Understanding Regret
By Dr. Robert L. Leahy PhD, The American Institute for Cognitive Therapy
For a number of years I have been interested in various emotions that are often experienced with great difficulty. My theoretical model, which I call Emotional Schema Therapy, proposes that each of us has a theory of our emotions and the emotions of other people. The Emotional Schema Model is a social cognitive model that follows a long tradition in the field of social cognition, person perception, and theory of mind, and identifies various dimensions that we use in our “understanding” and response to our emotions and the emotions of other people. These beliefs include whether we feel guilty or ashamed, that our emotions make sense, that our emotions will go out of control, that others have similar emotions, that we can tolerate mixed feelings, can we accept our emotions, and if our emotions are related to our higher values. Related to these beliefs are the strategies that we activate to cope with our emotions including suppression, avoidance, distraction, social support, cognitive reframing, behavioral activation, acceptance or other strategies. There’s a lot of discussion in the cognitive behavioral therapy field about different kinds of anxiety, sadness or anger, but I am interested in the more complex, self-referential emotions, such as jealousy, envy, regret, ambivalence, and even the desire for revenge.
We often think that there’s a higher self that we should aspire to, but my observation is that these are universal emotions that evolved because they were useful in specific contexts. My view is that life should not simply be focused on the pursuit of pleasure, but rather on the pursuit of meaning. And a meaningful life often involves a lot of uncomfortable emotions, like grief, jealousy, remorse, boredom, frustration, and regret.
Regret is an emotion of remorse or disappointment about a decision we made or chose not to make or about a decision that we might anticipate making. In research on conversations among college students, regret is the second most common emotion that’s mentioned with love or liking being the first. Regret is always about decisions, not simply about misfortune, where we attribute some responsibility to ourselves for what we chose to do or not do. We can regret deciding to buy a stock or a piece of property or to get into a relationship or we can regret something that we said. You can also regret what you did not do. You might regret that you did not buy stocks or you did not pursue a relationship or you did not pursue a career goal. In the short run, we tend to regret choices to make a change. But in the long run, the research shows, we’re more likely to regret what we did not do.
We can learn from the regrets of those who are imminently facing death. A study of the regrets of people in hospice revealed that the most common regrets were not being true to yourself, spending too much time at work, not staying in touch with people, and not expressing your feelings. We have a lot to learn about what is important from people who are facing the end. These findings suggest that many of our deepest regrets are not about failed achievements, but about neglected values, relationships, and opportunities to live authentically.
Productive and Unproductive Regret
A few years ago, I got interested in the clinical implications of regret because I’ve had a lot of patients who ruminate about things that they did in the past or did not do or they anticipate if they make a change that they will regret the outcomes. Although clinicians might view regret as a negative emotion, regret is viewed by people as the most useful emotion because people think that they can learn from their mistakes. I make a distinction between productive and unproductive regret. Productive regret is where you realize you made a mistake, you use it as an opportunity to learn from it and to improve your behavior in the future. For example, if I eat spicy food at night, I may not sleep as well, and I might regret that and as a result, I will not eat that kind of food in the future. Unproductive regret occurs when we regret a choice and then criticize ourselves and ruminate about it and we may even avoid a behavior or person because they remind us of our regrets.
Let’s take a closer look at productive regret. Consider the following. Let’s imagine you are single and you are looking for a life partner and you meet somebody and they say, “I find you very interesting and attractive, but what you should realize about me is that I am incapable of regret. I never regret anything”. How likely would it be that you would want to pursue a serious relationship with this kind of person? I think you might believe that this is a person who never apologizes and never learns from their mistakes and that they will likely blame everybody else. In fact, research shows that people who show humility and own up to their role in problems and don’t try to act as if they’re above the rules are trusted more in work and have better relationships. So, guilt, which is regret on steroids —and apologies that are viewed as sincere— are ways to use regret productively.
Another example of productive regret is the following. Half of the patients who are prescribed medication for hypertension do not take their medication a year later. A significant percentage of young people do not sign up for a forced savings pension plan. When you ask people to think about what it would be like if they had a stroke, this increases compliance with medication for hypertension. When we ask people to think about what their life would be like in their 60s when they retire at their current savings rates, they increase their saving. This is a use of productive regret.
Talking to Your Future Self
The clinical application of this concept involves having a conversation with your future self, represented by what is sometimes called your wise mind. For example, I have asked patients who think about making problematic decisions, to consider what advice their future self a year or two years from now might give them. For example, somebody seeking revenge on an ex-partner might feel the urge to act out now, but from the perspective of their future self, they may be less inclined to take action. Unfortunately, we often treat our future self as a stranger with whom we have no relationship. But the present self has a habit of becoming the future self. If we live completely in the present moment, we will not become the future self that we wish to be. Using values clarification and setting life goals helps to clarify this future self with whom we should interact on a regular basis. Living completely in the present moment is not the best strategy to live according to your values and goals.
Don’t Waste a Good Mistake
Mistakes are inevitable but we tend to give mistakes a bad name. For some people, making a mistake is the beginning of self-criticism and rumination. But what if we looked at mistakes as an opportunity to learn from the experiment that we carried out? What did you learn? How can you grow from it? We should never waste a good mistake, since there is information that we can use to move forward. Perhaps the most efficient use of mistakes and regret is to use the mistakes of other people. I remember in college and in my early 20s that a lot of my peer group were over-drinking or abusing drugs, and I realized the only thing I had of any value was my brain. I looked at what they were doing and thought that would not be a good course of action for me. We often think of role models as imitating those who engage in positive behavior that we wish to imitate, but there are excellent role models of people whose behavior we should avoid at all costs.
Excessive Regret
And, of course, there are people who have an excess of regret about the past and who anticipate regret in the future. These are people who focus on choices they made in the past and their outcomes, emphasize all the negatives, discount any positives, criticize themselves, avoid making future decisions to make changes, and then ruminate-- sometimes for years about past decisions and outcomes. Or when making a decision, they over-predict regret and negative emotions and believe that the outcomes that will ensue will be unacceptable. This is especially true for people who have a depressive style of thinking. Depressed people have what we call loss aversion where they place a greater emphasis on any potential loss without counterbalancing potential gain. All decisions involve trade-offs and are made under uncertainty. But some people have difficulty accepting either one of these inevitable parts of the process. Other factors that contribute to anticipating more regret are the depressed person’s belief that they have few resources, the inability to recover from loss, and the belief that they will not experience pleasure. They often have the “durability” illusion—that my negative emotions will last indefinitely. Having patients review evidence of recovering from disappointments can help them see their capacity for resilience. Another technique is to review decisions that had positive outcomes. Rather than label yourself as someone who always makes bad decisions, we can help patients put current regrets in the context of positive outcomes in the past.
The Maximizer and Existential Perfectionism
One style of decision-making is the maximizer who wants the best outcome and believes that if they pursue the very best, they will have fewer regrets. However, the research shows that maximizers take much longer to make decisions, require excessive information, and even when objectively they obtain a better outcome compared to somebody prone to satisfaction, the maximizer is less satisfied and has more regrets. This is because maximizers are imagining even a better outcome and think they cannot settle for less. The clinical implication is to examine what it means not to have the very best outcome (“I am mediocre, not a special person”), and to examine the costs and benefits of this approach, while experimenting with trying to have gratitude and appreciation for what they do have.
This maximizing style has increased in recent decades with a hyperfocus on brands, fads, and social media as people race after receding reference points.
Related to the maximizing style is a trend that has developed over the last 40 years in what I call Existential Perfectionism. This is the belief that my life should be fulfilling and exciting and I never should be bored, uncomfortable, or frustrated. Alongside this existential perfectionism is the belief that we have great social mobility, which is not consistent with the facts in American society. Social mobility has been decreasing. If we think about regret as the opportunity emotion- reflecting the opportunities that I failed to pursue- we can see why regret might be increasing. An interesting set of findings is that between 1989 2016 there has been an increase of perfectionism in the general population. In addition, if you use the Google Ngram tool to chart the use of the word regret in the published English language, there has been a dramatic increase from the early 1980s to 2022. An additional finding is that in this time-period, the GINI index (which reflects economic inequality) has dramatically increased. So, we have perfectionism, inequality, and regret all increasing during the same decades. As the expectations of success and materialism have increased, and the race for higher status has continued unabated, the opportunities for regret continue to rise. An example of this emphasis on existential perfectionism is that when high school kids are asked what they want to be when they are adults, the most common response is famous. And of course, social media drives this.
Adaptive Humility
Another concept that I discuss is adaptive humility, which is a recognition that I am only a human being like other people and I am not special or unique, I make mistakes and I can accept that. This does not mean that you view yourself as a doormat or that you will not assert yourself. It just means that you accept the possibility of making mistakes. People with adaptive humility are trusted more and their apologies are viewed as more sincere and they have better relationships. We can also eclipse current regrets by focusing on appreciation, gratitude, and compassion for self and others. All of us will have regrets but if we focus on gratitude for what we have and compassion toward those less fortunate we may find that our regrets have limited negative impact. Pursuing opportunities can be a positive, but if you fail to have gratitude for what you do have, then you are chasing a receding reference point as you race down the field while your ambitious mind keeps moving the goal posts. Regret can teach us what matters, but it should not become the lens through which we view our entire lives. When balanced with gratitude, humility, and compassion, regret becomes not a burden, but a guide.
About the Author:
Robert L. Leahy (B.A., M.S., M.Phil., Ph.D., Yale University), Director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy, completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania Medical School under the direction of Dr. Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy. Dr. Leahy is the Past-President of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Past-President of the International Association of Cognitive Psychotherapy, Past-President of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy, Director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy (NYC), and Clinical Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell University Medical School.Dr. Leahy is the Honorary Life-time President, New York City Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Association and a Distinguished Founding Fellow, Diplomate, of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. He has received the Aaron T. Beck award for outstanding contributions in cognitive therapy. In 2023, he was named the Global Ambassador by the Association of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy (ABCT) and he also received the Outstanding Clinician Award from ABCT.
References
Bell, D.E. (1982). Regret in decision making under uncertainty. Operations Research, 30, 961-981.
Leahy, R.L. (2022) If Only…Finding Freedom From Regret. New York: Guilford.
Leahy, R.L. (2015). Emotional Schema Therapy: A practitioner's guide. New York: Guilford.
Leahy, R.L. (2017). Cognitive therapy techniques (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford.
Roese, N. J., & Summerville, A. (2005). What we regret most … and why. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , 31, 1273–1285. doi:10.1177/0146167205274693.
Twenge J.M., Campbell W.K., Freeman E.C. Generational differences in young adults' life goals, concern for others, and civic orientation, 1966-2009. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2012 May;102(5):1045-62. doi: 10.1037/a0027408. Epub 2012 Mar 5. PMID: 22390226.
Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2007). A Theory of Regret Regulation. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 17(1), 3–18.
Zeelenberg, M., van den Bos, K., van Dijk, E., & Pieters, R. (2002). The Inaction Effect in the Psychology of Regret. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(3), 314–327.
