The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Why Living Without Regret is a Bad Idea

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Regret sucks. Thinking back on things we should have done, or should never have done, can make us feel bad. But #noregrets isn't a philosophy for a happy and healthy life.    Regrets can be a great guide and can help us live a life that's true to our authentic selves. Illustrator Liz Fosslien learned to listen to her regrets after letting down her mom during a family crisis. While writer Daniel Pink compiled a global database of regrets to help unpick what common regrets tell us about our real values.  For Further Reading: Daniel Pink - The Power of Regret. How Looking Back Moves Us Forward See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. I'm going through a breakup right now. And so that's, there's regret in choosing to be together and there's regret in also choosing to be apart. We all replay dumb things we did in the past. I think a lot of my regret stems from like school work. Every school year comes around and I'm like, this year I'm going to do better. And then like, I don't.

Or fret about the things we didn't do. I was afraid to come out for a long time to my parents. It was that fear of rejection, regardless of whether they would have really rejected me. I was like hiding myself for two other people. And that is something that I regret a lot. From time to time, regret sets up shop in all our heads and makes us wonder about what we coulda, shoulda, or woulda done differently. I'd done a lot of mistakes.

Like I spent a lot of money. I paid for a lot of people. I got used by a lot of people. And I did not know my worth. Our feelings of regret mostly kind of people. I got used by a lot of people and I did not know my worth. Our feelings of regret mostly kind of suck. We can experience it as a mild pang, a sort of throbbing emotional toothache, but sometimes the anguish of regret reduces us to tears or saddles us with grief that lasts a lifetime. I was in a relationship and it was very toxic. I should have put my foot down

way earlier because now it kind of affects me to this date and it's just like, toxic. I should have put my foot down way earlier because now it kind of affects me to this day. And it's just like, dang, I could have prevented all of this, these feelings from happening if I just would have left it in the beginning. And so it's natural to fantasize about a life without this painful emotion, to strive to be without the burn that comes from looking back. I mean, who needs regrets? Hashtag no regrets. I do not believe in regrets or have any regrets in my life. My mistakes are me. But is the whole no regrets thing really right? I mean, could it be possible that embracing regret is the key to living a better, more authentic, and even a happier life? Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.

But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. Hey, I'm Malcolm Glabo.

Here's my regret. When I graduated from college, I had this idea that I would spend a year in Jamaica getting a graduate degree at the University of West Indies. My instinct was that my early 20s were the perfect moment to broaden my horizons, experience a new culture, and take a risk. Instead, I moved to Indiana. Oh man, I blew it. Life is full of choices. Forks in the road where we have to pick one path

or the other. Sometimes we make those decisions under pressure, or with incomplete information, or at times when we're not our calmest, most rational selves. And sometimes, once we begin to regret the path we've taken, it's too late to turn around. That's how it was for author and illustrator Liz Vosselin. As the child of European immigrants, Liz spent a lot of her youth traveling back and forth to visit relatives. I just have a lot of happy childhood memories there,

and it felt like a link to this bigger family that I don't feel that I have in the U.S. But with families, it's not always vacations and holiday get-togethers. There are sometimes emergencies and bereavements. So my grandmother died when I was in my early 20s, and my mom, who rarely shows emotion or asks for much, asked me to go with her to pack up the house. Liz dropped everything, right?

I mean, she wasn't going to let down her mom at the very moment she needed her presence and support the most. And I said no. Liz had just landed a great new consulting job, a position she'd badly wanted and had worked hard to win. I was like, I have so much going on at work. I just can't take two weeks off for an international trip. It's just too much for me to take on right now. take two weeks off for an international trip. It's just too much for me to take on right now.

And so Liz's mom flew across the Atlantic to deal with the death of her mother all alone. Decades later, that decision still causes Liz tremendous anguish. Like even now, I'm like starting to get tears in my eyes because I think of my mom alone on this eight-hour plane ride to go pack up like her childhood and my childhood and our link to our family. Though painful, regrets like these are a creative spur for Liz. Along with author Molly West Duffy, she's part of a duo known online as Liz and Molly. They're responsible for a popular Instagram feed of illustrations that show how we can deal with all kinds of painful feelings, the types of things that we too often keep to ourselves. There's just so much, especially when we talk about big feelings, that all of us are experiencing on a daily basis that we don't share with people. I'm a huge fan of Liz and Molly's

work. I share their simple yet powerful cartoons with my students all the time. They're not just poignant, clever, and funny. They also include lots of science-backed tips for dealing with those big feelings. So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that the duo were also putting out a new book. It's called Big Feelings, How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay. The book gives advice for navigating seven of our most painful negative emotions, the usual emotional culprits, things like sadness, anger, and even burnout. But there's also one that doesn't get as much attention. You guessed it, regret. Research shows that it's one of the most

common emotions that people feel. I think it's after love or something like that. Some studies estimate that over 90% of people report having severe regret about some decision they've made in their lives. Over 90% of people. That's basically everyone. And yet, one of the misconceptions about regret is that it's actually even possible for us to live that hashtag no regrets life. It's just a completely inaccurate view of the world. There is no life in which you will have no regrets.

A second misconception goes something like this. Okay, so maybe I can't have a perfectly hashtag no regrets existence, but I so maybe I can't have a perfectly hashtag no regrets existence, but I'd definitely be able to have a hashtag mostly no regrets life if only I could get everything I want. We assume that if we had the perfect job and a swanky house and an amazing partner, we'd never experience that painful twinge of what if. But this too is a spot where our minds are lying to us. And part of that is because you can only choose one life. Even if your current life path is mostly awesome,

there's probably something great out there in the universe that you're not going to get a chance to experience. Another fork in the road you could have chosen, but didn't. And sometimes we can't help but regret not taking it. And we also have a tendency to put on rose-colored glasses when we consider that alternate path, especially in moments when our current reality is a little harder. I feel like we have a lot to learn about regret. So I decided to call in an expert.

My name is Daniel Pink. I'm the author of The Power of Regret, How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. Daniel developed what he calls the World Regret Survey, which collected the experiences of tens of thousands of people from more than 100 countries. It's one of the largest databases of regrets ever. With all that data to draw on, I was hoping that Daniel could give us a bit of a crash course on regret, starting with a definition. I think one way to start is that a regret is an emotion, and it's an emotion that makes us feel bad. And it's emotion that arises from, I think, some really fascinating and interesting powers of our brain. Regret requires a few complicated and possibly unique cognitive abilities. The first of these is the ability to accept blame. Unlike other negative emotions, like, say, disappointment, regret

requires agency. We can only regret stuff that we caused. You experience regret because it's your fault. Regret also requires the capacity to time travel. Regret forces us to hop in a mental time machine and travel back to some remembered event of the past. And once we get there, our brains engage in a third impressive cognitive feat, what Daniel calls fabulism. We imagine making a different decision than we actually made. And then what's even more crazy is that we negate that experience. We get back in our time machine. We arrive back in the present and we now see a present that is reconfigured because of this decision that we've undone in the past. And that's the final cognitive superpower we engage in when feeling regret.

What's known as counterfactual thinking. We create a new, completely imaginary timeline that runs counter to the facts. And there are two kinds of counterfactual thinking. One of them is known as a downward counterfactual. So that is, we imagine how things could have been worse. Downward counterfactuals often involve the phrase, well, at least. So let's say you missed your morning flight because you spent too long getting ready. You might engage in a downward counterfactual and say things like, well, at least there was a later flight. Or, well, at least I

didn't miss my connection. Downward counterfactuals help us remember that it could have been worse. They usually make us feel better. But less helpfully, we also engage in upward counterfactuals. Which is, can you imagine things could have been better? Upward counterfactuals make us say, if only. If only I had spent a year in Jamaica. If only I had helped my mom when she needed me. If only I had done this thing or that thing differently, then everything now would be so much better. I kind of regret going to college. I might have like ended up, I don't know, working on a flower farm. Upward counterfactuals convince us that we've totally screwed things up. They kind of make us feel like crap. And sadly, they also dominate our thoughts. Because I'm a lawyer. But it would have been nice to find something that I'm passionate

about. An actress, a science teacher, or I'm going to be a doctor because I love health, nutrition, that kind of stuff. Researchers have looked at how often we use each of these two kinds of counterfactuals. Those painful-if-only counterfactuals? They beat out the nicer feeling of at least counterfactuals more than painful if only counterfactuals, they beat out the nicer feeling of at least counterfactuals more than 80% of the time. We are biased on this case toward the negative. We're biased toward the upward counterfactual, toward the if onlys. I think the interesting thing here as we try to sort out the puzzle is, you know, why would we do that? Why would we be prone to do something that makes us feel worse? And so there

must be something about this that confers a benefit. There must be something about this that is adaptive. So becoming happier must involve banishing those negative if-onlys, right? Well, Daniel argues that wouldn't be such a smart thing to do. I'm all for positivity, all right? I'm all for positive emotions. But here's the thing. I don't want to have only positive emotions because negative emotions serve a function. I think that no regrets, the philosophy of no regrets, that you should never look backward, you should always look forward, never be negative, always be positive, is a profoundly bad idea. I think it is an unhealthy recipe for living. I think what we have to do is actually use our regrets as information, as signal, as data. Not ignore them, not wallow in

them, but use them to help clarify what we value and instruct us on how to live better. When we get back from the break, we'll explore just how we can use these if-onlys to live a better life. We'll see that regret can be a critical signpost for the version of ourselves that we most want to be. And we'll see that if we better understand that ideal self, we can start to use this painful emotion to live a healthier, happier, and more authentic life. The Happiness Lab will be right back. We'll be right back. because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention, because you know what you want. And you know what?

We love that for you. Someone else will, too. Be more you this year, and find them on Bumble. I'm Maya Shunker, host of A Slight Change of Plans. When I was around 11 years old at summer music camp, I had the biggest crush on another violinist, Shunsuke Sato. He was cute, a total violin prodigy, and was really funny too. I thought

maybe he liked me as well, but I could never tell for sure. One day, a mutual friend of ours just asked me point blank, hey, do you like Shunsuke? I think he might like you. Shunsuke was an earshot, and I remember seeing him lightly smile in response to her question. But even with that affirmation, I was too embarrassed and said no. He could have been my summer boyfriend, but I was too much of a wimp. And it took me until I was 19 to actually have my first boyfriend. How different things could have been for me. Regrets can feel so troubling that we'd move mountains to change things.

Like, I would give a lot, a lot, a lot of money to go back and make a different decision. Liz Fossilene still hurts when she reflects on her grandmother's death and not being there for her grieving mother. But Liz argues that experiencing the painful big feelings that come with regret have helped her to learn what really matters in life. Remembering how painful it was. It wasn't just regret. It was pain.

It was shame. It was guilt. It was all these sort of really, really thorny, difficult feelings that were welling inside me that really, really clarified the decisions I wanted to make going forward. Liz tackled this idea in a recent Liz and Molly comic on Instagram. In it, a tiny dejected looking figure looks regretfully back into the past. But another similar figure turns to the future and asks, what if I do things differently from now on? Liz and Molly then quote the author, Augustine Burroughs,

to live in regret and change nothing else in your life is to miss the entire point. And the science shows that this is one of the big benefits of being a creature that can feel regret. Our regrets can help us to better understand the kind of people we want to be, even if we're not currently living up to those standards. Just as our brains are good at simulating imaginary counterfactual situations, say, asking out that person we liked but never spoke to, or going to graduate school in the Caribbean rather than working in Indiana, so too can our brains simulate imaginary

counterfactual versions of ourselves. When I'm having a tough day as a professor, I might simulate a version of Laurie who's an astronaut or a veterinarian or a beach bum. Perhaps more usefully, I can also simulate a better version of Laurie who doesn't skip her workouts, who never spends too much time on social media, and who always gets enough sleep. Research has found that paying attention to the different kinds of better selves we simulate can help us to make choices that could ultimately make us happier. Back in the 1980s, Columbia University psychologist Torrey Higgins proposed an idea he called self-discrepancy theory.

It started from the observation that people tend to compare their real actual self to two very different kinds of model selves. The first is what he called the ideal self. Your ideal self is the truest, most authentic version of you. Ideal you ignores what society says and fearlessly shoots for all your hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Liz knew exactly what her ideal self wanted. So this is the career that makes you come alive

versus the career that you feel pressured to pursue. But we also fantasize about a second counterfactual self, the ought self. The ought self is all about duty, obligation, and doing what's expected of you. So for me, that is being a doctor. My parents are both immigrants, academics. It was very much like doctor, banker, lawyer. That is success. My own ought self is a me that never takes a break. That Laurie is a perfectionist who has the perfect body and great clothes and a flawlessly clean house.

But ideal Laurie has a completely different set of aspirations. Ideal Laurie does want to do good work in the world, but she also wants to take care of herself and live her dreams. And the ought self and ideal self sometimes require you to pick two very different paths. When Liz's grandmother died far away across the ocean, Ideal Liz and Aunt Liz clashed about what to do next. Liz's ideal self would have hands down risked upsetting her new bosses to help her mom in that moment of grief. The ideal self is someone who shows up for the people that I care

about in the moments that really matter. But her aunt self won out. Rather than following her heart and going to the airport, she headed to the office. I really felt like I could not fail, especially early on in this job. Otherwise, it would ruin my career forever. And looking back now, I totally understand that that was ridiculous, catastrophic thinking. And there are many examples of this in my early 20s. Like, I cannot believe some of the things I did. Like the time Liz passed out and spent the night in the hospital. The next morning, her aunt self convinced her that she needed to go to work anyway. And I looked terrible.

And my boss asked what had happened. And I briefly mentioned that I had been in the ER. And he just stared at me and was like, you need to go home. It's not okay that you are here. But again, it was a similar compulsion of like, I have to be present. I have to be showing up. So given that we have these two different imaginary versions of ourselves on our shoulders, each screaming different things, which one should we listen to?

Well, Tori Higgins found that ignoring either of these voices doesn't feel great in the short term. If Liz had flown to Europe, she'd probably have worried about her job as soon as the airplane left the tarmac. But research shows that when it comes to long-term regrets, the severe kind that give us anguish years after the fact, they're much more likely to stem from ignoring the person we ideally want to be. If you pursue the path that brings you closer to your ideal self, you tend to be happier. I've confronted with, hey, this is the job that really sings to my soul versus this is the job that everyone has expected me to take. But the thought of taking it actually fills me with a deep existential dread. You should go with the ideal self job. It may sound grim, but people at the very end of life bear out this observation.

Palliative nurse Bronnie Ware had years of experience living with patients in their final weeks, and she repeatedly witnessed the pain and anguish of their regrets. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, she once said. Mood by their stories and hopeful to share the wisdom she'd gained from her patients, she wrote a best-selling book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. All of the top five regrets Ware shares in her book involve disappointing the ideal self rather than the odd self. The dying regret not being emotionally available to their friends and loved ones, being too devoted to proving themselves at work,

and caring too much about what other people think. Social psychologists Tom Gilovich and Shai Davidai did a more empirically-based survey of long-term regrets. They studied a very different cohort of people, not the terminally ill, but everyone, from college students to residents in an old-term regrets. They studied a very different cohort of people, not the terminally ill, but everyone, from college students to residents in an old-age home. People's regrets about not living up to the person they ideally wanted to be far outnumbered their regrets about not living up to what they ought to do to please bosses, neighbors, or the wider society. Findings like these have

shaped how Liz now listens to her two different counterfactual selves. When I'm faced with something and when I have this little voice within me that says like, oh, but work is really busy this week. I'm like, no, remember the pain that you're trying to avoid in the future. Just put that sort of perfectionist self to the side and go show up because that's what you're going to remember in 10 years. I truly do not know what I was doing at work that week. I can tell you nothing about the project I was working on, about how it turned out. It just wasn't as important in the long run. Liz is now convinced that past regrets are great learning points. That recent Liz and Molly cartoon I mentioned also included an important quote,

regrets can be burned as fuel. But regrets burn hot. And we can only become better people if we're committed to directly embracing our regrets and the pain they cause. Because I think when we do that, there's a lot of evidence that it is a powerfully transformative emotion. The Happiness Lab will be right back. We're so done with New Year, New You. We'll be for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. I'm Jacob Goldstein. I host a podcast called What's Your Problem? And when I was in my 20s, I regretted pretty much everything all the time. It got to the point where anytime I had to make a big decision,

I would be paralyzed by the fear that I would regret whatever choice I made. It was like pre-regret. Pre-gret. Eventually, I mostly got past it. I came to trust myself more, feel better about my decisions. Regret, thankfully, is no longer a big part of my life. But I guess I do still regret a little that I spent so many years of my life living in fear of regret. One of the interesting things about regret is that people want the instruction that comes from

regret. They just don't want the bad feeling. And that's not the offer that's on the table here. If we can tough out the discomfort, author Daniel Pink thinks we can learn valuable lessons from our regrets. If we get past this kind of fog machine that we should never have regrets, that we should always be positive, we can look at this emotion and say, it's telling us something, it's teaching us something.

And if we actually think about our regrets differently, we can enlist them to lead a better, more fulfilling, more satisfying life. Daniel's extensive survey of regrets around the world taught him that the only way to learn from this painful emotion is to let ourselves feel it. As much as we'd like to, we can't fast forward through the painful parts of our regrets. The reason they make us do better is because they make us feel worse. And once you experience the pain, you can commit to doing better. But how? Daniel says the first step is determining the specific category of regret you're dealing with. So there's an interesting distinction in the architecture of regret, which is the distinction

between action regrets and inaction regrets. Regrets about what we did and regrets about what we didn't do. So let's take action regrets, regrets about what I did. Those are things that you can undo. When I think of such situations, I'm reminded of the advice of life coach Valerie Burton, who I spoke to for a previous episode about dealing with guilt. Valerie said that the first steps to dealing with our action regrets are to admit what we've done, assess the damage done, apologize for our actions, and then atone as best we can. So if you regret saying something mean to a friend, you should apologize. If you carelessly broke your work buddy's favorite mug, you should buy them a new one. Undoing doesn't mean erasing what you did, but you can acknowledge your actions and make amends for the damage, at least a bit.

But if the regret you're experiencing stems from an inaction, something you didn't do yet, then the solution is also clear. If possible, you should do the thing you haven't gotten around to doing yet. As the old saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is now. Daniel's survey results demonstrated the importance

of fixing inactions as soon as possible. One of the biggest domains in which Daniel observed the painful consequences of inaction regrets was in our social relationships. Which are, if only I'd reached out. And the typical pattern was a relationship comes apart, usually in very, very undramatic ways. It's like there's not yelling and screaming. And it was just like things drift apart. Your relationship drifts apart. And then what happens is that one person wants to reach out and they say, oh, it's going to be really awkward if I reach out. And the other side's not going to care. So they don't. Then they wait a few more years and they

say, oh, now it's going to be even more awkward and they're going to care even less. So they don't. And so people are making a, I think a pretty profound misjudgment. They say it's going to be even more awkward and they're going to care even less. So they don't. And so people are making, I think, a pretty profound misjudgment. They say it's going to be awkward and it turns out to be way less awkward than they think. And they say the other side is not going to care. And the other side almost always cares. If you are at a juncture where you're wondering, should I reach out or should I not reach out? To my mind, being at that juncture has answered the question. Always reach out. I think it's very clear when we look prospectively that if you don't reach out, you're going to regret it. And I have too many stories of people who didn't reach out

and then it was too late because somebody passed away. But you might be left asking, how can we deal with regrets that we can't fix? Those hurts that we cause to people who are no longer with us, or some stranger we hurt, or mistakes that we can't undo, or cases where enough time has passed that we simply can't complete the actions we failed to do before. Daniel argues that situations like these require changes in how we think. We first need to normalize the fact that we messed up and commit to not beating ourselves up over it. One of the most important things you can do when you screw up is treat yourself with self-compassion. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Recognize

that your mistakes are part of the human condition. And when engaging in this more compassionate self-talk, we can also use the power of specific words to better see the lessons that come from our mistakes. Like, for example, harnessing that less painful counterfactual phrase that allows us to feel better. At least. As we talked about earlier, you can at least them. You can find the silver lining. You can do that downward counterfactual. Liz Fossilene agrees that using new words in our self-talk can be a valuable way to learn about possible silver linings.

One thing that I've found really valuable is replacing the phrase should have with what if. So in my case, like I should have gone with my mom and gotten on that plane, changing it and saying like, well, what if the next time I do get on the plane? It's sort of a quick phrasing shift that allows us to both give ourselves grace, but then shift more into this mindset of what could the future look like if I learned from this past experience. Another effective, although somewhat counterintuitive strategy involves sharing your regrets more broadly. We assume that talking about our mistakes will feel shameful or embarrassing, but the science shows that admitting your regrets, either to a close confidant or to the pages of a written journal, can make you feel better. In one study, researchers had subjects talk about their regrets on a tape recorder for 15 minutes a day. After four weeks, participants reported

higher levels of life satisfaction and better overall mental well-being. Daniel argues that this works because talking about our regrets can make them more concrete. And that makes them less fearsome and it also begins the sense-making process. And that sense-making process is the final step of harnessing our regrets. We're trying to extract a lesson from what we did badly in the past so we can do better in the future. I don't think it's good enough to simply say, oh, I'm going to treat myself with kindness. I'm going to write about it or disclose it. I think you have to go to the next step and say, what did I learn from this? What is the lesson that I've derived from this and how do I apply it going forward? The sense-making process

is one of the reasons Liz is also keen to share the power of regret. By courageously processing her own regrets about not showing up when her mother needed her, she's been able to better live up to the person she ideally wants to be. And so I don't even want to say I'm grateful because that's not quite true, but I do, I try every time I'm confronted with a similar situation to make the choice that I know is going to lead to less long

run pain. And that actually aligns more with my values. Unfortunately, Liz had a chance to test that commitment to her new ideal self when her father was rushed to the hospital. And at the time, we didn't, you know, we really didn't know if he was going to make it. So it was very scary. Liz was living in San Francisco at the time. She knew that flying halfway across the country to her father's hospital in Chicago at short notice and in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic would be a logistical nightmare. And this time, even her mother was telling her not to bother making the trek. And I was just like, absolutely not. I'm coming. Just pick me up at the airport or I'll take a lift or whatever it is. By fully processing her previous experience, Liz was sure that no matter how difficult

that trip to Chicago was, the anguish of not going would be worse. I do not want to experience that pain again. And I have learned my lesson that I will never, ever make that decision. And so Liz made the trek and quickly enjoyed the benefits that come from being the person you ideally want to be. My dad luckily ended up being sort of overall

okay. And my mom a couple days later was just like, I'm so glad you're here. And I said, I am too. And I absolutely have no regrets around that. We often think that in order to be happy, we need to shield ourselves from painful emotions. And there's no doubt about it, feeling regret is painful. It's one of the suckiest emotions around. But as Daniel Pink put it in his book, it's time you started thinking of your regrets not as emotional threats, but as opportunities. If there's some past action that makes you cringe, fix it. Didn't take on that big challenge your ideal self was pushing for? Do it now. And if you can't go back and change the past,

find ways to see those pangs of remorse in a new light as a powerful way for your ideal self to nudge you in the right direction. And if your ideal self wants to avoid at least one future podcast regret, then I'd encourage you to come back soon for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughn, and Courtney Guarino. Joseph Rydman checked our facts. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola.

Thanks to everyone who shared their regret stories for this episode. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Christina Sullivan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.