The powerful emotion that helps us make better decisions

It looks like a scene from an epic romance.

In 1981, a young American named Bruce was traveling through northern France when a pretty brunette named Sandra boarded his train in Paris and sat next to him.

The conversation came easily, and soon they were laughing and holding hands.

When they arrived at Sandra’s destination, a station in Belgium, they kissed and, on impulse, Bruce considered jumping off the train with her to see where life would take him . Instead, he quickly wrote his name and his parents’ address on a piece of paper.

Almost as soon as the doors closed, Bruce regretted not following his instinct. After his return to the United States, he received a letter from Sandra.

“It may be crazy, but when I think of you, I smile,” it said, but mysteriously, it did not contain the sender’s address.

In the decades since that encounter, Bruce never stopped wondering what might have happened if he had gotten off the train.

Key role

The anecdote is just one of 16,000 stories that author Daniel Pink collected in his World Regret Survey .

By analyzing this data and drawing on the latest scientific experiments, Pink has been able to identify four different types of regret and the types of events that are most likely to lead to each of them.

This research, described in Pink’s new book, The Power of Regret , helps us understand the crucial role regret plays in our lives, from helping us cultivate friendships and make responsible decisions to weighing risks.

It also highlights what kind of repentance is deepest and suggests many ways to make peace with our own disappointments and mistakes.

Je ne regrette rien (I don’t regret anything)

Like many negative emotions, regret is often viewed as a purely undesirable feeling , one we should muzzle whenever possible.

Consider Edith Piaf’s most famous song, or the many other artists, from Emmylou Harris to Robbie Williams, who have sung about the philosophy of living “without regrets.”

Psychologists, however, have shown that it can be an eminently useful emotion. “I think it would be a very, very bad idea to eliminate regrets from your life,” says Aidan Feeney, a psychology professor at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

“It’s a mechanism to learn how to improve your decision making, a sign that you may need to rethink your strategy.”

Regret is a complex emotion, as it involves counterfactual thinking, he notes. It requires the ability to imagine alternative options for events that have already happened and the ability to compare and contrast those different outcomes to determine which one you would have preferred.

Because of this complexity, young children are often incapable of feeling regret and the emotion tends to emerge around age six or seven .

Feeney’s own research has shown how emotion is essential to developing an understanding of delayed gratification: our ability to put off a small reward now in order to get a bigger reward later.

Experiment

Working with Teresa McCormack, Aidan Feeney presented two boxes to a group of 6- to 7-year-olds. The boxes were equipped with a timer lock, with one set to open after 30 seconds and the other after 10 minutes.

Sand timers placed next to each box showed children how long they would have to wait for it to unlock . They were told that they could choose to pick a box to win their prize.

This task was a little unfair, as the children did not know what was in each box, so most of them opted for the one that was opened first, which contained two sweets. Only after they had made their choice were they told that if they had waited for the other box to be opened, they could have had four sweets instead, doubling their prize.

After the children learned this, the team tested whether they felt any remorse for having made the wrong decision. The next day, the psychologists presented the children with the same task again.

They found that those who had developed a sense of regret were much more likely to expect the larger reward, compared to children who did not yet harbor the emotion.

Regret, it seems, helped them become more patient in order to master the temptation to go for immediate pleasure. Delayed gratification of this kind is an essential form of self-control and is thought to be very important for people’s success in life.

If you can put off the pleasure of playing a computer game in order to study for exams, for example, you are more likely to get a place at a good university, which in turn will lead to more stable finances for the future.

Repentance, the great “teacher”

The psychological literature abounds with many other examples of the benefits of regret . Regret over a bad business negotiation helps people ensure they get better deals in the future, for example.

And if we make a decision hastily, the feeling of regret ensures that we consider a wider range of information in the future.

Such findings should help us reframe emotion in a more positive way, Pink says.

“We should view repentance as a teacher, trying to tell us something important .”

The Four Flavors of Regret

The central role of regret in our cognition may explain why so many people experience it so frequently. Pink speaks in particular of a 1984 study, which examined the conversations of married couples and college students.

Within these recordings, regret was the second most discussed emotion after love. The finding fits with one of Pink’s own questionnaires, which asked how often people experience regret. About 20% of respondents claimed to feel the emotion “all the time.”

In analyzing the specifics of her Global Regret Survey, Pink found that most people’s biggest regrets fall into one of four different camps:

“These four [kinds of] regrets are expressed over and over again all over the world,” Pink says.

How to avoid future regrets

Interestingly, regrets about connections turned out to be the most common experience in Pink’s survey. In her opinion, we should always reconnect when we feel a distance is building.

“If you’re wondering whether or not to reach out to someone, just being at that crossroads answers the question,” she says. “That, for me personally, has been the biggest lesson from this.”

Similarly, the prevalence of regrets about lack of boldness shows us the danger of being too fearful of taking risks ; sometimes it is okay to be impulsive.

That doesn’t mean we should actively embrace danger on a whim, but in many cases “people see more danger than actually exists,” Pink says.

This can be particularly true in cases where shyness prevents us from pursuing a once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity or approaching a potential love interest. We may hope to escape disappointment or embarrassment, but in exchange, we’ll forever be left wondering “what if…?”

A general strategy to avoid future regret is to deliberately imagine the worst potential outcomes before making a decision, Pink suggests.

This technique could be particularly useful in avoiding moral and foundational regrets when you do not act in a way that respects your values ​​and preserves your future health and happiness.

…and how to deal with the regrets you have

Pink’s research also offers us ways to cope with regrets we already have. Given their benefits, we certainly don’t want to suppress the feeling entirely, but certain strategies can help us regulate this emotion , so that we hear its message without wallowing in the sadness of our past mistakes.

Pink explains that the first step is disclosure. When we suppress painful feelings, they can get worse, but talking about the situation helps us look at it more analytically.

If you don’t feel like sharing your regret with another human being, research shows that writing a private essay can be just as productive. Putting emotion into words seems to help us process our feelings more constructively.

Second, you can practice self-compassion , rather than falling into toxic self-criticism. To do so, you must stop punishing yourself with statements like “I’m a loser” that frame your mistake as a sign of an innate, irreparable flaw.

Instead, you can try to identify the contextual factors that might have pushed you to make the wrong decision and remember that you are not alone in your pain.

“Sometimes we think our experience is more unique than it really is ; you might think you’re the only person who has regrets,” Pink says. “But trust me, you’re not that special.”

Research by Kristin Neff, an associate professor at the University of Texas, Austin, shows that people who cultivate self-compassion tend to recover from stress and sadness more quickly and, importantly, are also more likely to change their behavior in the future compared to self-critical people, so as not to make the same mistakes twice.

In other words, once you’ve acknowledged your mistake, it’s more than okay to take a break.

Finally, Pink advocates a psychological strategy known as self-distancing , in which you try to take some kind of outside perspective on your problems.

You might imagine yourself counseling a friend with a similar problem, for example. Several studies have shown that, like practicing self-compassion, this can help us view our situation more philosophically without our thinking being overwhelmed by emotion.

It may never be too late to start healing. For her book, Pink interviewed some of the survey participants. Through these conversations, she learned that some are now trying to make up for past betrayals, while others have suddenly decided to reach out to lost friends.

It seems that the survey helped them to accept their feelings and prompted them to take action.

Bruce, for one, is trying to make peace with his biggest regret. More than 40 years since he and Sandra lost touch, he recently posted a message on the “missed connections” section of Craigslist Paris, hoping they can finally see each other again.

He cannot change the past, but, having come to terms with his regret, he can try to make up for all the lost time.