Regret is Impotent

I don't know about you, but I've made mistakes in my life. I've been hard on myself about those mistakes. I've had regrets, some of them lasting longer than I'd like to admit.

Regret is fundamentally a rumination, a delusion of the mind that promises us thinking through a problem or feeling bad about something we did will change the outcome. In some cases, it can—if I regret something I've said to someone, I can go back and repair it. I can apologize. I can do better next time. But the regrets I'm interested in today, for this post, are those that are inactionable. They cannot change the outcome. They are impotent.

The danger in regret is that the feeling is strong, like a vortex that sucks you in and convinces your subconscious that feeling this way will have some effect on the external reality. Perhaps it can become so painful as to stir you into action. But more often than not, a regret does not deliver on its promise. Rather than inspire us, it burns us, it drains us. It may make us so uncomfortable that we move, sure, but we may already be so exhausted by our regret that our movement does not take us far enough to lose the regret. It ends up being a shadow by our side, still there despite taking some action in its wake.

The antidote is acceptance, though finding this medicine and ingesting it is easier said than done. Another antidote may be a mental policy, a posturing in life that we decide to take. That decision is to never turn back, to choose not to cultivate regret. Regrets can indeed be nurtured, grown, and fed to a point where they consume the good in our life. Instead, we can choose to pluck them out—and if we cannot pluck them out, then simply to stop giving them energy and sunlight.

Recognizing the difference between actionable and inactionable regrets is key to finding our antidate. Actionable regrets allow us to course-correct—apologizing to someone we've wronged or making a different choice next time. But inactionable regrets offer no such opportunity. They offer us no path to action, no benefit -- worse, they often drag us away from the flow of our life and render ourselves weary and impotent to regain momentum. They are reflections on the past that cannot be changed, and understanding this distinction can help us in knowing where to direct our energy.

The difficulty of ignoring regrets is not lost on me. Regrets and ruminations are often coupled with neuroses and patterns of thought that require tremendous, consistent effort in awareness and retraining the mind. It usually takes therapy, a trained mirror to help you see yourself and help you rewrite your stories. It is hard, but so are so many worthwhile things in life.

Doing hard things should not be avoided as pain and difficulty are inevitable in life. Suffering is inherent, but by accepting the inevitable suffering in life we can better evade the unnecessary suffering. Regret and its cultivation breed unnecessary suffering.

I am trying on a new thought experiment, a new policy for thinking. Whenever I have a regretful thought, I tell myself that I do not go there. I do not entertain those thoughts. I do not look back and question and interrogate myself for my decisions. I choose to cultivate trust in myself and in the flow of life, not to cultivate doubt and regret.

Maybe you can relate. What regrets have you had in life? How have you moved past them? What do you do to cultivate trust in life? Perhaps start by writing down a regret you hold and consider if it's actionable or inactionable. If it's the latter, ask yourself if it's time to let it go.