453 - Your Regrets are Here to Help You
Do you have regrets?
Regret often gets a lot of negative feedback and a bad rap, often being called a useless negative emotion, but during this episode we’re diving into some of the psychology research that indicates how regret can help us gain insight, motivation, and direction.
“Regret is an emotion. It’s a negative emotion in that it’s an emotion that makes us feel worse, not better. And it’s an emotion that’s triggered when we think of something from our past and wish we had done something differently, done something in a different way, not done something, taken an action, not taken an action. It’s incredibly cognitively complex because it requires mental time travel. You have to get in a time machine in your head and travel back to the past. Then you have to imagine the counterfactual to what really happened, and then get back in your time machine, come back to present day, and see the present day reconfigured because of the decision you made.”
Daniel Pink, behavioralscientist.org
Studies on regret:
"Praise for regret: People value regret above other negative emotions" by Colleen Saffrey, Amy Summerville, and Neal J. Roese. Published in 2008 in the journal Motivation and Emotion.
“Life regrets and the need to belong.” by Morrison, M., Epstude, K., & Roese, N.J.. Published in 2012 in Social Psychology and Personality Science.
“Sex Differences in Regret: All For Love or Some For Lust?” by Roese, N. J., Pennington, G. L., Coleman, J., Janicki, M., Li, N. P., & Kenrick, D. T. Published in (2006) in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(6).
“How Do I Regret Thee? Let Me Count My Alternatives: Regret and Decision Making in Intimate Relationships" by Mattson, Franco-Watkins, and Cunningham. Published in 2012 in Psychology.
The World Regret Survey
If you go to worldregretsurvey.com, you’ll find author Daniel Pink’s database of over 23,000 regrets from people in 109 countries. He organized data from his survey into four different major categories:
Foundational Regrets, or “If only I did the work.”
Not getting a particular education
Not starting to learn a particular skill when young.
Not taking better care of one’s health.
Not expressing oneself or one’s identity authentically.
Opportunity Regrets, or “If only I took the chance.”
Passing up a chance to work or study abroad.
Saying no to an exciting but scary job opportunity.
Moral Regrets, or “If only I’d done the right thing.”
Lying to a partner.
Cheating in the past.
Not standing up for someone.
Connective Regrets, or “If only I reached out.”
Losing touch with old friends.
Never reconciling with someone after a falling out.
Not connecting with someone before they moved away or passed away.
So what do we do about regret?
Pink has a 3-step process for “healthily investing in regret.”
Step 1. Undo it.
This applies in situations where you’ve done something that you later regretted. You can “undo” it by offering an apology to someone you’ve wronged, reaching out to a person that you fell out of contact with, etc. Sometimes this isn’t possible, which leads to step 2.
Step 2. “At least” it.
Find a new purpose, meaning, or silver lining within a decision you regret. For example, you regret going to medical school, but at least you wound up meeting your partner there. You can imagine all of the positive experiences that came out of the one bad experience.
It could help to generate gratitude for the regretful experience.
Step 3. Analyze and strategize.
What lessons can I learn from my regret? What can I do differently now that will prevent me from having more regrets in the future? For example, if you regret not spending more time connecting with a loved one before they died, that can highlight a new action plan: I’m going to cherish the time I have with the people around me and never take it for granted.
If you regret not opening up and being vulnerable with a partner, that can clarify your values: Moving forward, I’m going to take emotional risks in my relationships and open up my heart sooner rather than later.
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about regret. Regret often gets a bad rap as this useless negative emotion, but psychology research actually shows regret can help us gain insight, motivation, and direction. Today we'll be diving into different types of regret, how regret influences our relationship choices, and, most importantly, how we can use our regrets to make positive changes in our lives.
Dedeker: The question that I wrote down for us to start our discussion with was, do y'all fuck with regret? Where does regret fall in your emotional inventory? If that question makes sense.
Jase: A few weeks ago when Emily and I were doing our interview with Evita Sawyers and at one point she said, "Yes, something that I just don't really experience much in my life is regret over things," and we just went on and talked about other stuff, but as soon as she said it, my immediate thought was, "Oh, well, don't worry. I've got that covered for both of us."
Emily: Oh.
Jase: Do I fuck with it? Yes, very much so. I don't think I always fuck with it in the most constructive, helpful way. Sometimes maybe, and that's what we're going to be exploring in this episode, but, yes, definitely it's something I experience a lot of.
Emily: I think in the conventional sense of regret where it's this thing that haunts you over and over again and you keep coming back to, "What if I just did that thing?" I would say that doesn't really come into my life that often, except for big pivots or life changes that my life trajectory could have gone one way or the other. Sometimes it's not so much regret as it is "what if?" It's like just an exercise in what a multiversal me there may be of doing a different thing had I made a different decision in that moment or not. I think we'll get into that a little bit more but that's where regret lies in my life, not necessarily that I made the wrong choice, but just what would my life look like if I had made this different choice?
Dedeker: Sure.
Emily: The big one for me is I had this opportunity right after I graduated college to either move to New York or move to LA and I thought my whole life-- not my whole life, but for my teens, my young adolescence through my college career that I really, really, really thought that I was going to move to New York and then I got an agent in LA and I moved to LA, and I would have never have met the two of you. I would have never embarked in Multiamory or all of the amazing things that have come from that in my life, but I also am like, "Shit, what would I have done, though, in New York?" That would have been cool. I wish I could experience both, both different diverging paths, but I can't, alas.
Jase: Wow.
Dedeker: That's funny because I'd always-- I wouldn't list this as a major regret necessarily, I have other regrets, but the first year that I moved to Los Angeles, I really killed it at a Disney audition and had the opportunity potentially to go be a Disney princess in Paris at Euro Disney-
Emily: Oh, shit.
Dedeker: -and I turned it down.
Emily: I didn't know that.
Dedeker: I turned it down for a really, really inappropriate reason. It was a stupid reason. It was a dumb reason. Like, I should not have turned down that opportunity. I don't even want to talk about why. The important part is that I turned it down. It's the same thing where my brain goes that like, "Okay, yes, that could have really set my life off in a very different trajectory, but that maybe means I wouldn't have the life that I have now and the relationships that I have now." The way that Cheryl Strayed puts it, I think in one of her columns she said that we're always going to have this ghost ship of another life floating along beside us all the time. We're always going to be aware of that, of these different branching pathways. Now, because of that, I, for myself, I'm someone who for a long time identified as someone who didn't feel any regrets whatsoever.
Jase: Wow. Really?
Dedeker: Yes. Sure, I can regret things that I did that were wrong or mean or stuff like that, but as far as life choices, most of the time I don't feel a ton of regret. I think that really directly has to do with the fact that I'm pretty happy with the way that my life has turned out now, and so I don't spend a lot of time wondering, "Why didn't I do this? Why didn't I do that? I could have made this choice." In more recent years, as I've gotten older, I've accumulated more regrets and I don't know why that is necessarily.
Emily: Interesting.
Jase: Interesting. I guess I'm thinking more of the ones that I experience are more of those smaller-scale regrets, not about those big branching life paths or whatever, because even at times when things haven't been going well for me in my life or I've been upset or whatever, just not feeling good, I've still always had that sense of, "Well, yes, but also there are parts of me that have gotten stronger or learned things, and I got those this way," and so I haven't often had that regret of I could have taken this totally other path.
I think part of that is also holding onto that idea that those doors aren't closed, closed. It's like, sure, maybe I couldn't do quite the same thing that I could have if I'd pursued something entirely different 20 years ago, but it's not like, oh, I'm stuck in this life where I feel like I have no power to make any changes or do anything different. I think if I did feel more like that, it would be much easier to have those feelings of regret of a big-
Dedeker: Sure.
Jase: -big time life decision regret.
Dedeker: That makes sense. We're going to dive into these different flavors of regret a little bit more specifically. There's some really interesting research that I think helps add some more detail and color and nuance into this conversation. I started writing this episode because I listened to a TED Talk last year by author Daniel Pink, and we're going to get more into his work a little bit later in the episode, but I really like the way that he describes and defines regret. I pulled this quote from an interview that he did for behavioralscientist.org.
Pink says, "Regret is an emotion. It's a negative emotion in that it's an emotion that makes us feel worse, not better, and it's an emotion that's triggered when we think of something from our past and wish we had done something differently, done something in a different way, not done something, taken an action, not taken an action. It's incredibly cognitively complex because it requires mental time travel. You have to get in a time machine in your head and travel back to the past. Then you have to imagine the counterfactual to what really happened, and then get back in your time machine, come back to present day, and see the present day reconfigured because of the decision you made."
Emily: That sounds like a pretty big ask and pretty impossible, truly, to really be able to comprehend maybe the enormity of the change that may or may not happen in our lives because of one single decision.
Jase: Yes. Boy, I love time travel stories, though, so I think I want to spend more time on that, but maybe we'll do a future episode on time travel or something.
Dedeker: Yes. I don't know. To me, it makes me feel proud of us as a species that our brains have evolved to this level of complexity that we can do these weird twisty, turny, time-travely modes of thought, even though it seems like it bums us out more often than it makes us feel good-
Emily: Yes. Exactly.
Dedeker: -but I'm proud of us. I'm proud of our brains.
Jase: Sure.
Emily: Let's dive into some of the research on regret and what the science says. First, we have a study called Praise for Regret: People value regret above other negative emotions by Colleen Saffrey, Amy Summerville, and Neal J. Roese. This was published in 2008 in the journal Motivation and Emotion. The findings were from two different self-reported surveys measuring people's perceptions of emotions, and they found that people see regret as more useful and favorable than other negative emotions. Regret is believed to help with sense-making, motivating future behavior, gaining self-insight and social harmony better than other negative emotions such as anger, fear, guilt, jealousy, sadness, et cetera. Interestingly, people believe they experience more regret than others showing a self-serving bias. Can you talk a little bit more about that, Dedeker?
Dedeker: I just think it's interesting. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about this concept known as pluralistic ignorance. I would love to somehow make an episode all about that. I've still got to think about what the angle on it would be, but pluralistic ignorance is this idea that we perceive that the people around us feel a particular way, and therefore we think if we feel differently, that we must be the odd one out, there must be something wrong with us or our opinion or something like that, and so that's how we end up going along with things or maybe not speaking up about things because we assume that everyone else must be thinking the same way or must be different from how I'm thinking.
In many situations, the truth is the opposite, that everyone is suffering from that same bias of thinking, for instance, that, "Oh, other people feel less regret than I do. I'm the one who feels the most regret," or "Other people really love this film and I hated this film but I guess I'm going to keep quiet about it among my friends," even though the reality may be that a lot of your friends really didn't like it, but they assumed that everyone else loved it. That's what I think is really interesting about this is that it seems that we tend to feel like, "I have more regrets than everybody else does."
Jase: I guess because no one talks about them that much or-
Dedeker: Perhaps.
Jase: -keeps that secret.
Dedeker: Perhaps. I guess that that's pretty vulnerable stuff to share.
Jase: Sure.
Emily: For sure. Additionally, the findings show that people value regret and see it as psychologically beneficial despite assumptions that regret is this undesirable emotion. I like that idea because I think all of us are told, "Oh, you should regret nothing or have no regrets." That's a thing a lot of people are told, but if you can see it as potentially beneficial in your life that, "Hey, I'm going to do better next time or I'm going to choose a better path for myself or see it as motivational," maybe that can be a good thing.
Dedeker: Yes. I really wanted to dive into this idea. It feels like one of the main findings was that regret is considered a negative emotion and yet people find that it's useful or maybe that it's productive, and I wanted to get your take on that. Do we think that regret can be productive or useful? Do we think there's types of regret that can be unproductive or less useful?
Jase: Based on my own experience with the small-scale regrets like I was talking about of, "Oh, I wish I hadn't said that thing or hadn't done this thing or I had reached out to this person," or those little smaller decisions rather than those big life path ones, but just looking at those, I feel like, yes, positive in the sense of, "Gosh, I really regretted that," so the next time I'm in that situation or a similar situation, I'll remember that I regretted that, and that'll help me to make a different decision in a similar situation in the future. However, I feel like the negative is when it turns into ruminating on those things when I'm not in those situations and not being able to let go of that. In that case, it's like, yes, it's not like I want to say I have no regret, but I would like to just have regret less constantly as background noise all the time.
Emily: I'm sorry, Jase.
Jase: I know I'm making it sound really serious. It's not like a horrible debilitating affliction that I have with feeling regret all the time, but just in general, can get caught in those cycles of thinking about how I could have done a situation differently or, "Oh, I wish I'd said this thing," or, "I wish I had stood up to those bullies in second grade when my brother and I first moved to a different city when they were picking on him and I was too scared and didn't do anything about it." It's stuff like that that still haunts me to this day, and I was nine or eight. I don't know how old you are in second grade, whatever age that was.
Emily: I think regret is unproductive when there's really nothing that can be done about it, or even in the moment, there's nothing that could've potentially been done about it or it was just maybe a split-second decision that at the time you thought would have no consequence and then ultimately ended up having some sort of consequence, but you couldn't have known that in the moment. I think all of those things, it is tough because perhaps we could have done something different but we didn't know that at the time and we just have to live with that and life could have gone in this one way or the other and that's just not really productive to dwell on that.
Perhaps it is productive when we realize, "Hey, I hurt someone in this moment and I regret doing that and I'm going to endeavor to not do that again in a similar situation," that, I think can be really productive when the way in which we act and interact with others can be changed based on making a different decision in the moment because of knowledge that we had when we did something that maybe was less than ethical or less than kind.
Jase: Going along with the ethics piece, something that I don't know of any research about but could be interesting is if regret might have any piece in actually weakening some of our dogmatic beliefs, because I feel like for a lot of people, certain key pivotal decisions in their life, maybe they have some kind of moral compass, whether that comes from a religion or their upbringing or something, whether that's always put family first or always tell the truth or always stand up for the little guy, whatever it is, some kind of axiom that we just go, "Oh, always this," or like in non-monogamy, maybe it's like, "Always tell my partner about everything that happens," or something like that.
Maybe most of the time those work, and sometimes we can just plow ahead making decisions based on those and going, "Oh, I decided on this belief, so anytime I do this belief, I'm doing the right thing." I wonder if those situations that sometimes come up where, "Actually, I ended up hurting someone more by just sticking with this belief instead of evaluating a situation or really asking for what was the right thing to do in that situation," that maybe that regret might actually help to weaken some of that dogma that we could hold onto in those beliefs. That's all speculation, though. I don't know.
Dedeker: This whole conversation reminds me a lot of our episodes that we did on shame, which was way back in 281 and 282, because I do think that there's an argument to be made here that maybe shame is a particular piece of regret and shame in itself can be either productive or unproductive and getting us to have a different perspective on a situation or changing our beliefs about a situation or changing the way that we want to move forward.
Jase: Next up, we have another study here that's called Life Regrets and the Need to Belong. This is by Morrison, Epstude, and Roese again, published in 2012 in the Social Psychology and Personality Science Journal. This one was similar to the last one, a combination of a few different studies. This one was actually five different studies with different methodologies that they used to get this, but some of the key things they found here was that regrets involving primarily social relationships, like romance, family, are felt more intensely than less socially based regrets, like work and education, like, "I wish I'd taken that job," or something.
For example, regret over a lost love or regret over a fight with a family member is felt a lot more heavily than a lost job opportunity or not taking a certain job, something like that. Also, the social impact of regret corresponded to its intensity, which makes sense. If there's a larger social impact involved in that decision that you regret, that corresponds with a lot more intensity of that feeling of regret as well. The need to belong is a really core component of regret, and that threat to belonging predicted regret intensity with love and with work regrets, so feeling like that's cost you some sort of belonging is going to make that much more significant.
Individual differences in that need to belong also had a correlation with how intensely they felt that regret. For example, some people might feel a more acute need to belong than others, which makes them more likely to feel intense regret in a situation that had some kind of social impact or made them feel like they didn't belong or broke some sort of social cohesion there. I think this study is interesting because it's looking at it from a different angle than the last one, and this one seems to imply that regret may have been something that we developed specifically to help us have better social interactions, which sounds useful.
Dedeker: Yes. This confirms my hypothesis that shame might be a component of regret because shame is also a very socially based emotion.
Emily: It's all about what other people think of us.
Dedeker: Yes. It's kind of could have evolved to make it so that we're just more conscious of our social ties because that was very directly tied to our survival, and maybe the same with regret.
Emily: It's really interesting to me that regret over a lost love or a fight with a family member is felt more heavily than a lost job opportunity, because one of those things implies that more than one person is affected rather than a lost job opportunity that just affects me personally, but if you get in a fight with a family member or a friend, that maybe means that you aren't going to be in a relationship with one another anymore, that can affect far more people, and so that's felt more heavily.
Dedeker: Yes, that makes sense.
Jase: Yes. When we did that episode a while back, now about that really long-running 80-year Harvard study about happiness and wellbeing, that was something that came up in that more in terms of what people look back on being happy about is the good things they did in their relationships more than the good things they did in their job or their career or with money. It's interesting to see that this regret piece matches that, that this regret might also be pushing us to make more pro-social decisions, which in the long run will also benefit our wellbeing. That's cool, I guess. That's a positive way to look at it.
Dedeker: Let's talk about what the science has to say also about regret and how it specifically affects our relationships. I found this study called Sex Differences in Regret: All for Love or Some for Lust? which is also by--
Jase: To make it all for love-
Dedeker: I know .
Jase: -and some for lust.
Dedeker: And some for lust. Jase and I really jammed on that song during the Pandemic, I got to say.
Jase: Oh yes.
Emily: It's good. It's good.
Jase: From The Three Musketeers movie. It's so good.
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: This All For Love or Some for Lust study was by Roese, Pennington, Coleman, Janicki, Li, and Kenrick, published in 2006 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. They were looking to find if there are differences in what men and women experience regret over. Bear in mind this study was all the way back in ancient history, 2006, so they were only focusing on cis people and no non-binary people or trans people, or at least they didn't disclose that if that was the case.
That's why we're operating on a strict gender binary in this particular study. Mainly they found that the areas of romance and sex are where men and women tend to differ in their regrets as opposed to, I think they were asking people about family regrets or job regrets or school performance regrets, but people tended to be very similar, but romance and sex was where they diverged. Men are more likely to have regrets of inaction and women are just as likely to have regrets of both action and inaction. To clarify this, examples of action regrets include things like, "I should have broken up with this person sooner," or, "I shouldn't have had sex with this person."
Examples of inaction regrets are things like, "I wish that I had dated more people," or, "I should have tried harder to sleep with this person," or "I wish that I tried harder to keep contact with this particular friend." They found that men are more likely to feel those inaction regrets like, "Oh, I should have gone for it. I should have shot my shot," and women will experience those type of regrets as well, but they'll also experience more of the action-- like regrets over their own actions as well when it comes to romance and sex.
Emily: Now men regret nothing about the actions that they take apparently.
Dedeker: But the actions that they performed, I guess.
Jase: I don't think that's what it's saying.
Emily: They're all perfect.
Dedeker: Especially looking at these inaction regrets, it made me think of this show, this Japanese show, I've only watched an episode or two of it, so I can't give you a full review, but it's on Netflix. The Japanese title of the show is Yareta Kamo Iinkai. The very unwieldy English translation they have given to the show is the Could Have Gone All The Way Committee.
Emily: Love that.
Dedeker: If it's still on Netflix, go check it out, but the whole premise of the show, I guess I would call it magical realism. The whole premise of the show is that you go before-- every episode, there's a character who goes before a panel of experts-
Jase: Oh, wow.
Dedeker: -and this person will describe a situation from their past where when they look back on it, they're like, "Maybe I could've slept with this person. I don't know. I'm not sure if I was reading the room right or-
Emily: Is it all about sleeping with?
Dedeker: -the situation was right." Yes, a lot of that-
Jase: Sleeping, come out what?
Dedeker: -is yareta kamo is literally you could've done it.
Emily: Got it.
Jase: Okay. I didn't realize it was that kind of-
Dedeker: That kind of yaru, yes.
Jase: Okay.
Dedeker: It's like people present their case, "This was the situation. This is how old I was. This is what the other person did or said," and then the committee discusses it and then comes to a conclusion about whether or not, yes, you totally could've done it-
Jase: You could have done it.
Dedeker: -or no, you probably couldn't have done it.
Emily: Then what?
Jase: Goodness gracious. That's it. That's the show.
Dedeker: Right. Then people get closure. I guess people get closure, I suppose. Like I said, I've only watched two episodes and it seems-
Emily: Oh God.
Dedeker: -like it's maybe about the person who brought it before the panel, they just get to know. They get a question answered. They get a mystery of their life maybe solved for them. Would you be interested in that?
Emily: I don't think those people know the reality of the situation definitively one way or the other, but it's kind of cute.
Dedeker: It's magical realism.
Emily: Okay, fine.
Jase: Magical realism. Yes.
Emily: Okay. Wait, so it's not a real thing, it's just---
Dedeker: No. It's a fictional show. No, people are not going for an actual panel of experts.
Emily: Got it. The committee somehow has this omniscient idea of the world and-- I don't know.
Jase: They're sort of a magical committee.
Dedeker: Yes. They're like a magical committee.
Emily: Yes. I know all that has happened and yes, I say one way or another.
Dedeker: They're not quite omniscient, because if they were omniscient, they would just know. They'd have perfect knowledge. They'd be, you could or you couldn't. They have discussed it.
Emily: Omniscient light. Okay.
Dedeker: Yes. They have to discuss it and analyze the situation and then they come to a conclusion.
Emily: Cool.
Jase: Wow.
Dedeker: Anyway, go watch the show, I suppose, and then you can tell us if you understand how it works.
Jase: This is interesting. I do wonder about this study a little bit, because, again, thinking back to that Harvard wellbeing study and the happiness that people would think about later in life, like the things they look back on and are happy about, and similarly the things they would look back on and regret, I wonder if those would be different than this study, which perhaps was done on younger people, we're not quite sure, because I wonder if that gender bias might shift over time as well.
Emily: I have people I wish I could have slept with but I didn't.
Dedeker: Oh, me too, and the opposite.
Emily: Oh, definitely the opposite.
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: We have an additional study that I love the name of. It's called How Do I Regret? Let me count my alternatives: Regret and Decision Making in Intimate Relationships by Mattson, Franco-Watkins, and Cunningham, and his was published in 2012 in the Journal of Psychology. Now, caveat, right off the bat, this was a study of primarily young white female undergraduates. Apparently, other people can't have regrets about intimate relationships that they .
Dedeker: No, they can, it's just that this certain group of people were just very easy to-
Emily: To find-
Dedeker: -to find.
Emily: -and talk about their regrets.
Dedeker: It wasn't only women. There were men, too, but the percentage was heavily skewed in favor of female undergrads.
Emily: Got it. They found that people who were satisfied in their relationship but had an attractive new potential partner expressed more regrets about their current partner. This regret made them more likely to say they would hypothetically leave their current partner. Yikes. Okay. Also, people who were less satisfied in their relationship expressed regrets about their current partner even if they didn't have a new potential partner. This regret also made them more likely to say they would leave.
Jase: They also found that people who were satisfied in their relationship and then didn't have a new potential partner expressed the least amount of regret about their current partner. They were the least likely to say they would leave as well, and that the regret people felt about their current partner predicted whether they said they would leave, even after accounting for how satisfied they were or whether they had new alternatives.
In summary, the study found that thinking you chose the wrong person makes you more likely to say that you would leave your relationship, and that this regret matters a lot even if someone's pretty happy or doesn't have a new person lined up, and that the more people regretted their choice of partner, the more they wanted to hypothetically switch regardless of their actual satisfaction level or available alternatives. Although those things did influence it, I guess they found that the regret was the key piece more than just the options or the satisfaction.
Emily: It sounds like they need some non-monogamy in their lives.
Dedeker: That's what I wanted to ask about, is do you think that a compulsory monogamy culture encourages the potential for those feelings of regret around partner choice?
Jase: 100%.
Emily: Yes, I do. I think that this idea that, "If I have a scarcity mindset of there's only one person that I get to be with at a time, and if they are not everything that I could possibly want, and I see on the horizon this other person that might be more attractive to me in a variety of ways, then I regret being with this person that doesn't feel good to me in this whatever way it may be, and I want to go off to be with this other person who hypothetically could be better for me," yes, if that was out of the equation entirely, if it's like, "Yes, I'll be with both people," then, sure, I'm assuming that regret would maybe be gone a little bit. Maybe not entirely, but probably a little.
Dedeker: Now, this is just based on my own personal lived experience, because I've been non-monogamous-
Emily: Forever.
Dedeker: -for over-- forever, not actually forever, but over a decade, and I have had some periods of time where even though I have multiple partners, I may feel regret about my investment in a particular partner. I may still have this feeling like, "Oh, I think I chose the wrong person,"-
Emily: Interesting.
Dedeker: -in the sense of I regret that I'm spending my time in this relationship. I regret that I'm spending my emotional energy in this relationship, even if I'm non-monogamous and, sure, I have the potential to date whoever I want, or whatever, but that's not always the solution. If I'm dissatisfied in a relationship, it's not always the solution to be like, "Whatever, I'll go find someone else who can meet my need to have a good relationship, or whatever." Now, I do think it's a different flavor from what monogamous people may experience because I think the stakes are definitely higher in monogamy and there's more of this sense of you got to find the one, and maybe you picked the wrong one, uh-oh, what are you going to do about that?
Jase: I think that the compulsory monogamy part of it, sure, like you said, the regret of, "Oh, I've invested this time and effort into this relationship that's maybe not giving back to me or isn't a good one to have done that with," that, "Yes, I think the stakes are a lot higher when in order for me to invest in this relationship, I had to intentionally divest from any other relationship that I might have had going on, and that I couldn't have been spending any time in those," that's the whole narrative about I wasted X number of years of my life where it encompasses those entire years rather than maybe just those hours or those weekends or whatever that I spent with that particular partner. I do think it amplifies it, but I think that there's also just this-- it's just the whole narrative of the one and the magical thinking about relationships. If you think about romantic movies, how almost always the story goes, someone's with a person that's not good for them, they stop being with that person to end up with a person that's better for them.
Emily: Totally.
Jase: It's like this trading-up mentality. When I think about movies that don't follow that pattern, they're quite rare. Actually, the first one that comes to mind is Sleepless in Seattle, where in that one, he's happily married-
Emily: She is with--
Jase: Not her, him.
Emily: Oh.
Jase: His wife dies, and then he ends up meeting someone new and he thought that he couldn't. It's like, okay, it's not about that. Then on her side, it's not that that relationship's bad, and they have this amicable break-up, but, yes, there is a little bit of that trading-up mentality, so not perfect.
Emily: Although she doesn't know who this guy is at all, but whatever, he's .
Jase: Sure. A very swift decision.
Dedeker: We can unpack Sleepless in Seattle a whole other time.
Emily: Yes. It's stalking you.
Dedeker: I freaking love that film.
Emily: I know.
Jase: Yes, it's great. With that, we're going to move on to the second part of this episode, where we get into the World Regret Survey and how we can actually take some steps to apply regret better in our lives, but we're going to take a quick break to talk about how you can support this show. We love being able to put this content out into the world every week that's available to everyone in the world for free. The way that we do that is through our sponsors and through people contributing to us directly by joining our community. Please take a moment, check out the sponsors. If any are interesting to you, go check them out, and, of course, go to multiamory.com/join to join our community there.
Dedeker: We're back and I want to introduce to you the World Regret Survey. Daniel Pink, who I mentioned at the top of the episode, he created the World Regret Survey, which enabled him to create this huge database of-- now it's up to more than 23,000 regrets-
Emily: That's incredible.
Dedeker: -from people, yes, submitted by people in 109 countries. If you go to worldregretsurvey.com, you can still fill out the survey yourself, but what I find most interesting to do on the site is you can pull up a world map and you can click on different countries or even different states and it will show you an anonymous regret that somebody submitted. It just gives their age, their gender, and, of course, their location. I found that super fascinating just clicking through. It was on the one hand sad seeing all these people, everything from people expressing, "I stayed in this horrible marriage for so long. I really regret that I didn't get a divorce sooner" or this person expressing, "I wish that I'd started doing something about climate change earlier in my life,"-
Jase: Wow.
Dedeker: -or even one from a-
Emily: Wow.
Dedeker: -16-year-old about, "I got into a fight at school last week and I really wish I hadn't done that." It's sad stuff, but I also found it a little bit comforting. I think because of that whole pluralistic ignorance thing that I can carry around this assumption that, "Oh, I feel my regrets more deeply than anybody else or I have more regrets or I've done more bad things than maybe the average person has," and then to see other people sharing their regrets actually felt a little bit comforting. It was like there was solidarity. It was like the sense of like, "Oh, wow, we are all human after all."
Emily: You're not alone.
Dedeker: Yes, that you're not alone. If you're not already in too much of a bummer mood, I'd highly recommend going to worldregretsurvey.com and you can fill it out if you want or you can just click around and see what other people are sharing. Anyway, Pink analyzed all of this data that he got and he found that there were four recurring themes. He organized all of these different regrets from people around the world into four major categories. Just a really quick rundown of those four categories and then we're going to give examples and explain them, he found that there were foundational regrets, opportunity regrets, moral regrets, and connective regrets.
Jase: Starting off with foundational regrets, these are things like, "If only I did the work," like not getting a particular education, or not starting to learn a particular skill earlier, or not taking better care of my health, or not expressing myself better or expressing my identity more authentically.
Dedeker: That was something that came up in the examples when I was clicking around is people sharing, "I was closeted until my 40s and then I was finally able to come out as being a bisexual man," for instance, "and I really regret I didn't do that sooner." I work with a lot of clients who maybe come to a different type of relationship, whether it's polyamory or swinging or something like that and same thing, like, "I'm in my 50s. This wasn't something that seemed like an option to me when I was in my 20s and I really wish that it had been because this feels like my authentic self." Those are those foundational regrets that are not just about wishing you'd put in work earlier in your life, but also about these core aspects of one's identity that maybe got lost in the shuffle.
Emily: The next one is opportunity regrets, things like, "If only I took the chance," and kind of what I was talking about right off the top of the episode, passing up a chance to work or study abroad or saying no to an exciting but scary job opportunity like Dedeker talked about, or just moving to one part of the country rather than the other. Things like that, opportunities that could have happened and that you didn't take in the moment.
Dedeker: I think some of those could be related to relationships also where it could've-
Emily: Sure.
Dedeker: -been, "I should have chatted that person up when they were around. I shouldn't have chickened out and decided to not talk to them," or, "Maybe I should have said yes when that person wanted to be in a relationship with me rather than telling them no or that I couldn't."
Jase: The next one is moral regrets, which is, "If only I'd done the right thing." This is something like lying to a partner or not telling them the truth soon enough, cheating in the past. I'm assuming this means relationship cheating, but I also imagine cheating on a test or something like that.
Dedeker: Yes. That's true.
Jase: Then not standing up for someone. Like my story with my little brother in second grade, that kind of thing of, "I wish I'd done it differently because it would have been the right thing to do."
Emily: The last one is connective regrets, so things like, "If I only reached out," losing touch with friends or never reconciling with someone after a falling out or not connecting with someone before they moved away or passed away. That's definitely one for me, a person I've talked about before on this show who died in my early adulthood. I had the opportunity to potentially reach out or just see her a month before she died and I didn't take that opportunity when I was in town briefly for college and then she died less than a month later and I definitely regret that. I don't know if it would have made a difference, but I do wish that I had taken that opportunity instead of saying no.
Jase: I've found that in looking through the World Regret Survey, there are a fair number of those of some kind of regret about not asking my parent a particular question before they passed away, or not reaching out to a sibling or a friend or someone who we had a falling out 17 years ago, or whatever it was, that I do see those come up quite a bit when I'm just shuffling through random regrets.
Dedeker: On this last one, I really love this particular line from an interview with the author where he said that, as he was analyzing this data and specifically looking at these connective regrets that he was reading all these people's stories and being like, "Gosh, why don't they just reach out to this person? Why don't they just repair with this person?" Then he realized, "Oh, that's something that I'm bad at too. I have actually a lot of people that I'm not reaching out to or friends where I'm not repairing the friendship or things like that."
He said for him, after going through this research, he said, "If I'm at a juncture where I'm saying, 'Should I reach out or should I not reach out?' I know the answer. Always reach out," which I thought is really beautiful. I don't say that just to mean to pressure somebody into reaching out to someone who's been horrible to them. You don't have to repair or make amends with someone if it's not appropriate. However, if that's not the case, I think this is a nice rubric, that it's probably better for you to reach out, reach out and say, "I'm sorry," reach out and say, "Hey, can we revisit that thing that happened," or even reach out to say, "Actually, I still want to have a connection with you in some kind," like that probably it's going to be better to reach out rather than to not.
Jase: Yes, I think that's worth clarifying. If there's a question, if you're on the fence about it, then reach out.
Dedeker: Or something that you need to say, I think.
Jase: Yes, but I just mean, compared to that, "I have no interest in connecting with this person, yet everyone tells me that I should and I'll regret it if I don't," yes, I do think you don't need to have that pressure either. In this situation he's talking about, is that like, "Oh, I want to, but I don't know. Should I? I don't know," then it's that, like, "Yes, just do it," because you'll be much less likely to regret doing it than not doing it. What do we do about regret here? Pink developed a three-step process for what he calls healthily investing in regret. What kind of returns on investment will we get?
Dedeker: He has this funny metaphor that he talks about your emotional investment portfolio and that you need to diversify your emotional investment portfolio, and I think the whole point being that it's okay to let yourself feel even negative emotions as well in a healthy way if you can.
Jase: You got to have a nice proportion of stocks and also bonds to diversify investment.
Dedeker: Exactly. You got it.
Jase: Okay, great. Step one is undo it. This applies in situations where you've done something that you later regretted. You can "undo it" by reaching out, offering an apology to the person that you've wronged, or reaching out to that person that you fell out of contact with, like we were just talking about, but this isn't always easy to do. This isn't always an option, which is how we'll get to step two.
Just to hang on this one for just a second is that idea that I mentioned way back in the beginning of this episode of how regret can change our decisions and that things aren't so permanent as we sometimes think they are. Not just with life choices or things that we want to do, but also things like this of, "I did the wrong thing and I regret that," you can't go back in time and undo that as much as we fantasize about it, but there's still something that you might be able to do for somebody. If that isn't possible, go on to step two.
Dedeker: Step two is to "at least it." Now, this comes from this idea of you're like, "Okay, this bad thing happened, but at least yada, yada, yada." It's finding a new purpose, finding meaning, or finding some silver lining within a decision or an event that you regret. An example being maybe you have come to a point where you regret that you went to medical school. Maybe it's like, "It's not something that I actually wanted to do and now I'm in a career path that's not actually making me happy and I regret making that choice, but at least when I was at medical school, I found the love of my life there that I'm happily married to right now."
I can imagine that, I think like we were doing at the top of the episode, that, "If I'd picked a different life path, maybe I wouldn't have had this amazing relationship. Maybe I wouldn't have had all these positive experiences and all these wonderful memories that I have with this person." The at leasting portion, again, it's finding a silver lining and also finding the places of gratitude for the regretful experience.
Emily: Finally, analyze and strategize. Ask yourself, "What lessons can I learn from my regret and what can I do differently now that will prevent me from having more regrets in the future?" I think that's the really positive part of regret that we've been talking about all throughout the episode is that if you can take what you learned from the regret and let it help you moving forward, then you can turn that into a positive experience.
For example, if you regret not spending more time connecting with a loved one before they died, that can highlight a new action plan. You can say, "Okay, I'm going to cherish the time that I have with the people around me and never take it for granted," or if you regret not opening up and being more vulnerable with a partner, that can clarify your values. You can realize, "Hey, moving forward, I'm going to take emotional risks in my relationships and open my heart sooner rather than later."
Jase: That is the one strategy I've found has most effectively helped me to get out of those rumination cycles when I think back of, "Oh, I wish I'd said that thing or I wish I'd done this," is if I can express it in this way. That's interesting that this is part of his strategy is the times I've been able to let it rest at least a little bit is by saying, "Okay, now I've learned this," pinning down for myself what the lesson was and even telling it to someone else can help me to stop having to relive it so many times in my head.
Dedeker: Totally. Totally. Time for some homework for everybody listening-
Emily: Uh-oh.
Dedeker: -because this is our last episode of the year. It's time to go out with New Year's resolutions and in with your old regrets. This exercise is to write down your three biggest regrets from the past year. Now, this has been the top of my mind. I asked Jase this question randomly at the kitchen counter the other day. I ask some of my clients this randomly, and everyone's a little put off by it, but I'm like, "No, really, it's cool. Promise." You're going to write down your three biggest regrets from the past year and then you can take them through that three-step process.
Again, number one being undo it or at least it or so analyze and strategize, and then just see what comes out the other side of that process, that maybe this is going to help you realize, "Oh, I can take a different strategy with this coming year," or, "Oh, I'm going to do some different actions this year. I'm going to make a plan this year or I'm going to set this intention for this coming year so that I don't repeat these regrets so that I can glean the lesson from these regrets and affect some kind of positive change moving forward."
I also think that looking at our regrets is a really wonderful window into what our values are and what is actually important to us. Sometimes that can be a little fuzzy and hard to feel out and sometimes looking at the things that you regret can offer a lot of clues as to what's actually important to you, which I think is a really important piece of self-knowledge that everyone should dive into. All right, folks, we made it to the end of the episode, I hope that you don't regret.
Jase: If you do regret it, we hope you learn something from that.