Speaker 1: Pushkin. I don't think we've done a very good job
Speaker 1: equipping people with how to deal with negative emotions. I
Speaker 1: think at some level we've sold them a bill of
Speaker 1: goods about the need to be positive all the time,
Speaker 1: and what we should be doing is saying, yeah, have
Speaker 1: lots of positive emotions, they make life fantastic, but you're
Speaker 1: going to have some negative emotions. And these negative emotions
Speaker 1: are adaptive, they're functional if you know how to treat them.
Speaker 1: That's best selling author Dan Pink, who believes that negative
Speaker 1: emotions can be a force for good in our lives.
Speaker 1: Dan is most interested in the emotion of regret, which
Speaker 1: is the focus of his book The Power of Regret,
Speaker 1: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. But it took Dan
Speaker 1: a while to figure out why regret was such a
Speaker 1: valuable emotion. You know, reading through all these regrets every
Speaker 1: day here in my office, why was I not more
Speaker 1: bummed out? I got these people opening up their hearts
Speaker 1: and telling me the mistakes that they made and how
Speaker 1: terrible they feel about it. Why did they not bring
Speaker 1: me down? And I finally, over time realized that when
Speaker 1: people tell you what they regret the most, they're telling
Speaker 1: you what they value the most. On today's episode, how
Speaker 1: to transform our relationship with regret to live happier and
Speaker 1: more fulfilling lives. I'm Maya Shunker, and this is a
Speaker 1: slight change of plants, a show about who we are
Speaker 1: and who we become in the face of a big change.
Speaker 1: So I guess I'll start Dan by talking about how
Speaker 1: much I loved this very visceral description of regret that
Speaker 1: you share in your book. You call it the stomach
Speaker 1: churning feeling that the present would be better, in the
Speaker 1: future brighter, if only you hadn't chosen so poorly, decided
Speaker 1: so wrongly, or acted so stupidly in the past. Of
Speaker 1: all the feelings to study, why did you choose this
Speaker 1: one to examine in particular? Because my stomach was churning,
Speaker 1: because I had that emotion and I wasn't sure what
Speaker 1: to do about it, And at some level I was
Speaker 1: at a point in my life where, to my surprise,
Speaker 1: I had Mila john By, I had a room to
Speaker 1: look back, and like many people who look backward, I
Speaker 1: look backward and I see, Oh, if only I had
Speaker 1: been kinder, if only I had taken more risks, if
Speaker 1: only I had worked harder if only I had done
Speaker 1: that rather than that, And my stomach was churning in
Speaker 1: a way that made me want to talk about it.
Speaker 1: And when I very tenderly began mentioning it to other people,
Speaker 1: I discovered that everybody wanted to talk about regret, and
Speaker 1: that our perception of this emotion and what it meant
Speaker 1: to people was very different from how it lived in
Speaker 1: people's hearts and heads. Yeah, I love that. I think
Speaker 1: you probably identified there was something counterintuitive we might discover
Speaker 1: if you were to go down that path. Before we
Speaker 1: analyze how regret affects our lives, I first want to
Speaker 1: recognize just how remarkable it is that we as humans
Speaker 1: are even capable of feeling this thing called regret. I mean,
Speaker 1: as a cognitive scientist, I'm always marveling at human abilities,
Speaker 1: but this one, in particular kind of knoxster socks off.
Speaker 1: You say that our ability to feel regret depends on
Speaker 1: at least two pretty complex mental abilities. Do you mind
Speaker 1: painting a picture of what those are? Sure? The two
Speaker 1: mental abilities are time travel and storytelling. So time travel
Speaker 1: is essential in our ability to experience regret. If you
Speaker 1: think about this, So suppose that somebody has a regret
Speaker 1: about marrying Steve rather than Bob. I married Steve, and
Speaker 1: I should have married Bob if only I'd marry Bob.
Speaker 1: All right, So the thing about that, so what are
Speaker 1: you doing. You're getting into a time machine and your
Speaker 1: traveling back in time to when you first got to
Speaker 1: know Steve and Bob. Now, that itself is pretty amazing
Speaker 1: that we can travel through time in our heads. That's
Speaker 1: amazing in itself. But wait, there's more, because what we
Speaker 1: do is we go back and imagine what happened, but
Speaker 1: then rewrite the story, essentially negate what really happened, overwrite
Speaker 1: it with our own tail. Hey I'm going to marry Bob.
Speaker 1: That's amazing too. But wait, there's more, because then we
Speaker 1: get back in our time machine and come back to
Speaker 1: the present, and suddenly the present looks entirely different because
Speaker 1: we've reconfigured the past. And so that's an incredible cognitive ability.
Speaker 1: This ability of counterfactual thinking. Counterfactual thinking is when we
Speaker 1: imagine a situation that runs counter to the actual facts.
Speaker 1: So counterfactual thinking can be it rained yesterday, if only
Speaker 1: it were sunny yesterday, that's counterfactual thinking. How would my
Speaker 1: life be different if it were sunny yesterday. It's one
Speaker 1: reason why I mean, as a a scientists, you know
Speaker 1: that little kids can't do this. Their brains are not
Speaker 1: fully developed enough to do this kind of processing. So
Speaker 1: I love to dig into the fact that kids can't
Speaker 1: do this because it is fascinating from a child development perspective. Absolutely. So.
Speaker 1: This is an experiment done by a couple of developmental
Speaker 1: psychologists and what they did is they told kids a
Speaker 1: story about two boys. One was named Bob and one
Speaker 1: was named David. Now these boys live near each other,
Speaker 1: and each day Bob and David would each ride their
Speaker 1: bikes to school and they would take a path that
Speaker 1: went around a pond. Now, you can go around the
Speaker 1: right side of the pond to get to school, or
Speaker 1: you can go around the left side of the pond
Speaker 1: to get to school, and both paths are equidistant. It's
Speaker 1: the same length, the same amount of time. But every
Speaker 1: day Bob goes around the right side of the pond
Speaker 1: and David goes around the left side of the pond. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what they tell the kids is, this is the
Speaker 1: following story. One morning, Bob rides around the right side
Speaker 1: of the pond, but unbeknownst to Bob, a tree has fallen,
Speaker 1: smacking itself into the center of the path, and Bob
Speaker 1: collides with the branch. He falls off the bike, He
Speaker 1: hurts himself and is late to school. The left side
Speaker 1: of the path was fine now that same morning, David
Speaker 1: who gets up. I guess a little bit later, David
Speaker 1: who always takes the left side of the pond. He says, no,
Speaker 1: what today, I want to take the right side of
Speaker 1: the pond. David also hits the branch, he gets thrown
Speaker 1: off his bike, He's injured two and he is late
Speaker 1: for school. And so the question that these researchers asked
Speaker 1: these young children is who would be more upset about
Speaker 1: riding along the path that went around the right side
Speaker 1: of the pond. Bob who does it every day, David
Speaker 1: who just did it that one day, or would they
Speaker 1: feel the same? So five year olds said, ah, they'd
Speaker 1: be the same. They would be totally bombed out because
Speaker 1: they hit a branch and fell out their bike and
Speaker 1: relate to school. But seven year olds realized that it
Speaker 1: was actually David who would be more upset because he
Speaker 1: deviated from his ordinary path. He'd be more likely to
Speaker 1: feel regret. In this case, exactly, David would feel more
Speaker 1: regret because a seven year old is saying, if only
Speaker 1: David had taken the left side of the pond, he
Speaker 1: would have avoided that branch and gotten to school safely
Speaker 1: and on time. You know, five year olds and seven
Speaker 1: year olds are only two years apart, but a lot
Speaker 1: goes on in that time for these young brains to
Speaker 1: acquire the strength and the muscularity to perform this kind
Speaker 1: of mental trapeze act that we're talking about, where you're
Speaker 1: swinging back and forth between past and present, between reality
Speaker 1: and imagination. That's a very hard act to perform. And
Speaker 1: you need the muscle memory, you need the strength, you
Speaker 1: need the dexterity, and that happens somewhere probably between the
Speaker 1: ages of five and seven. Yeah. Man, it's so funny.
Speaker 1: I'm literally in this moment, I'm feeling star struck by
Speaker 1: our own minds, so part of me while I just
Speaker 1: have a moment. It's incredible. Though I'm such a nerd.
Speaker 1: I'm with you. I'm astonishing what our minds can do.
Speaker 1: I mean, it should, honestly, it should take our breath away.
Speaker 1: That is when I was reading the Neuroscience and the
Speaker 1: cognitive science. It's like, Wow, our brains are awesome. They're
Speaker 1: a little glitchy and certain circumstances, but it's a pretty
Speaker 1: good piece of equipment. You know. I'm not returning it
Speaker 1: to the factory. I've said. I've said before, I feel
Speaker 1: like we as humans are so hard on ourselves, but
Speaker 1: actually we should just feel like we're crushing it every
Speaker 1: moment of our existence, just by virtue of existing and
Speaker 1: doing like nine percent of the things we do on
Speaker 1: any given day. So, you know, who needs celebrity sightings? Dan,
Speaker 1: When you got the human brain, That's what I say,
Speaker 1: you can get absolutely Just pull up your just pull
Speaker 1: up your your MRI. You'll and you'll see that's that's
Speaker 1: your celebrity sighting for the day. That's exactly right. Um okay.
Speaker 1: So to summarize the Bob and David's study, we see
Speaker 1: that five year olds are able to identify, of course,
Speaker 1: that Bob and David are both experiencing negative emotions, right,
Speaker 1: They're probably feeling sad, there might be a little concerned
Speaker 1: about the bruises they have. Then there's this huge developmental
Speaker 1: milestone where for the first time we seem to understand
Speaker 1: intuitively that David would feel more of this thing called
Speaker 1: regret than Bob would. And so with that in mind,
Speaker 1: you know, there's lots of negative emotions we feel, and
Speaker 1: one of the things you do in your book is
Speaker 1: you differentiate regret from some of these other negative emotions.
Speaker 1: I'm curious to hear what you see as the necessary
Speaker 1: ingredients for feeling regret as opposed to another kind of
Speaker 1: negative emotion. What race You're very different? Are two things.
Speaker 1: It's compare and it is blame essentially, So with regret,
Speaker 1: we compare one set of circumstances to another set of circumstances.
Speaker 1: So regret doesn't exist in absolute terms. It exists in
Speaker 1: comparative terms, and so we're comparing one set of circumstances.
Speaker 1: It's a set of facts to another imagined set of facts.
Speaker 1: Perhaps even more important is blaming. Regret is your fault,
Speaker 1: all right, and that makes it different from other kinds
Speaker 1: of emotions. It makes it different from, say, the emotion
Speaker 1: of disappointment. I could feel disappointed that it's raining today,
Speaker 1: but I can't feel regret that it's raining because I
Speaker 1: don't control the skies. I can feel regret if I
Speaker 1: leave the house without an umbrella, and I know that
Speaker 1: it's raining because that's on me. But regret and disappointment,
Speaker 1: the big demarcation is agency. Regret is your fault. And
Speaker 1: for those listening who are as self critical as I am,
Speaker 1: this is also why regret stings so much, right because
Speaker 1: of this agency component. It just makes it such a
Speaker 1: painful feeling, right because you can't pin it on somebody else. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: now that we have a better handle on what regret
Speaker 1: is and the conditions that must be satisfied in order
Speaker 1: for us to feel regret, let's talk for a bit
Speaker 1: about how common it is for us to experience regret. Oh.
Speaker 1: Absolutely so. There's research and social psychology from years ago
Speaker 1: showing that in people's everyday conversations, the negative emotion that
Speaker 1: people expressed the most in everyday to conversations is regret.
Speaker 1: It was, in this particular piece of research the second
Speaker 1: most common emotion of any kind that they expressed, even
Speaker 1: after love. And one of the exciting things about this
Speaker 1: project was I was able to do some research of
Speaker 1: my own, and I was able to conduct a very
Speaker 1: large quantitative survey, the largest public opinion survey of American
Speaker 1: attitudes about regret ever conducted, and I asked people a
Speaker 1: bunch of questions, including the question how often do you
Speaker 1: look back on your life and wish you had done
Speaker 1: things differently? Now I agonize over the wording of that
Speaker 1: question because I wanted to describe regret without saying it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I didn't want to use the R word because
Speaker 1: there's such a stigma attached to the R word. And
Speaker 1: what we found is that eighty two percent of the
Speaker 1: US population did this thing at least occasionally. We have
Speaker 1: this performed idea that I have no regrets. I always
Speaker 1: look forward, I never look backward. But the proceuge of
Speaker 1: people who said they never do this was one percent.
Speaker 1: You know, in this culture, especially Western culture, where it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's all about positive emotions, all about positive feelings, Luke,
Speaker 1: with no regrets is the anthem that people are just
Speaker 1: screaming from the rooftops. One thing that really landed with
Speaker 1: me when reading your book, as you say, to live
Speaker 1: is to accumulate at least some regret. It is almost
Speaker 1: definitionally the case that if one has lived, they will
Speaker 1: feel regret. And I think there's actually a common element
Speaker 1: to that message. Yeah, I agree, I'll see that point
Speaker 1: and raise you and say that if you're feeling regrets
Speaker 1: actually a good sign. It's like, oh, my cognitive machinery
Speaker 1: is working. I am experiencing regret. If you don't experience
Speaker 1: a regret, truly, it's a sign of a potentially grave problem.
Speaker 1: You know. It's interesting, Dan, because when we engage in
Speaker 1: mental time travel and counterfactual thinking, we don't have to
Speaker 1: imagine how things could have gone better, right. We could
Speaker 1: instead imagine how things could have gone far worse. But
Speaker 1: what's interesting is that we as humans have a very
Speaker 1: strong bias towards the former, which helps explain why we
Speaker 1: so often regret things. And you capture this point really
Speaker 1: nicely when you talk about framing a thought in terms
Speaker 1: of at least versus if only yes. So, when we
Speaker 1: think about counterfactual thinking, there are two different varieties of it.
Speaker 1: One is an upward counterfactual. So you imagine how things
Speaker 1: could have been better if only I had become an
Speaker 1: accountant rather than an engineer. Everything in my life would
Speaker 1: be fantastic, Right, so you imagine a better scenario upward
Speaker 1: kund of factuals if only make us feel worse, but
Speaker 1: they can help us do better. But there's another kind
Speaker 1: of counterfactual, a downward counterfactual, where you imagine how things
Speaker 1: could have become worse, and so you say, oh, I
Speaker 1: shouldn't have married Edward, but at least I have these
Speaker 1: two great kids. You find the silver lining in that.
Speaker 1: What that does is that minimizes the sting. It makes
Speaker 1: you feel better, but it doesn't help you necessarily do better.
Speaker 1: And I think what's curious is that we're much more
Speaker 1: inclined to do the counterfactual thinking that makes us feel worse.
Speaker 1: Our brains are built for progress and efficiency, and they
Speaker 1: know that those upward counterfactuals, those if only while they hurt,
Speaker 1: they're going to make us better if we do it right.
Speaker 1: There's a really interesting study around Olympians and their response
Speaker 1: to winning different types of metals that I think illustrates
Speaker 1: this at least if only kind of thinking. Very well,
Speaker 1: do you mind sharing that study? This is a really
Speaker 1: really interesting study of Olympic medalists. And what they did
Speaker 1: is they showed a group of participants photographs of medalists
Speaker 1: on the Olympic platform, the gold medal winner, the silver
Speaker 1: medal winner, the bronze medal winner, except they blocked out
Speaker 1: the actual medals that these olympians won, and they had
Speaker 1: these participants who didn't know what the researchers were studying
Speaker 1: evaluate how happy the people looked, and they ranked the
Speaker 1: olympians based on how happy they were. And so, as
Speaker 1: we would expect, the person who won the gold medal
Speaker 1: looked the happiest, which makes sense, right, But then there
Speaker 1: was a bit of a surprise. The person who was
Speaker 1: the next happiest looking was the bronze medalist, and the
Speaker 1: silver medalist often didn't look all that happy, which is weird, right.
Speaker 1: You just want a silver medal in the Olympics. You
Speaker 1: should be pumped two And except they weren't. The bronze
Speaker 1: medalists were beaming. The bronze medalists in some cases, we're
Speaker 1: looking as happy as the gold medalist. And the way
Speaker 1: we explain this riddle is through counterfactual thinking. The bronze
Speaker 1: medalist is doing and at least a downward counterfactual. They're
Speaker 1: imagining how things could have been worse. The bronze medals
Speaker 1: is saying iron and bronze medal, which is great because
Speaker 1: at least it wasn't like that. Shmow finished fourth who's
Speaker 1: going home with no hardware but the silver medals is saying,
Speaker 1: if only I had they're a swimmer reached for the
Speaker 1: wall a little bit earlier. If only I had kicked
Speaker 1: a little harder, I would be wearing that gold medal
Speaker 1: instead of this crappy silver medal. Yeah. You know, naturally,
Speaker 1: regret gets a really bad rap, right, because as you've
Speaker 1: just described with that swimmer, and it's just such an
Speaker 1: unpleasant feeling that you make the case stand and I
Speaker 1: think a very convincing case that we should see regret
Speaker 1: as something we should embrace and learn from. And so,
Speaker 1: what are some of the positive effects that you feel
Speaker 1: regret can have when we engage with it in the
Speaker 1: right way. Yeah, And the key is that we have
Speaker 1: to engage with it in the right way. I think
Speaker 1: too often we're kind of conditioned to ignore regrets. Oh
Speaker 1: it's negative, don't even think about it. Just move on,
Speaker 1: look forward, don't look back. That's a bad idea. But
Speaker 1: sometimes I think if we're not equipped to deal with
Speaker 1: it properly, we get captured by our regrets. We wallow
Speaker 1: on them, we ruminate on them. Yeah, what we should
Speaker 1: be doing is listening to our regrets, confronting them, using
Speaker 1: them as signals, as data, as information. And when we
Speaker 1: do that, there are many many benefits. For instance, there's
Speaker 1: research and social psychologies showing that it can help make
Speaker 1: us better negotiators. You do a negotiation, you think about
Speaker 1: what you regret in that negotiation, you often do better
Speaker 1: in the next one. It can help us become better
Speaker 1: problem solvers, better strategists. There's even evidence that it can
Speaker 1: actually help us deepen sense of meaning in our lives.
Speaker 1: And so when we treat this emotion properly, and that's
Speaker 1: a big if we can use it as an engine
Speaker 1: for moving forward. Yeah, regrets really serving as a catalyst
Speaker 1: here right, for actually driving meaningful action. Sure, And I
Speaker 1: think I think what's I think what's puzzling here is
Speaker 1: to people is that, you know, a solution in some
Speaker 1: cases is to invite this negative emotion, not to bat
Speaker 1: it away, not to ignore it, but in some sense
Speaker 1: to invite it. And that seems a little counterintuitive because
Speaker 1: you're inviting something that feels bad. And the thing about
Speaker 1: regret is that regret can clarify what we value and
Speaker 1: instruct us on how to do better. And people like that,
Speaker 1: but it comes with discomfort. It comes with some amount
Speaker 1: of pain and people don't like that, but that's not
Speaker 1: the deal. It's a package deal. You've got to have both.
Speaker 1: And arguably I think that pain and discomfort is the
Speaker 1: source of the clarification and the instruction. Yeah, it's signaling
Speaker 1: to your brain that you've acted in a way that
Speaker 1: might conflict with value exact for example. Yep. There's also
Speaker 1: research you talk about in your book that when we
Speaker 1: engage with regret in a meaningful, constructive way, it can
Speaker 1: also increase our performance. Do you mind talking about some
Speaker 1: of the studies in this area, sure. I mean there's
Speaker 1: a lot of research in experimental psychology where you give
Speaker 1: people puzzles, especially anagrams, and what it shows in general
Speaker 1: is that you put people into a problem solving situation,
Speaker 1: they solve the problem, and then you ask them to
Speaker 1: reflect on what they regret doing or not doing in
Speaker 1: that problem solving exercise. Again, you're inviting this negative emotion.
Speaker 1: They often do better in the next round because they've
Speaker 1: felt bad. That bad feeling is a signal to the
Speaker 1: brain saying huh, maybe I should do things differently. It's
Speaker 1: a form of instruction, and so if you think about
Speaker 1: those puzzle solvers if they actually subscribe to the no
Speaker 1: regrets philosophy. They said, I screwed up this anagram. I
Speaker 1: did it slowly, I didn't get the right answer. But
Speaker 1: no regrets. I'm always positive, I never look backward. They're
Speaker 1: not going to get any better at performance on a
Speaker 1: whole array of problem solving skills. And how can regret
Speaker 1: deep in our sense of meaning? Well, I mean what
Speaker 1: it does in many cases that when we think about counterfactually,
Speaker 1: at some level, we sometimes will appreciate what we have,
Speaker 1: which deepens our sense of meaning. But it can also
Speaker 1: help clarify what we actually value in our lives. So
Speaker 1: there's one person I wrote about who regretted not spending
Speaker 1: time with her grandparents. Every winter of the grandparents would
Speaker 1: come and visit her, and she hated it. As a kid,
Speaker 1: she thought they were intruding, she didn't want to talk
Speaker 1: to them, she would standoffish, And when her grandparents passed away,
Speaker 1: she regretted it because she missed hearing their stories and
Speaker 1: hearing what their lives were about. And it actually prompted
Speaker 1: her to collect her own parents' stories because that feeling
Speaker 1: of regret spurred at least a quest for meaning and
Speaker 1: understanding of her own life and her own story. I
Speaker 1: want to dig in a bit to this notion of
Speaker 1: doing regret right, because I think this is so important.
Speaker 1: We want to make sure that we are not ignoring
Speaker 1: the negative feeling, ignoring the regret. We also want to
Speaker 1: make sure that we're not marinating in it, We're not
Speaker 1: ruminating in this unproductive way. But just as importantly, we
Speaker 1: need to draw the right conclusion from the regret. And
Speaker 1: we shouldn't code or regret as something that reflects this
Speaker 1: deep underlying flaw in our character and our personality. Instead,
Speaker 1: we should evaluate that behavior in isolation. Right. It's just
Speaker 1: a reflection of a behavior in a particular moment of time,
Speaker 1: and we shouldn't overgeneralize, which we as humans so often do,
Speaker 1: especially again hypercritical people. Oh my god, this must mean
Speaker 1: that I am a bad person. This must mean that
Speaker 1: I'm a terrible decision maker, or what have you. That
Speaker 1: is one of the secret to process and regret effectively.
Speaker 1: But I also think it's one of the secrets to
Speaker 1: leading a life where you're not torturing yourself. We say
Speaker 1: that if I made a mistake, I'm a bad person,
Speaker 1: rather than I did a stupid thing, and you're always
Speaker 1: better off evaluating the behavior rather than making some kind
Speaker 1: of broader assessment of the person. So there's a temporal
Speaker 1: aspect of it as well. You have to understand that
Speaker 1: any mistake that you make, any screw up, any regret,
Speaker 1: any blunder, is a moment in your life, not the
Speaker 1: full measure of your life. We're willing to make universal
Speaker 1: attributions about our entire lives based on a moment, always
Speaker 1: a negative moment, and essentially neglect the other ninety nine
Speaker 1: of our lives and our evaluation. Don't do that. That's
Speaker 1: a recipe for that's a recipe for unhappiness. And you know,
Speaker 1: when you explain this to people, they get it, and
Speaker 1: if you coach them, they can stop doing that. The
Speaker 1: problem is is that, I think it's a bigger problem
Speaker 1: is that I don't think we've done a very good
Speaker 1: job equipping people with how to deal with negative emotions.
Speaker 1: I think at some level we've sold them a bill
Speaker 1: of goods about the need to be positive all the time,
Speaker 1: and what we should be doing is saying, yeah, have
Speaker 1: lots of positive emotions. Positive emotions are great. They make
Speaker 1: life fantastic. But you're going to have some negative emotions.
Speaker 1: And these negative emotions are adaptive. They're functional if you
Speaker 1: know how to treat them. When we're back from the break,
Speaker 1: Dan teaches us how we should treat our regrets and
Speaker 1: why regrets about long lost romances and miss job opportunities
Speaker 1: are far more similar than we might think. And I
Speaker 1: come in with some hot takes about whether we're maybe
Speaker 1: putting too much weight on our deathbed regrets. We'll be
Speaker 1: back in a moment with a slight change of plans.
Speaker 1: As Dan Pink was researching regret, he first wanted to
Speaker 1: learn what people tend to regret. He launched the World
Speaker 1: Regret Survey and collected tens of thousands of regrets from
Speaker 1: people all over the world. Researchers have previously sorted regret
Speaker 1: into specific life categories, like romance regrets or education regrets,
Speaker 1: but when Dan analyzed the results of his survey, he
Speaker 1: realized these categories weren't telling the full story. What I
Speaker 1: found is that when you listen to what people are saying,
Speaker 1: what matters is not the domain of life. It's something
Speaker 1: else going on just beneath the surface. And the easiest
Speaker 1: way to make that clear is With an example, I
Speaker 1: was shocked by how many people who went to college,
Speaker 1: especially in America, regret not studying abroad. It blew my mind.
Speaker 1: And the reason they didn't study abroad is that, oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's kind of risky. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: I want to do that. And I was surprised by
Speaker 1: how salient that regret was. And then there were lots
Speaker 1: of people all over the world who had a regret
Speaker 1: that basically went like this, X years ago. There was
Speaker 1: someone who I really liked wanted to ask them out
Speaker 1: on a date, but I was too chicken to do that,
Speaker 1: and I've regretted it ever since. Okay, that's a romance regret.
Speaker 1: We've got an education regret. We've got a romance regret.
Speaker 1: Then I have lots of people all over the place
Speaker 1: who say, ah, I always wanted to start a business
Speaker 1: rather than staying in this dead end job, but I
Speaker 1: didn't have the guts to do that, and now I
Speaker 1: regret it. That's a career regret. But to my mind,
Speaker 1: those are all the same regret. They're in different domains
Speaker 1: of life, but they share a common root. And if
Speaker 1: the common root is this, you're at a juncture in
Speaker 1: your life. You can play it safe or you can
Speaker 1: take the chance. And most people regret not taking the chance.
Speaker 1: Not all the time. There are people who take the
Speaker 1: who took the chance and regret it because things went
Speaker 1: south on them. But for every one of those, there
Speaker 1: are dozens and dozens and dozens who have the opposite regrets.
Speaker 1: So that's one of the four core regrets. Boldness regrets
Speaker 1: if only I'd taken the chance, And let's stick into
Speaker 1: boldness of it, because this one's really interesting. You talk
Speaker 1: about the fact that when we're in our twenties right,
Speaker 1: what we would call in action regrets, so things that
Speaker 1: we didn't do an action regretting things we did do
Speaker 1: are roughly the same in number, but by the time
Speaker 1: we hit fifty, in action regrets are twice as likely
Speaker 1: to be felt than before. And help me understand why
Speaker 1: it is that as we age, we increase the ratio
Speaker 1: of the things we regret not having done then the
Speaker 1: things we have done. I think it's an interesting question.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure we know the full answer to that,
Speaker 1: but I think that we can speculate certain kinds of
Speaker 1: action regrets. We can find the silver lining in. We
Speaker 1: can do it. At least we can say, oh, I
Speaker 1: shouldn't have moved to Houston, but at least there is
Speaker 1: in a state and come technics okay, So you can
Speaker 1: find the silver lining in that. The other thing is
Speaker 1: that certain kinds of action regrets we can undo. If
Speaker 1: we fullied somebody, maybe we can make amends and make
Speaker 1: an apology. If we've stolen from somebody, maybe we can
Speaker 1: make restitution. I have one guy who I wrote about
Speaker 1: who got a tattoo that said no regrets, decided that
Speaker 1: he didn't like it and decided to have his tattoo removed.
Speaker 1: And so we can remove our tattoos. So with action regrets,
Speaker 1: we can we can make peace with them at some level.
Speaker 1: We can at least them, we can undo them. In
Speaker 1: action regrets, you can't do that. You typically can't find
Speaker 1: it at least and there's nothing to undo. Could you
Speaker 1: haven't done anything? So I think that's a big part
Speaker 1: of it. You know, in the research on aging, like
Speaker 1: Laura Carsonson's work, for example, she finds that as we
Speaker 1: get older, we tend to have fewer anxieties because there's
Speaker 1: just less future to be anxious about. And I do
Speaker 1: wonder if there's a parallel here, which is, as we
Speaker 1: get older, you know, the range of opportunity that lies
Speaker 1: ahead for us that we could potentially explore diminishes pretty considerably,
Speaker 1: and so that might make us lust after past moments
Speaker 1: when we actually did have opportunity but didn't take advantage
Speaker 1: of it. I think that's very plausible. I think that
Speaker 1: we do have a sense that many of us, not
Speaker 1: all of us, have a sense that when we're young,
Speaker 1: there are boundless opportunities, and then at some point, relatively
Speaker 1: early in our lives, we get a bracing reality check. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we've talked about boldness regrets. Do you mind talking
Speaker 1: about the three other categories? Sure? So one category is
Speaker 1: what I call foundation regrets. These are regrets that people
Speaker 1: have where they made small decisions or small mistakes early
Speaker 1: in life, no single one of which is consequential, but
Speaker 1: that accumulate into nasty consequences. So a very common one
Speaker 1: would be I spent too much and save too little,
Speaker 1: and now I'm broke. Now I have no money. And
Speaker 1: the same thing was true with health. You know, I
Speaker 1: didn't exercise, I didn't eat right, and it's not like
Speaker 1: for one day I did that. For years and now
Speaker 1: I am in ill health or woefully out of shape.
Speaker 1: So foundation regrets are if only I'd done the work.
Speaker 1: Moral regrets are if only I'd done the right thing.
Speaker 1: So you're at a juncture in your life. You can
Speaker 1: take the high road, you can take the low road.
Speaker 1: And when people take the low road, not everybody, but
Speaker 1: most of everybody regrets it because I think most of
Speaker 1: us are good and want to be good. And in
Speaker 1: that category, we had a lot of regrets about marital infidelity,
Speaker 1: a lot of a huge number of regrets about bullying.
Speaker 1: I couldn't believe how many regrets we had about bullying.
Speaker 1: Morality ends up being a little bit more complicated because
Speaker 1: people have different moral taste buds. And then finally, our
Speaker 1: connection regrets. These are regrets about relationships, and not only
Speaker 1: romantic relationships, but all the relationships in our lives. And
Speaker 1: what often happens is that these relationships that were intact
Speaker 1: come apart. And what I found is that many of
Speaker 1: these relationships come apart in very uncinematic ways. They just
Speaker 1: drift apart. And what happens is that one person wants
Speaker 1: to reach out. They say, oh, man, I was such
Speaker 1: good friends with Maya ten years ago, I really should
Speaker 1: reach out and say hi to her, and then we say,
Speaker 1: oh man, no, no, no, it's been ten years. That's
Speaker 1: going to be so awkward. And besides they don't want
Speaker 1: to hear to me, so and besides Mina doesn't want
Speaker 1: to hear from me. She doesn't care. And then we
Speaker 1: waited another few years, and then it's like, okay, and
Speaker 1: now it's thirteen years. Oh man, it's even more awkward
Speaker 1: to reach out. That ends up being a colossal mistake
Speaker 1: on both fronts, because it's when we do reach out,
Speaker 1: it's way less awkward than we think, and the other
Speaker 1: side almost always cares. I like that there's a signaling here,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, these categories that you've talked about,
Speaker 1: because we tend to regret them. What that teaches us
Speaker 1: is that those are the things we care most about
Speaker 1: in life. Yeah. I mean, I think that for me,
Speaker 1: a personal pultle I was trying to resolve, was, you know,
Speaker 1: reading through all these regrets every day here in my office,
Speaker 1: why was I not more bummed out? I got these
Speaker 1: people opening up their hearts and telling me the mistakes
Speaker 1: that they made and how terrible they feel about it.
Speaker 1: Why did they not bring me down? And I finally,
Speaker 1: over time realized that when people tell you what they
Speaker 1: regret the most, they're telling you what they value the most.
Speaker 1: So it is, as you say, this very powerful signal.
Speaker 1: If you think about all the decisions that any of
Speaker 1: us may today or yesterday, or this week or last week.
Speaker 1: I don't remember half of I don't remember most of them.
Speaker 1: But if you remember a decision or an indecision from
Speaker 1: a year ago, or five years ago or ten years ago,
Speaker 1: and it bugs you still, you got to pay attention
Speaker 1: to that. Man, that's a very strong signal. That is
Speaker 1: an airhorn screaming in your psyche telling you pay attention
Speaker 1: to me. It's telling me something, and it's what's telling
Speaker 1: us is this is a signal about what you value,
Speaker 1: and it's a signal about how to do better in
Speaker 1: the future. So let's see, Dan, I'm listening to this
Speaker 1: episode and I'm thinking to myself, Okay, Dan's convinced me
Speaker 1: I need to engage with my regret more proactively and
Speaker 1: also in this productive way. What are some strategies that
Speaker 1: you could give me the listener for taking a regret
Speaker 1: and actually turning it into something productive. When you have
Speaker 1: he agreat treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Recognize
Speaker 1: that your regrets are part of the human condition. That's
Speaker 1: a big part of it too. We have this kind
Speaker 1: of pluralistic ignorance where we think, oh my god, I'm
Speaker 1: the only person who regrets bullying. I'm the only person
Speaker 1: who regrets being too timid in my choices, when in fact,
Speaker 1: I got a database of nearly twenty two thousand people
Speaker 1: with your exact same regret. Another thing that we should do.
Speaker 1: I think there's a very strong argument to make for
Speaker 1: disclosing our regrets, even if it's only in private writing.
Speaker 1: I actually think the power of disclosure, even if we
Speaker 1: don't disclose it publicly is a conversion process, is in
Speaker 1: some ways a transmutation process, because emotions, by their nature
Speaker 1: are blobby, their abstractions, and that's what makes positive emotions
Speaker 1: feel good, but it's also what makes negative emotions feel bad.
Speaker 1: And when we write about our negative emotions, talk about
Speaker 1: our negative emotions, we convert these abstractions into concrete words,
Speaker 1: and those are just less menacing, and they can begin
Speaker 1: the sense making process and then we move forward. It's
Speaker 1: very important to draw a lesson to extract a lesson
Speaker 1: from our scroups from our regrets, the chat ledge is
Speaker 1: that we're terrible at solving our own problems. We're too
Speaker 1: caught up in the details. And I actually like the
Speaker 1: technique of using our crazily amazing brain's ability for time
Speaker 1: travel is essentially having a consultation with the U of
Speaker 1: ten years from now and asking the U of ten
Speaker 1: years from now what you should do, Because I think
Speaker 1: we can make a pretty safe bet what the U
Speaker 1: of ten years and now is going to care about?
Speaker 1: I want to Okay, So I think I have a
Speaker 1: broader question, just generally about regret, which is why it
Speaker 1: is we put so much weight on regrets that we
Speaker 1: may feel later in life. So there's this proverbial deathbed regret,
Speaker 1: and people often say, well, you know, Dan, when you're
Speaker 1: on your deathbed, are you really going to regret A?
Speaker 1: Aren't you going to regret B? Instead? And that calculus
Speaker 1: can really influence our present day decisions. And I want
Speaker 1: to challenge this thinking a bit because it seems to
Speaker 1: be grounded in the idea that the values we express
Speaker 1: at the end of our lives somehow represent a truer
Speaker 1: or more accurate expression of either what we care about
Speaker 1: or what we ought to care about. Right, it's prescriptive,
Speaker 1: and this way of thinking implies that there is just
Speaker 1: one constant, true set of things that we ought to
Speaker 1: care about. And another way to think about it, at
Speaker 1: different framing is that we are people whose values naturally
Speaker 1: change and evolve over time. And if you take that view,
Speaker 1: then there's no obvious reason why we should privilege the
Speaker 1: values of future Maya over present day Maya. Absolutely, and
Speaker 1: so this is one reason why there's a reason that
Speaker 1: I say ten years and not deathbed I am very
Speaker 1: skeptical of deathbed regrets. I'm skeptical of the accuracy of
Speaker 1: the reporting of them, because it's purely anecdotal. The numbers
Speaker 1: are not very vast. And also I don't think that
Speaker 1: what we're thinking in a moment of fog when we're
Speaker 1: about to perish from the earth is necessarily the clearest
Speaker 1: and highest expression of what we value. Exactly as you say, well, look,
Speaker 1: I'm already super happy if we're just constraining the time
Speaker 1: frame with which we view the future. So I'm on
Speaker 1: board with the like ten years from now, Maya. The
Speaker 1: deathbed stuff just drives me nuts, because, like you said,
Speaker 1: in our final moments, there's a lot of factors that
Speaker 1: are weighing into what we say we regret, what we
Speaker 1: think we should be saying about what we regret in
Speaker 1: order to maybe pass by people who live on planet Earth.
Speaker 1: I don't know, there's just lots of things. That's a
Speaker 1: very good point. That's one that I hadn't thought about,
Speaker 1: is that there could be a kind of performative side
Speaker 1: of it. There could be a kind of oh my god,
Speaker 1: I gotta get you know, I gotta get my last
Speaker 1: argument in here before the final decider decides whether I
Speaker 1: go up or down, if you have kind of apologize
Speaker 1: or make right with so and so. But I just
Speaker 1: think it's important in general, as much as we can
Speaker 1: value regret, to remember it is also just a feeling.
Speaker 1: Regret is a feeling that can be transient and can pass,
Speaker 1: and it's not always something we I say this only Dan,
Speaker 1: because regret often gets this trump card. It's like we're
Speaker 1: making a decision. We're trying to weigh costs and benefits.
Speaker 1: I don't really want a kid right now, but I
Speaker 1: think I might regret not having a kid later in
Speaker 1: the minute. Our society. Here's the word regret. It's like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, then go do the thing right. And
Speaker 1: so I just want to make sure we're not elevating
Speaker 1: it to too important a category, because, like a lot
Speaker 1: of other negative emotions, it is just a feeling. I
Speaker 1: think that's a fair point. And the other thing empirically
Speaker 1: is that there's a decent amount of evidence showing that
Speaker 1: if we over index on our anticipated regret, we end
Speaker 1: up making suboptimal decisions. We can end up making decisions
Speaker 1: that actually are a little bit more risk averse, because,
Speaker 1: as Dan Gilbert says, we end up buying emotional insurance
Speaker 1: we don't need and so and so and so. Anticipating
Speaker 1: regret is not a perfect decision making tool. This is
Speaker 1: why I think there's some nuance in it. I think
Speaker 1: one should anticipate what I think most people will regret
Speaker 1: in the future, but actually chill out on most stuff,
Speaker 1: and also recognize that some regrets are ephemeral. I'd love
Speaker 1: to end on a personal note. Dan, I'm wondering, you
Speaker 1: know you've been in the world of regret for I
Speaker 1: imagine several years now, right researching for this book, writing
Speaker 1: this book. What is something that you had long regreted,
Speaker 1: or you do still regret, but that you now see
Speaker 1: through a different lens. I felt pretty bad about certain
Speaker 1: regrets that I had with regard to kindness, and I
Speaker 1: never talked about them, but I had them. I harbored
Speaker 1: these regrets about kindness. Now it's a moral regret, although
Speaker 1: it's a peculiar kind of moral regret, because my moral
Speaker 1: regrets about kindness where regrets of inaction, not action. So
Speaker 1: they're not regrets about bullying people, but they're regrets about
Speaker 1: being in situations where people were not being treated well,
Speaker 1: where people were being left out or being made fun
Speaker 1: of or being excluded. And I didn't participate in that,
Speaker 1: but I saw it and I knew it was wrong,
Speaker 1: and I didn't do anything. And I have to say
Speaker 1: that has bugged me so much for so long, to
Speaker 1: the point where I kind of sublimated it. I said, Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't want to deal with this. And one of
Speaker 1: the things about reading through all these regrets is that
Speaker 1: I started seeing that regret among other people, and I've
Speaker 1: started in a weird way that made me feel better.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh my god, I'm not the only person
Speaker 1: who did this, and the other thing that it did
Speaker 1: is that if you listen to that, Okay, so this
Speaker 1: is a good example of how you process or regret.
Speaker 1: So I could feel that that kindness regret and I
Speaker 1: could say, no regrets. It's in the past. I'm going
Speaker 1: to look forward. I don't want to be negative. That's
Speaker 1: a bad idea. I could also say, oh my God,
Speaker 1: earlier in my life I wasn't as kind as I
Speaker 1: could be. I am just an wretched, awful, worthless individual.
Speaker 1: I am this the worst. That's a bad idea too.
Speaker 1: What I could what I could do instead is like, wow,
Speaker 1: twenty five years later, this is bugging me. This is
Speaker 1: something I need to pay attention to. And what it's
Speaker 1: teaching me is it's clarifying what I value in ways
Speaker 1: that I didn't realize. I guess I value kindness more
Speaker 1: than I expected. And it's instructing me on how to
Speaker 1: do better so that when you know, I try as
Speaker 1: much as I can when people are being excluded in
Speaker 1: way smaller large to say something, to do something to
Speaker 1: pull people in. I'm not saying I'm perfect in doing that,
Speaker 1: but that spear of regret is prompting me to do
Speaker 1: better in the future because I don't want to feel
Speaker 1: that feeling again, and that feeling is telling me what
Speaker 1: I value and I need to pay attention to that. Hey,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for listening. Please join next week for
Speaker 1: an episode that is really close to my heart. My guest,
Speaker 1: Christy Warren, is actually a Slight Change of Plans listener,
Speaker 1: and she reached out to me about her experiences working
Speaker 1: as a paramedic and firefighter for more than two decades.
Speaker 1: As a first responder, Christie made rescuing people her life's work,
Speaker 1: but she eventually had to learn to save herself when
Speaker 1: the psychological impact of the job became too much. Every
Speaker 1: time I got off work, I'd start crying on the
Speaker 1: way home. So this day I said, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to cry, Like I'm going to make it home and
Speaker 1: I'm not going to cry. And then I was going
Speaker 1: to go meet somebody to play tennis. And I got
Speaker 1: in my car drive to the tennis courts, and the
Speaker 1: whole world came just tumbling down on me. Everything just
Speaker 1: blew open and blew apart, and I was like, I
Speaker 1: can't do this anymore. I can't go back to work.
Speaker 1: I just can't. A Slight Change of Plans is created,
Speaker 1: written an executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight
Speaker 1: Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our story editor
Speaker 1: Kate Parkinson Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vestola, and our
Speaker 1: associate producer Sarah McCrae. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song,
Speaker 1: and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change
Speaker 1: of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big
Speaker 1: thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special
Speaker 1: thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change
Speaker 1: of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. See you
Speaker 1: next week. And what they did is they told kids
Speaker 1: a story about two boys who lived near each other
Speaker 1: in the same neighborhood and each day rode their bikes
Speaker 1: to work. So one kid's name was Bob. Is it
Speaker 1: to work or school? Because they're little kids, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: these are some very advanced kids you've got, Yes, indeed,
Speaker 1: indeed they're they're they're child actress. And so this is
Speaker 1: a is taking place in Hollywood, and they're going to
Speaker 1: quickly descend into drug addiction and despair. But first they're
Speaker 1: going to ride their bucke