We’ve all heard the phrase “ live life without regrets”, but will you know whether future you will regret something or not? Is it really worth risking it all in fear of future “regret”, which again isn’t even certain?
Let’s start by defining the word regret. Regret isn’t a “thing” but instead an internal emotion and is defined as “a feeling of sadness about something sad or wrong or about a mistake that you have made, and a wish that it could have been different and better ,” as defined by Cambridge dictionary. But in my eyes, it’s way more than that, that's why I'm an advocate hater of the phrase “live life without regrets”.
“Things without remedy should be without regard. What’s done is done.”Thisseems like an encouraging quote of letting go and accepting consequences. But this quote was said by Lady Macbeth to her husband telling him to stop feeling remorse after slaughtering another being. Not so inspiring now is it? You can’t go wrong with saying it’s somewhat sociopathic. The inability to feel regret is actually classified as a sociopathic quality and is a characteristic of brain damage. Therefore, “living your life with no regrets” can only happen if you have a traumatic brain injury.
I know what you’re thinking. “It’s not supposed to be interpreted that way!” It is supposed to be used as a motivator to do things you feel scared to do. Though, I fully support going outside your comfort zone, but demonizing the idea of regret and thinking of it as an emotion we should avoid isn't right either. Regret makes us feel humane. Imagine that on the day of your exam, there was so much traffic; therefore, you missed your exam by just 3 minutes (doors were locked and you couldn’t sit the exam). But another time, you missed your exam by 40 minutes, which one would cause the greatest regret? The one you missed by just 3 minutes right? Why, you may ask? This is because in the first scenario, it is easier to imagine the things you could’ve done to get the outcome you wanted: such as passing that yellow light or skipping breakfast. You’ll start to feel this anger and frustration building up inside of you, wishing your past self acted differently hoping for a better outcome.
Regret causes a variety of other emotions and symptoms. Often, when you regret something, you don’t just think “ I shouldn’t have done that”, but instead, “ I shouldn’t have done that” repeats over and over and over again, taking up your entire consciousness and causing a spiral storm of overthinking. And before you know it, you’re stuck in a rabbit hole unable to escape the same thoughts wandering your mind.
But the first stage of regret usually isn’t this spiral of thinking. Instead, it’s denial. You tell yourself, “make it go away,” hoping it’ll just vanish like it never happened.
Nowadays, we are so addicted to instant gratification that when it doesn't meet our satisfaction right away, we lose interest. Overthinking what we’ve done does not change anything whatsoever. Instead, we are purely punishing ourselves out of the damaging belief that if we scare and punish ourselves so much, and traumatize ourselves with how horrible it felt, we will do better next time to prevent similar feelings. Having this as a coping mechanism, is extremely draining to one’s mental health. Why’s the acceptance of our actions at the cost of our own misery, like self-punishment? What’s stopping you from choosing to accept what happened and move on from it, since putting yourself through all that won’t change the outcome either way?
We have the tendency to feel that if we just accept something that we can’t improve on, and if we keep beating ourselves up on it we believe we’ll do better next time, signifying that we ARE really driven by fear. A way to cope with feeling a sense of regret is by using humor, ironic and silly as it sounds. It connects the darkness to the light and brings in acceptance making you realize everything is okay. Another coping mechanism is just the passage of time, as time goes on and as you feel your emotions, it’ll slowly fade away.
I’m sure all of us have regrets:some big, some small. Nonetheless it’s an unavoidable and normal emotion to feel but thinking about regret from a different perspective may help. Has someone ever said something they’ve regretted about themselves to you and your first initial thought was automatically: “it’s not that bad”? Why can’twe think like that about our own regrets? Regret teaches us a lot. When someone or something we love doesn’t go as expected and we feel that pain, it is the biggest sign that we love that thing so much that it physically hurts that we don’t get to have it. The attachment and the fear of losing that thing is so great that it takes up all our thoughts. It is just a way of us expressing how much we care for it.We need to learn to accept our failures and flaws, since they are just indications that we are capable of better.
At the end of the day, you took a step and tried something without knowing the exact outcome. Even if you failed, lessons were learnt along with your mistakes hence the saying: “it’s better to try and fail than not try at all”. Not trying at all will guarantee losing the wanted outcome, and will also come with the lingering feeling of “what could it be?”. It is better to regret something you have done than regret not doing something out of fear. You’re doing yourself a disservice for not acting on your determination, sometimes the best “self-care” thing you can do for yourself is taking that leap of faith. Even if you fall, you’ll fall further than where you were if you didn’t take the leap at all.
We shouldn’t live without regrets. Instead, we should learn to not hate ourselves for having them.