Ignoring Your Biggest Regrets
Regrets, people often feel, are to be avoided. Mistakes may be unavoidable, but they should be kept to a minimum. And when they do occur, the best course of action is to ignore them as inevitable steps on our journey. That seems logical, at least until you consider that one of the criteria for mental illness is an inability to feel regret. As author Kathryn Schulz argues, "If you want to be fully functional, and fully human, and fully humane, I think you need to learn to live not without regret, but with it." Counter-intuitively, she and other experts argue feeling regret is essential for living your best life. No one is saying, of course, that getting trapped in your past mistakes is a good idea. But neither is a "no regrets and never look back" mentality.
Regret forces us to engage in a reflective analysis to understand why we thought or acted the way we did and makes us try things differently in the future. If you keep telling yourself "no regrets," then learning isn't going to happen. Besides, hiding from regret doesn't make it hurt less.
Action, recent research shows, is the best way to make regret hurt less. So if you're troubled by your failure to travel when you were young, science suggests you consciously plan an adventurous trip now that you're older and wiser. Upset about a broken friendship? Act to try to repair it.
Acknowledging our mistakes, rather than ignoring them, reminds us that we are valuable and worthy despite our faults. That sort of acceptance is the basis both of real self-confidence and of true kindness. As Schulz sums up in her talk: "Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us we know we can do better."
