The powerful emotion that helps us make better decisions

It looks like a scene from an epic romance.

In 1981, a young American named Bruce was traveling through northern France when a pretty brunette named Sandra boarded his train in Paris and sat next to him.

Conversation flowed easily, and soon they were laughing and holding hands.

When they arrived at Sandra’s destination, a station in Belgium, they kissed and, on impulse, Bruce considered jumping off the train with her to see where life would take him. Instead, she quickly wrote his name and his parents’ address on a piece of paper.

Almost as soon as the doors closed, Bruce regretted not following his instincts. After he returned to the United States, he received a letter from Sandra.

“Maybe it’s crazy, but when I think of you, I smile,” it said, but, mysteriously, it did not contain the return address.

In the decades after that encounter, Bruce never stopped wondering what could have happened if he had gotten off the train.

Key role

The anecdote is just one of the 16,000 stories that the author Daniel Pink compiled in his World Regret Survey (Global Survey on Regret).

Analyzing this data and drawing on the latest scientific experiments, Pink has been able to identify four different types of regret and the types of events that are most likely to lead to each of them.

This research, described in Pink’s new book, The power of regrethelps us understand the crucial role played by repentance in our lives, from helping us cultivate friendships and make responsible decisions to weighing risks.

It also highlights what kind of regret runs deepest and suggests many ways to make peace with our own disappointments and mistakes.

Je ne regrette rien (I don’t regret anything)

Like many negative emotions, regret is often viewed as a purely undesirable feelingone that we must silence whenever possible.

Consider Edith Piaf’s most famous song, or the many other artists, from Emmylou Harris to Robbie Williams, who have sung about the philosophy of living “without regrets.”

Psychologists, however, have shown that it can be a eminently useful emotion. “I think it would be a very, very bad idea to remove regrets from your life,” says Aidan Feeney, a psychology professor at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

“It is a mechanism to Learn to improve your decision making a sign that you may need to rethink your strategy.”

Regret is a complex emotion, as it involves counterfactual thinking, he notes. Requires the ability to imagine alternative options for events that have already happened and the ability to compare and contrast those different outcomes to determine which one you would have preferred.

Because of this complexity, young children are often incapable of feeling regret, and emotion tends to surface around six or seven years.

Feeney’s own research has proven how emotion is essential to developing an understanding of delayed gratification: our ability to postpone a small reward now in order to get a larger reward later.

Experiment

Working with Teresa McCormack, Aidan Feeney presented two boxes to a group of 6-7 year olds. The boxes were equipped with a time lock, with one set to open after 30 seconds and the other after 10 minutes.

Sand timers placed next to each box showed the children how long would they have to wait for it to unlock. They were told that they could choose to pick a box to win their prize.

This task was a bit unfair, as the children did not know what was in each box, so most chose the one that was opened first, which contained two candies. Only after they made their decision were they told that if they had waited for the other box to open, they could have had four pieces of candy instead, doubling their prize.

After the children learned this, the team tested whether they felt any remorse for making the wrong decision. The next day, the psychologists presented the children with the same task again.

They found that those who had developed a sense of regret were much more likely to expect the larger reward, compared to children who did not yet harbor the emotion.

Repentance, it seems, helped them become more patients in order to overcome the temptation to go with the immediate pleasure. Delayed gratification of this kind is an essential form of self control and it is believed that it is very important for the success of people in life.

If you can postpone the pleasure of playing a computer game to study for exams, for example, you’re more likely to get a place at a good university, which in turn will lead to more stable finances for the future.

Repentance, the great “teacher”

The psychological literature abounds with many other examples of benefits of repentance. Regret over a bad business negotiation helps people ensure they get better deals in the future, for example.

And if we make a decision in haste, the feeling of regret ensures that we consider a wider range of information in the future.

Such findings should help us reframe emotion more positively, says Pink.

“We should see repentance as a teacher, trying to tell us something important”.

The four flavors of regret

The critical role of regret in our cognition may explain why so many people experience it so often. Pink speaks in particular of a 1984 study that examined the conversations of married couples and college students.

Within these recordings, regret was the second most discussed emotion after love. The finding fits with one of Pink’s own questionnaires, which asked how often people experience regret. About 20% of those surveyed claimed to feel the emotion “all time”.

Analyzing the specifics of his Global Regret Survey, Pink found that most people’s biggest regrets fall into one of four different camps:

• The foundational they revolve around a lack of responsibility, which has betrayed our need for stability. This would include regrets about skipping school, spending too much, or neglecting your health—bad habits that had negative long-term consequences for life.
• regrets for lack of audacity come from being overly cautious. As Bruce discovered on that train traveling through France and Belgium, sometimes we are presented with opportunities that can change our lives.
• the regrets morals they focus on other people, whom we have hurt by our own failures. Cheating on a partner is one of the most obvious and common examples.
• Those linked to the lack of connectionwhich refer to the loss of relationships with family, friends or colleagues, often due to simple negligence.

“These four [clases de] Regret is expressed over and over again around the world,” says Pink.

How to avoid future regrets

Interestingly, regrets about hookups turned out to be the most common experience in Pink’s survey. In her opinion, we should always reconnect when we feel that a distance is being created.

“If you’re wondering whether or not to communicate with someone, just being at that crossroads answers the question,” he says. “That, for me personally, has been the biggest lesson from this.”

Similarly, the prevalence of regrets for lack of audacity shows us the danger of being too fearful of taking risks; sometimes it’s okay to be impulsive.

That doesn’t mean we should actively embrace danger on a whim, but in many cases “people see more danger than there really is,” says Pink.

This can be particularly true in cases where shyness prevents us from pursuing a once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity or approaching a potential love interest. We may hope to escape disappointment or embarrassment, but instead, we will be forever left wondering “what if…?”

A general strategy to avoid future regret is deliberately imagining the worst outcomes potential before making a decision, suggests Pink.

This technique could be particularly helpful in avoiding foundational and moral regrets, when you don’t act in a way that respects your values ​​and preserves your future health and happiness.

…and how to deal with the regrets you have

Pink’s research also offers us ways to deal with regrets we already have. Given its benefits, we certainly don’t want to suppress sentiment entirely, but certain strategies can help us regulate this emotionso that we listen to his message without wallowing in the sadness of our past mistakes.

Pink explains that the first step is disclosure. When we repress painful feelings, they can get worse, but talking about the situation helps us see it more analytically.

If you don’t feel like sharing your regret with another human being, research shows that writing a private essay can be just as productive. Putting emotion into words seems to help us process our feelings more constructively.

Second, you can practice self pityinstead of falling into toxic self-criticism. To do so, you need to stop beating yourself up with statements like “I’m a loser” that frame your mistake as a sign of an inborn and irreparable flaw.

Instead, you can try to identify the contextual factors that might have pushed you to make the wrong decision and remind yourself that you are not alone in your pain.

“Sometimes we believe that our experience is more unique than it really is; you might think you’re the only person who has repented,” says Pink. “But trust me, you’re not that special.”

Research by Kristin Neff, an associate professor at the University of Texas, Austin, in the US, shows that people who cultivate self-compassion tend to recover from stress and sadness more quickly and, more importantly, also is more likely to change their behavior in the future compared to self-critical people, so as not to make the same mistakes twice.

In other words, once you’ve admitted your mistake, it’s more than okay to take a breather.

Finally, Pink advocates a psychological strategy known as self distancingin which you try to take some kind of outside perspective on your problems.

You could imagine advising a friend with a similar problem, for example. Several studies have shown that, like practicing self-compassion, this can help us view our situation more philosophically without our thinking being overwhelmed by emotion.

It may never be too late to start healing. For her book, Pink interviewed some of the survey participants. Through these conversations, she learned that some now they are trying to compensate their past betrayals, while others have suddenly decided to get in touch with lost friends.

It appears that the survey helped them come to terms with their feelings and prompted them to act.

Bruce, for example, is trying to make peace with his biggest regret. More than 40 years since he and Sandra lost touch, he recently posted a message to the “missed connections” section of Craigslist Paris, hoping they could finally see each other again.

He cannot change the past, but, having come to terms with his regret, he can try to make up for all the lost time.