Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Make Mistakes Your Superpower | Daniel Pink #386

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

What do you regret in your life? Are there things you wish you’d done – or not done? Society tells us not to look back and instead to focus on the positive, but could sitting with the discomfort of a regret allow us to grow? Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today's clip is from episode 248 of the podcast with author and expert in human behaviour, Daniel Pink.   Dan asserts that regret is a misunderstood and useful emotion that, when used correctly, can help us lead happier and more fulfilled lives. In this clip, he explains how to make mistakes your superpower. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/248 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. 

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 248 of the podcast with author and expert in human behaviour, Daniel Pink. Dan asserts that regret is a misunderstood and useful emotion that when used correctly can help us lead happier and more fulfilled lives. In this clip, he explains how to make mistakes your superpower. I wanted to start off with this quote by Bob Dylan,

I don't believe in regrets. You don't agree with Bob, do you? Far be it for me to disagree with a Nobel Prize winner, but scientists have been studying this emotion for 60 years and over 60 years. And what they have determined is something that is very important to note at the top here, which is that everybody has regrets. Everybody has regrets. They're part of the human condition. The thing is, is that regret feels bad. And so there's a puzzle here, which is that you have this emotion that everybody has. It's arguably the most common negative emotion that we experience. One of the most common emotions of any kind that we experience. it's arguably the most common negative emotion that we experience, one of the most common emotions of any kind that we experience. It's ubiquitous, and yet it's painful. So what's the point? What's going on here? And the point is obvious if you think about

evolution, if you think about survival. It's that it's useful. It helps us if we treat it right. The problem is, is that we don't treat it right. We have this absurd philosophy that we should never have regrets. We should never look philosophy that we should never have regrets. We should never look backward. We should always be positive. And that's just profoundly wrong. It's unscientific and it's not an effective blueprint for living. So, sorry, Bob, but you missed this one.

This world regret survey that you conducted, I love the way you came up with these core categories of regrets because on the surface, a lot of these regrets can seem quite different. Yes. So I wonder if you could share some of your learnings. Sure. So I initially started wondering what people regret. And the academic research showed that people regret a lot of different things. We have career regrets and education regrets and romance regrets. Then in my own quantitative survey, I

asked that same question and found the same thing. People's regrets were all over the place. So it's kind of stymied. It's like, what's going on here? But what I realized in reading through thousands upon thousands upon thousands of these regrets is that the domain of life mattered less than what was going on one layer down. Domain of life meaning this is a regret about my career. This is a regret about my education. This is a regret about finances. This is a regret about health. This is a regret about romance, family. And you started hearing the same language, hearing sometimes identical language, Hearing sometimes identical language, language like taking the chance, speaking up, not confident, believe it or not, introverted, those kinds of things as examples. And it didn't matter what aspect of people's lives they were discussing those things.

And that language kept coming up over and over again. So I have plenty of regrets from people who it's quite amazing to me. A lot of regrets of people who didn't travel at some point in their lives. They went to university and had a chance to study abroad, but they didn't do that. And that's a surprising number of people. Or I had a chance early in my life to travel, but I was too scared to go do a gap year. I was too scared to get on a train. I was too scared to fly.

And I didn't do that. And now I regret it. Okay. So that's the thing about that. It's an education regret. Then I have lots of regrets in the career realm about not starting a business. This is a very big regret that people have. Huge. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I didn't have the guts to do it. I always wanted to go out on my own, but I didn't do it.

If I had gone out on my own, I might not be stuck in this terrible job. That's a career regret. Then I have lots of regrets about romance that are essentially people wanted to ask out somebody on a date and they never did. And it bothers them 10, 20, 30 years later. Okay. So that's a romance regret, but all those regrets are the same. All three of those regrets are the same, even though they're in different domains of life. It's a regret that says, if only I had taken the chance, you're at a juncture in your life. And a lot of these regrets begin at a juncture. You're at a juncture in your life. You can play it safe or you can take the chance. And when people don't take the chance, not every time, but way more often than I would have

expected, they regret it. And it bothers them for years and years and years and years. So that's one category of boldness regrets. What I hear there is this idea that we regret more what we didn't do than what we did do. Is that what the research shows as well? That is an overwhelming conclusion of the research. And by the time we're in our 40s and 50s, inaction regrets are double the action regrets. What sticks with us are things we didn't do. Big time. I'd be surprised if there's anyone listening at this very moment can't think back to some aspects of their life where they wonder what would have happened had I made that different decision.

Yeah. And what's interesting about that is that it's not only about the outcomes. It's also just about actually doing something. What they're saying is that I had a chance in my life to step up and do something and I blew it. It wasn't so much about the outcome. It was about the act itself. It was about having a moment in your life when you could do something and you didn't. That's what really sticks with people. The way we get regret wrong is that we think of regret as something that's meaningless, something that we should ignore because feelings don't really matter and because you should always be positive and never look backward. That's a bad idea. But it's also a

bad idea, perhaps even a worse idea, is ruminating on these regrets, bathing in these regrets, wallowing these regrets, letting them capture you. What we want to do is we want to think about them. And when we think about them, regrets do two things. One, they clarify what we value and they instruct us on what to do. I'll give you an example from my own experience. So I have regrets about kindness, especially when I was younger. I was never a bully ever, but as a younger person, both in school and university, as a young professional, I was often in situations where people were being excluded. People were not being treated right. People were being left out.

I saw it happening. I was right there. I didn't say a word. I didn't step in. That bothers me. That's telling me something. The fact that this has been, this bugs me for 10 years or 20 years, that's a signal. What's a signal of? It's a signal of what

I value. It's a signal of what I value. It's telling me you value kindness. You value kindness perhaps more than you realize. And so if you think about that, you don't say, oh, it doesn't matter. That was in the past. I let people be excluded in the past and didn don't say, oh, it doesn't matter. That was in the past. I let people be excluded in the past and didn't do anything. Oh, it doesn't matter. No regrets. Or you can say, oh, my God, I am the worst human being there ever was. I am just so inherently flawed.

I don't deserve the sanctity of life. There's something profoundly wrong with me. That's a bad idea, too. What you should be doing is thinking about them and saying, you value kindness. What it's also doing, along with the clarification, it's instructing me. It's like, don't do that anymore. Do better. And so one of the things truly that I've done, I mean, it's modest.

I'm not trying to paint myself as some kind of saint here. But if you see me in social gatherings, what you'll find is that there might be clumps of people around. see me in social gatherings, what you'll find is that there might be clumps of people around. And if there's somebody who is left out, somebody who is kind of this unmoored from the other islands of connection there, I will literally walk over and bring that person in, always invite them into the scrum. Now, again, does that qualify me for sainthood? No. Is that better than I was before? Yes. Is the reason I was better than before regret? Absolutely. We can utilize regrets. We can utilize the past to help us inform and change our future behavior. Not only can we, we must. That is an essential component of healthy living. If it wasn't useful, it would have likely evolved out of our bodies and brains. It's useful.

Regret helps us learn. And there's also, so that's sort of the evolutionary theory behind it. But we also have evidence from social psychology showing that when we lean into our regrets, we're better, we become better negotiators. We become better problem solvers. We become better parents. We become better strategists. We have more meaning in our life. That regret clarifies what's important to us and instructs us on how to do better.

And so this is why I don't like the no regrets view. All these people with tattoos that say no regrets. All right. All right. It's nutty, right? But if you have a tattoo that says no regrets, it's like you might as well say a tattoo that says no growth, no learning, no doing better. One of the most important things I do on a daily basis to help me with mental wellbeing, with contentment, frankly, for my levels of happiness is a daily practice of solitude.

And I actually think solitude is very, very much underrated. I think it very much plays into what you've just said, because you've got to listen to the signal that your emotion, that you're feeling, that potentially your regret is giving you, right? But it's so easy now. It's always been easy to distract ourselves. It's probably easier now than ever before, whether it's our phone or social media or whatever, you know, emails. We can always go outward and not have to turn inwards. So therefore, we don't know what we're feeling. We've never spent time sitting with that feeling, so therefore we can't process it. For me, I think, and I've seen that with patients, it's so helpful. I kind of feel

regret plays in here because if you're always so busy that you can never sit with your thoughts and your feelings and your emotions, how on earth are you going to start processing it? And we don't like to do that because it's slightly uncomfortable. And this is the problem, that is comfort is never the path to growth. Comfort is never the path to progress. Now, extreme discomfort is not that either. It's this kind of mild discomfort, this mild perturbation, kind of mild discomfort, this mild perturbation, having that moment of discomfort. And instead of fleeing from it by scrolling down your phone as like a digital narcotic to relieve a little bit of that psychic discomfort, you actually sit with it and recognize that discomfort is part of life and discomfort is a desirable part of life.

You have to actually confront it and confrontation is inherently uncomfortable. But we can push past the discomfort. discomfort. And it's interesting because I might feel this, I think I believe this more deeply because of our conversation is that so much of our lives are spent avoiding discomfort when maybe what we should be doing is actually welcoming discomfort more affirmatively. That's what I'm trying to do with regret. But I think in in general too much of our lives are spent trying to bypass discomfort rather than just simply recognizing that in a more like almost like zen-like state hey discomfort is part of the human condition let me welcome it into my life because the more i do that the less likely i'm going to be to have that discomfort metastasize into something that's destructive.

Super, super powerful, Dan. For people who this is really connected with and they're like, man, you know what? I've got some regrets in my life. What kind of advice would you give them as to how they can start that process of dealing with it, processing it, and then ultimately moving on from it? Sure. So start with self-compassion. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Very important. Treat yourself with the same kindness you treat somebody else. Recognize that your missteps are just like anybody else's. Writing it down or even talking about it is one of the most important things that we can do with our regrets for a whole host of reasons. One of them is this honesty. It's a form of self-confrontation. But the other thing about it, which I found the research quite fascinating, is this. So,

emotions, almost by their nature, are abstract, right? So, something like love or joy, it's an abstraction, right? We can make sense of what caffeine is in this coffee. Right. We can draw the molecular structure of caffeine and identify it perfectly. Right. But there's no molecular structure of joy or or bliss or love or anything like that. OK, it's abstract. Same thing with fear and regret and so forth. So emotions are abstract. That's what makes positive emotions so great, is that they're abstract. They're vaporous. It's like you're in a fog of joy. But it's also what makes negative emotions so menacing because they're amorphous. And so, writing it down,

talking about it, writing about it converts that abstraction into words. Words are concrete, things that are concrete are less fearsome, and that's an essential part of the sense-making process. Don't discount disclosing it publicly because we make another error here in that we think that when we disclose our vulnerabilities, people think less of us.

They think more of us, not in every time, but often. Then the final step here, and this is the key, you have to extract a lesson from it. So if you treat yourself with kindness and you do the sensemaking, you got to find a lesson. And the thing is, is that we're terrible problem solvers when it comes to our own problems. So what you want to do is you want to do self-distancing. And there are all kinds of techniques for self-distancing to extract a lesson from. You can talk to yourself in the third person. So instead of saying, what should I do? Say, what should Dan do? Great decision-making tool, which is ask yourself, what do I tell my best friend to do? So let's take one of these over here. Not traveling when I had more time before kids. Let's say that's a regret. Okay. So if your best friend came to you with that regret, what would you tell him or her to do?

if your best friend came to you with that regret, what would you tell him or her to do? Oh, well, I would tell my best friend to look for a three-day weekend where you can go on a trip in the next couple of months. Okay. Yeah. You know, and it's like, oh, okay. But you don't think about that for yourself. So ask yourself, what would you tell your best friend to do? The final thing, I think it's a really powerful technique is to use our incredible abilities of time travel to sort of reach out and talk to the you of 10 years from now. The you of 10 years from now knows what's best. And we can make reasonable predictions about what the you of 10 years from now is going to care about. So let's think about it. The you of 10 years from now is not going to care about whether you wore a black T-shirt today or a green T-shirt today.

Absolutely not. The you of 10 years from now is not going today or a green t-shirt today. Absolutely not. The you of 10 years from now is not going to care what you had for lunch today. But what the you of 10 years from now is going to care about is, did you reach out when you had a chance? You had a relationship and it drifted apart. Did you reach out? Because in 10 years, it might be too late. The you of 10 years from now is going to care, did you do the right thing?

The you of 10 years from now is going to say, did I act boldly when I had the chance? And so that's another way to make sense of our regrets is that if we're unsure what to do, you can make a very strong prediction what that U of 2032 is going to care about. And it's not very much. It's stability and love and boldness and morality. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday

and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.