Feelings of Regret: They Help You Grow

"Forgive and forget" has always struck me as half-right. Forgiving someone is a smart move. It's the forgetting part that gives me pause. Releasing the sting of something that hurt you makes sense, but wiping the memory clean can stall the growth you'd otherwise get from it. So sit with your own regrets for a second. Pick one if that helps. Regret tends to split into two shapes: either you wish you'd acted, or you wish you hadn't. Which one fits yours?

Now ask why the feeling sticks around. Embarrassment, maybe. Anger. Guilt. Sometimes it's grief over a relationship that fell apart because of a few careless words. Sometimes it's the ache of never saying what you meant to someone before they were gone. Whatever emotion rides along with it, the regret has already handed you something useful: a clear sense of what you'd do differently.

Regret is built into the brain. It's the mechanism that lets us connect what we did, or failed to do, with what followed. The idea sounds elaborate, but the wiring behind it is fairly old and simple. Guilt, shame, fury, and the rest of the unpleasant crowd show up precisely because the brain is trying to keep us from repeating whatever triggered them. Call it conscience. It runs mostly below awareness, and people with psychopathic traits may not register it at all. The capacity to look back and reconsider is part of what sets us apart.

Those emotions are a signal that something went sideways. They can hit immediately, or creep in slowly as we notice our lives drifting off course. The discomfort is how we come to grasp consequence, and memory lets us tag certain behaviors with the outcomes they produced.

Children under seven don't appear to feel regret at all. That tells us something about how the trait develops. A lot of our worst decisions land in adolescence and the early twenties, and it takes repeated run-ins with cause and effect before growth starts to take hold. The whole thing is learned, which is exactly why it matters.

The catch is that the brain is far better at generating the painful emotions than at putting them down. It never stops trying to make sense of its surroundings, and part of that work involves running alternate versions of events. When we slip up, through action or inaction, the mind keeps rehearsing a different path that would have led somewhere better. That rehearsal can curdle into obsession. We start picking apart details that are long past changing, and the regret grows like a weed nobody pulled, crowding out any real forward movement.

Neal Roese, a marketing professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, studies how people decide and how they feel about where those decisions land them. With his colleagues he has tracked the regrets people report most often. The categories that top the list: education, romance, parenting, and career. One of their findings is that Americans, on average, feel regret more frequently than you might expect. The pattern suggests that the more options a person has, the more those options churn in the mind. In the United States, schooling and work come with a wide menu of choices. Even who we partner with and how we raise children is largely left to us, within the bounds of what society tolerates.

In a culture this competitive and this focused on money, that abundance has a dark side. Regret can tip into depression and anxiety. Constant worry can wreck sleep, scatter focus, and eventually show up as physical illness. Roese's point isn't that we should hand our lives over to regret, but that we shouldn't ignore its usefulness either. Handled well, it can point us the right way.

The reason to hold onto a regret is to mine it for a lesson, not to marinate in it. You don't have to stew over what you did or didn't do. You can move past the disappointment and come out further along.

One approach is to put the regret in proportion. Borrow someone else's situation as a yardstick. It feels harsh to say, but if you regret never finishing a college degree, measuring that against a person who can't pursue one at all because of a traumatic brain injury tends to reset your sense of scale. That same comparison should leave you feeling lucky to even have the option, which is a quiet nudge to go use it. Think, too, about how differently things could have run. What if you'd told that person you loved them? What if you'd taken the other job, or stayed in your hometown instead of leaving? Wishing is easy. Then look hard at where you actually are. What's worth being grateful for? How did one choice open a door you're now glad you walked through? The threads link up.

Another approach: act on the inaction. If the thing you regret can still be done, finish the degree, switch careers, make amends, then do it. There's rarely an expiration date on that. Saying you're sorry is a fine place to begin.

Then there's owning your faults. If a regret traces back to something you did, that means you did something you shouldn't have, and you have to claim it. Growth doesn't happen while you're still dodging the admission. Once you've accepted it privately, say it out loud to the people involved. Apologize for the damage, commit to doing better (this carries extra weight in parenting and in marriage), and talk about what you've been through. Your regrets can double as a warning or a guide for someone else.

And some regrets are simply ready to be released. If you're in a car accident and someone gets hurt, it's entirely possible nothing within your control would have changed it. Emotions are stubborn, but once you recognize there was nothing to be done, or that you're genuinely glad your life turned out as it did, you can start letting go. If the anxiety, sadness, or guilt turns crippling, that's the moment to bring in professional help. Cognitive behavioral therapy, which works by helping people change how they act, is one of the stronger tools for releasing old injuries. Journaling, talk therapy, and group counseling are out there too, all of them ways to start forgiving yourself.

Melissa Lavery, M.S.