including me, for his unhappiness," she said.

"I feel like I wasn't the mother I could have been if my husband wasn't so mean," she said. "I would have loved to have had a happy home where we could have friends over. Any time we tried to have people over, he would ruin it. I should have left him, but I was too afraid."

Most enduring regrets stem from discrepancies between our real self (our actual behavior), our ought self (how we think we should act; responsibilities and morals), and our ideal self (what we aspire to be). People find it easier to recover from regret over failures of responsibilities and duties. Our longest regrets stem from the gap between our actual and ideal selves.

For Megan, she felt that her husband's anger issues held her back from her full potential in life. She graduated valedictorian, started her own business right out of high school, met her husband in college, and got pregnant. They married, and she put her achievement dreams on hold. "In the beginning, my husband wanted to help me in my business. After he alienated my best employee in a rage, I told him he couldn't work there anymore. He couldn't keep a job for more than a few months. I had to do it all," Megan said.

Megan valued commitment, hard work, and achievement. She lived up to her ought self values by remaining married, raising her children, and fulfilling work responsibilities. Yet her ideal self felt robbed of happiness and fulfillment.

In addition to deep regret, Megan suffered from anxiety. Her anxiety symptoms included insomnia, social avoidance, heart palpitations, gastrointestinal disorders, and a sense of impending doom. "I was never a nervous person," Megan said. "With my husband, I always had to be on guard. It hurt me. My sister married a good man, and she's so happy, relaxed, and healthy. It hurts to see how things could have been for me," she said.

Megan needed skills to help her move past regret and move on with her life. We began with an assessment of her immediate, present situation. Financially she had made good decisions. All three of her children had graduated from college, and her youngest had recently moved out of the house. She reported having a close and loving relationship with her children.

"I don't know what to do with myself now. I lived on a treadmill of obligations for decades," Megan said. I asked her to imagine an ideal future. Her face softened into a peaceful smile. "I live near the beach and take long walks on the ocean with friends. My home is a gathering place full of laughter. I host a book club every month," she beamed.

Five Steps to Healing

Eventually, Megan moved past regret by taking the following five steps.

1. Be your own best friend: Listen to self-compassion meditations, talk to yourself with kindness, let go of judgment. Megan learned to treat herself with the loving attention she gave to others. That helped her relax a bit.
2. Acceptance: When we accept life's difficult experiences and events, we stop fighting them and start coping better. Research shows that self-compassion helps us move past regret by helping us face reality. Acceptance reduces anxiety and regret (Zhang and Chen, 2016).
3. Remember joy: Rather than dwelling only on regret; it helps to remember good times too. Take time to reflect on victories, happy relationships, joyful occasions in your life. Megan began to see her life in a more honest, balanced way when she spotlighted the happier times of her life.
4. Compare yourself to those less fortunate: We can feel better about our life circumstances if we compare ourselves to those who've experienced worse. Megan learned to suffer less when she stopped comparing herself to her sister but remembered friends in more difficult circumstances. Research shows that downward social comparison can help us engage with goals and move past regret (Bauer and Wrosch, 2011).
5. Set meaningful goals: When we work toward something that matters, we leave regret behind. Absorbed in working toward a goal, we ruminate less and see progress. Megan started to dream of a happier future.

When you treat yourself like a best friend, accept things as they are, remember the joyful times, compare yourself to those less fortunate, and work toward meaningful goals, your perspective changes. When you change your perspective, your feelings will follow.