Why “No Regrets” Is Bad Advice

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3:16Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Welcome back to our Happiness Hot Takes series, a whole season in which I call out the bad happiness advice that I hear so often on the internet. In today's happiness hot take, we're going back to the Happiness Lab archives to tackle a happiness misconception that's so common it's even got its own hashtag. Hashtag no regrets. The idea that we should stand by the bad decisions we make with confidence, that we should ignore all those pangs of remorse that don't feel so hot. Well, today's throwback happiness hot take is that no regrets is no way to live. And you'll see why in this In Case You Missed It episode.

3:52I hope you enjoy it.

4:01I'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 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 hiding myself for two other people. And that is something that I regret a lot.

4:36From time to time, regret sets up shop in all our heads. And makes us wonder about what we could have, should have, or would have done differently. I've done a lot of mistakes. 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 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. sick, I should have put my foot down way earlier because now it kind of affects me to this date.

5:16And it's just like, dang, I could have prevented all of 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.

5:54But 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.

6:15Hey, I'm Malcolm Gladwell. 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.

6:56That's how it was for author and illustrator Liz Fosselin. 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?

7:30I 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. 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.

8:16Though 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.

8:49They 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 OK When Things Are Not OK. 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.

9:24Some 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'd definitely be able to have a hashtag mostly no regrets life if only I could get everything I want.

10:01We 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.

10:38I 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.

11:12And 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.

11:54We 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.

12:33Downward counterfactuals often involve the phrase, well, at least. So let's say you miss 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.

13:09If 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.

13:44Researchers 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 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.

14:21So 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, 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.

15:02Not 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.

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19:10I'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, Shinsuke 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 Shinsuke? I think he might like you. Shinseki 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.

19:49And 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 Fossiline 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.

20:23It 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.

21:02Our 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.

21:43Research 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 Tori 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.

22:18Liz 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.