Coping With Regret

Ever tried a Russian salad? No, not the authentic recipe, but the desi version of it we randomly compose in our brown desi households. Remember how appetizing it looked in the YouTube recipe tutorial? But once you take that single bite…your face cringes and tongue gags. Your taste buds reek from the eccentric flavors of vegetable and fruit, swaths of mushy mayonnaise having deluded you into believing it would be worth it.

Your throat tightens and struggles to swallow. Your thoughts run on something around these parameters: “It really was not as delicious as that chef did it!”. A salty aftertaste remains in your taste buds even after the water washing off the food: Bingo! The taste of regret.    

Regret is a universal emotional response experienced when the “outcome of a decision is worse than the option foregone” (Towers, Williams, Hill, Phillip and Flett, 2016). In the course of a lifetime, we all undergo through regret, both major and minor. Something we all relate to well: “If only I had not binge watched that Viking series all weekend, I could have studied for this final exam!”. Or something more close to home: “I wish I had not trusted so and so. It was the greatest mistake of my life!”. 

It is a form of counterfactual thinking. Imagining all the ways any event in your life could have gone down differently. Regret is the trigger to a rollercoaster of disappointment and self-guilt. 

You remember that terribly awful sensation that sinks into the pit of your stomach when regret overwhelms your entire being? The answer to that is because, by nature, it indicates that there is something you could have done. Some choice you could have made, or an action you could have taken that would have made something positive occur or even averted something dreadful. An endless cycle of “What If’s? Could have. Should have” of the infinite “somethings”.

Fortunately, while you cannot avoid regret altogether, there are coping strategies you can employ to minimize these feelings and channel constructively to instead foster change and growth.

 Here are 5 tips I find handy for coping when regret comes strolling around the corner:

 1.    Ditch the “I’ll never do that again” thinking: 

If you've fallen into specific traps dozens of times before, it's not likely that you'll never do those things again. Instead of promising to never make the same mistake again, acknowledge that you need strategies for gradually improving your habits or limiting the negative consequences when you have failures of self-control.

2.    Acknowledge what you are feeling: 

Instead of following the “No regrets” popular mantra for many, be realistic and true to yourself. When you acknowledge your emotions instead of denying them, it helps prompt you to think about strategies you could use to minimize the pain of future experiences of that emotion.

3.    Believe in your capacity to grow:

 Instead of becoming excessively hesitant or avoidant, have more faith in yourself. Just because you made some less than ideal decisions does not mean you're doomed to permanent failure in any one area.

4.    Seek little thinking hacks to help you with your patterns: 

Shifts in your thinking can help prevent you from repeating the same mistakes quite so often. 

5.    Give yourself a suitable space of time to absorb your feelings: 

Subtle balancing must happen. Overthinking isn't helpful—but neither is attempting to just brush your feelings aside. Instead, according to the situation of either a small or larger regret, the more you can leave your emotions alone to just work themselves out, the better. If feelings of regret pop up and pester you intermittently, you can cope with that. 

At the end of the day, emotions are like that. They're designed to come and then go away. When emotions become sticky, it's usually because we're feeding them in some way, through rumination, cruel self-criticism, or avoidance.

If you allow your emotions to naturally work themselves out, that's often more efficient and effective than trying to do something to "make" them go away, which can easily backfire.