October 3, 2022 • 42 mins
Author Daniel Pink teaches us how to transform our relationship with regret so that we can live happier, more fulfilling lives.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin. I don't think we've done a very good job
equipping people with how to deal with negative emotions. I
(00:35):
think at some level we've sold them a bill of
goods about the need to be positive all the time,
and what we should be doing is saying, yeah, have
lots of positive emotions, they make life fantastic, but you're
going to have some negative emotions. And these negative emotions
are adaptive, they're functional if you know how to treat them.
That's best selling author Dan Pink, who believes that negative
emotions can be a force for good in our lives.
(00:57):
Dan is most interested in the emotion of regret, which
is the focus of his book The Power of Regret,
How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. But it took Dan
a while to figure out why regret was such a
valuable emotion. You know, reading through all these regrets every
day here in my office, why was I not more
bummed out? I got these people opening up their hearts
(01:18):
and telling me the mistakes that they made and how
terrible they feel about it. Why did they not bring
me down? And I finally, over time realized that when
people tell you what they regret the most, they're telling
you what they value the most. On today's episode, how
to transform our relationship with regret to live happier and
(01:39):
more fulfilling lives. I'm Maya Shunker, and this is a
slight change of plants, a show about who we are
and who we become in the face of a big change.
(02:01):
So I guess I'll start Dan by talking about how
much I loved this very visceral description of regret that
you share in your book. You call it the stomach
churning feeling that the present would be better, in the
future brighter, if only you hadn't chosen so poorly, decided
so wrongly, or acted so stupidly in the past. Of
(02:22):
all the feelings to study, why did you choose this
one to examine in particular? Because my stomach was churning,
because I had that emotion and I wasn't sure what
to do about it, And at some level I was
at a point in my life where, to my surprise,
I had Mila john By, I had a room to
look back, and like many people who look backward, I
(02:44):
look backward and I see, Oh, if only I had
been kinder, if only I had taken more risks, if
only I had worked harder if only I had done
that rather than that, And my stomach was churning in
a way that made me want to talk about it.
And when I very tenderly began mentioning it to other people,
I discovered that everybody wanted to talk about regret, and
(03:05):
that our perception of this emotion and what it meant
to people was very different from how it lived in
people's hearts and heads. Yeah, I love that. I think
you probably identified there was something counterintuitive we might discover
if you were to go down that path. Before we
analyze how regret affects our lives, I first want to
recognize just how remarkable it is that we as humans
(03:28):
are even capable of feeling this thing called regret. I mean,
as a cognitive scientist, I'm always marveling at human abilities,
but this one, in particular kind of knoxster socks off.
You say that our ability to feel regret depends on
at least two pretty complex mental abilities. Do you mind
painting a picture of what those are? Sure? The two
(03:48):
mental abilities are time travel and storytelling. So time travel
is essential in our ability to experience regret. If you
think about this, So suppose that somebody has a regret
about marrying Steve rather than Bob. I married Steve, and
I should have married Bob if only I'd marry Bob.
All right, So the thing about that, so what are
you doing. You're getting into a time machine and your
(04:08):
traveling back in time to when you first got to
know Steve and Bob. Now, that itself is pretty amazing
that we can travel through time in our heads. That's
amazing in itself. But wait, there's more, because what we
do is we go back and imagine what happened, but
then rewrite the story, essentially negate what really happened, overwrite
(04:31):
it with our own tail. Hey I'm going to marry Bob.
That's amazing too. But wait, there's more, because then we
get back in our time machine and come back to
the present, and suddenly the present looks entirely different because
we've reconfigured the past. And so that's an incredible cognitive ability.
This ability of counterfactual thinking. Counterfactual thinking is when we
(04:54):
imagine a situation that runs counter to the actual facts.
So counterfactual thinking can be it rained yesterday, if only
it were sunny yesterday, that's counterfactual thinking. How would my
life be different if it were sunny yesterday. It's one
reason why I mean, as a a scientists, you know
that little kids can't do this. Their brains are not
fully developed enough to do this kind of processing. So
(05:17):
I love to dig into the fact that kids can't
do this because it is fascinating from a child development perspective. Absolutely. So.
This is an experiment done by a couple of developmental
psychologists and what they did is they told kids a
story about two boys. One was named Bob and one
was named David. Now these boys live near each other,
(05:39):
and each day Bob and David would each ride their
bikes to school and they would take a path that
went around a pond. Now, you can go around the
right side of the pond to get to school, or
you can go around the left side of the pond
to get to school, and both paths are equidistant. It's
(06:00):
the same length, the same amount of time. But every
day Bob goes around the right side of the pond
and David goes around the left side of the pond. Okay,
so what they tell the kids is, this is the
following story. One morning, Bob rides around the right side
of the pond, but unbeknownst to Bob, a tree has fallen,
(06:22):
smacking itself into the center of the path, and Bob
collides with the branch. He falls off the bike, He
hurts himself and is late to school. The left side
of the path was fine now that same morning, David
who gets up. I guess a little bit later, David
who always takes the left side of the pond. He says, no,
(06:44):
what today, I want to take the right side of
the pond. David also hits the branch, he gets thrown
off his bike, He's injured two and he is late
for school. And so the question that these researchers asked
these young children is who would be more upset about
riding along the path that went around the right side
(07:06):
of the pond. Bob who does it every day, David
who just did it that one day, or would they
feel the same? So five year olds said, ah, they'd
be the same. They would be totally bombed out because
they hit a branch and fell out their bike and
relate to school. But seven year olds realized that it
was actually David who would be more upset because he
(07:27):
deviated from his ordinary path. He'd be more likely to
feel regret. In this case, exactly, David would feel more
regret because a seven year old is saying, if only
David had taken the left side of the pond, he
would have avoided that branch and gotten to school safely
and on time. You know, five year olds and seven
(07:49):
year olds are only two years apart, but a lot
goes on in that time for these young brains to
acquire the strength and the muscularity to perform this kind
of mental trapeze act that we're talking about, where you're
swinging back and forth between past and present, between reality
and imagination. That's a very hard act to perform. And
(08:12):
you need the muscle memory, you need the strength, you
need the dexterity, and that happens somewhere probably between the
ages of five and seven. Yeah. Man, it's so funny.
I'm literally in this moment, I'm feeling star struck by
our own minds, so part of me while I just
have a moment. It's incredible. Though I'm such a nerd.
I'm with you. I'm astonishing what our minds can do.
(08:34):
I mean, it should, honestly, it should take our breath away.
That is when I was reading the Neuroscience and the
cognitive science. It's like, Wow, our brains are awesome. They're
a little glitchy and certain circumstances, but it's a pretty
good piece of equipment. You know. I'm not returning it
to the factory. I've said. I've said before, I feel
(08:55):
like we as humans are so hard on ourselves, but
actually we should just feel like we're crushing it every
moment of our existence, just by virtue of existing and
doing like nine percent of the things we do on
any given day. So, you know, who needs celebrity sightings? Dan,
When you got the human brain, That's what I say,
you can get absolutely Just pull up your just pull
up your your MRI. You'll and you'll see that's that's
(09:18):
your celebrity sighting for the day. That's exactly right. Um okay.
So to summarize the Bob and David's study, we see
that five year olds are able to identify, of course,
that Bob and David are both experiencing negative emotions, right,
They're probably feeling sad, there might be a little concerned
about the bruises they have. Then there's this huge developmental
milestone where for the first time we seem to understand
(09:41):
intuitively that David would feel more of this thing called
regret than Bob would. And so with that in mind,
you know, there's lots of negative emotions we feel, and
one of the things you do in your book is
you differentiate regret from some of these other negative emotions.
I'm curious to hear what you see as the necessary
ingredients for feeling regret as opposed to another kind of
(10:05):
negative emotion. What race You're very different? Are two things.
It's compare and it is blame essentially, So with regret,
we compare one set of circumstances to another set of circumstances.
So regret doesn't exist in absolute terms. It exists in
comparative terms, and so we're comparing one set of circumstances.
(10:25):
It's a set of facts to another imagined set of facts.
Perhaps even more important is blaming. Regret is your fault,
all right, and that makes it different from other kinds
of emotions. It makes it different from, say, the emotion
of disappointment. I could feel disappointed that it's raining today,
but I can't feel regret that it's raining because I
(10:46):
don't control the skies. I can feel regret if I
leave the house without an umbrella, and I know that
it's raining because that's on me. But regret and disappointment,
the big demarcation is agency. Regret is your fault. And
for those listening who are as self critical as I am,
this is also why regret stings so much, right because
(11:07):
of this agency component. It just makes it such a
painful feeling, right because you can't pin it on somebody else. Okay, So,
now that we have a better handle on what regret
is and the conditions that must be satisfied in order
for us to feel regret, let's talk for a bit
about how common it is for us to experience regret. Oh.
(11:27):
Absolutely so. There's research and social psychology from years ago
showing that in people's everyday conversations, the negative emotion that
people expressed the most in everyday to conversations is regret.
It was, in this particular piece of research the second
most common emotion of any kind that they expressed, even
after love. And one of the exciting things about this
project was I was able to do some research of
(11:49):
my own, and I was able to conduct a very
large quantitative survey, the largest public opinion survey of American
attitudes about regret ever conducted, and I asked people a
bunch of questions, including the question how often do you
look back on your life and wish you had done
things differently? Now I agonize over the wording of that
question because I wanted to describe regret without saying it. Yeah,
(12:13):
but I didn't want to use the R word because
there's such a stigma attached to the R word. And
what we found is that eighty two percent of the
US population did this thing at least occasionally. We have
this performed idea that I have no regrets. I always
look forward, I never look backward. But the proceuge of
people who said they never do this was one percent.
(12:38):
You know, in this culture, especially Western culture, where it's
you know, it's all about positive emotions, all about positive feelings, Luke,
with no regrets is the anthem that people are just
screaming from the rooftops. One thing that really landed with
me when reading your book, as you say, to live
is to accumulate at least some regret. It is almost
definitionally the case that if one has lived, they will
(12:59):
feel regret. And I think there's actually a common element
to that message. Yeah, I agree, I'll see that point
and raise you and say that if you're feeling regrets
actually a good sign. It's like, oh, my cognitive machinery
is working. I am experiencing regret. If you don't experience
a regret, truly, it's a sign of a potentially grave problem.
(13:20):
You know. It's interesting, Dan, because when we engage in
mental time travel and counterfactual thinking, we don't have to
imagine how things could have gone better, right. We could
instead imagine how things could have gone far worse. But
what's interesting is that we as humans have a very
strong bias towards the former, which helps explain why we
(13:41):
so often regret things. And you capture this point really
nicely when you talk about framing a thought in terms
of at least versus if only yes. So, when we
think about counterfactual thinking, there are two different varieties of it.
One is an upward counterfactual. So you imagine how things
could have been better if only I had become an
(14:03):
accountant rather than an engineer. Everything in my life would
be fantastic, Right, so you imagine a better scenario upward
kund of factuals if only make us feel worse, but
they can help us do better. But there's another kind
of counterfactual, a downward counterfactual, where you imagine how things
could have become worse, and so you say, oh, I
(14:26):
shouldn't have married Edward, but at least I have these
two great kids. You find the silver lining in that.
What that does is that minimizes the sting. It makes
you feel better, but it doesn't help you necessarily do better.
And I think what's curious is that we're much more
inclined to do the counterfactual thinking that makes us feel worse.
(14:47):
Our brains are built for progress and efficiency, and they
know that those upward counterfactuals, those if only while they hurt,
they're going to make us better if we do it right.
There's a really interesting study around Olympians and their response
to winning different types of metals that I think illustrates
(15:07):
this at least if only kind of thinking. Very well,
do you mind sharing that study? This is a really
really interesting study of Olympic medalists. And what they did
is they showed a group of participants photographs of medalists
on the Olympic platform, the gold medal winner, the silver
(15:28):
medal winner, the bronze medal winner, except they blocked out
the actual medals that these olympians won, and they had
these participants who didn't know what the researchers were studying
evaluate how happy the people looked, and they ranked the
olympians based on how happy they were. And so, as
(15:49):
we would expect, the person who won the gold medal
looked the happiest, which makes sense, right, But then there
was a bit of a surprise. The person who was
the next happiest looking was the bronze medalist, and the
silver medalist often didn't look all that happy, which is weird, right.
(16:09):
You just want a silver medal in the Olympics. You
should be pumped two And except they weren't. The bronze
medalists were beaming. The bronze medalists in some cases, we're
looking as happy as the gold medalist. And the way
we explain this riddle is through counterfactual thinking. The bronze
medalist is doing and at least a downward counterfactual. They're
(16:33):
imagining how things could have been worse. The bronze medals
is saying iron and bronze medal, which is great because
at least it wasn't like that. Shmow finished fourth who's
going home with no hardware but the silver medals is saying,
if only I had they're a swimmer reached for the
wall a little bit earlier. If only I had kicked
(16:53):
a little harder, I would be wearing that gold medal
instead of this crappy silver medal. Yeah. You know, naturally,
regret gets a really bad rap, right, because as you've
just described with that swimmer, and it's just such an
unpleasant feeling that you make the case stand and I
think a very convincing case that we should see regret
as something we should embrace and learn from. And so,
(17:16):
what are some of the positive effects that you feel
regret can have when we engage with it in the
right way. Yeah, And the key is that we have
to engage with it in the right way. I think
too often we're kind of conditioned to ignore regrets. Oh
it's negative, don't even think about it. Just move on,
look forward, don't look back. That's a bad idea. But
sometimes I think if we're not equipped to deal with
it properly, we get captured by our regrets. We wallow
(17:40):
on them, we ruminate on them. Yeah, what we should
be doing is listening to our regrets, confronting them, using
them as signals, as data, as information. And when we
do that, there are many many benefits. For instance, there's
research and social psychologies showing that it can help make
us better negotiators. You do a negotiation, you think about
what you regret in that negotiation, you often do better
(18:01):
in the next one. It can help us become better
problem solvers, better strategists. There's even evidence that it can
actually help us deepen sense of meaning in our lives.
And so when we treat this emotion properly, and that's
a big if we can use it as an engine
for moving forward. Yeah, regrets really serving as a catalyst
here right, for actually driving meaningful action. Sure, And I
(18:25):
think I think what's I think what's puzzling here is
to people is that, you know, a solution in some
cases is to invite this negative emotion, not to bat
it away, not to ignore it, but in some sense
to invite it. And that seems a little counterintuitive because
you're inviting something that feels bad. And the thing about
(18:46):
regret is that regret can clarify what we value and
instruct us on how to do better. And people like that,
but it comes with discomfort. It comes with some amount
of pain and people don't like that, but that's not
the deal. It's a package deal. You've got to have both.
And arguably I think that pain and discomfort is the
(19:08):
source of the clarification and the instruction. Yeah, it's signaling
to your brain that you've acted in a way that
might conflict with value exact for example. Yep. There's also
research you talk about in your book that when we
engage with regret in a meaningful, constructive way, it can
also increase our performance. Do you mind talking about some
of the studies in this area, sure. I mean there's
(19:30):
a lot of research in experimental psychology where you give
people puzzles, especially anagrams, and what it shows in general
is that you put people into a problem solving situation,
they solve the problem, and then you ask them to
reflect on what they regret doing or not doing in
that problem solving exercise. Again, you're inviting this negative emotion.
(19:50):
They often do better in the next round because they've
felt bad. That bad feeling is a signal to the
brain saying huh, maybe I should do things differently. It's
a form of instruction, and so if you think about
those puzzle solvers if they actually subscribe to the no
regrets philosophy. They said, I screwed up this anagram. I
(20:11):
did it slowly, I didn't get the right answer. But
no regrets. I'm always positive, I never look backward. They're
not going to get any better at performance on a
whole array of problem solving skills. And how can regret
deep in our sense of meaning? Well, I mean what
it does in many cases that when we think about counterfactually,
(20:32):
at some level, we sometimes will appreciate what we have,
which deepens our sense of meaning. But it can also
help clarify what we actually value in our lives. So
there's one person I wrote about who regretted not spending
time with her grandparents. Every winter of the grandparents would
come and visit her, and she hated it. As a kid,
she thought they were intruding, she didn't want to talk
(20:52):
to them, she would standoffish, And when her grandparents passed away,
she regretted it because she missed hearing their stories and
hearing what their lives were about. And it actually prompted
her to collect her own parents' stories because that feeling
of regret spurred at least a quest for meaning and
understanding of her own life and her own story. I
(21:16):
want to dig in a bit to this notion of
doing regret right, because I think this is so important.
We want to make sure that we are not ignoring
the negative feeling, ignoring the regret. We also want to
make sure that we're not marinating in it, We're not
ruminating in this unproductive way. But just as importantly, we
need to draw the right conclusion from the regret. And
(21:37):
we shouldn't code or regret as something that reflects this
deep underlying flaw in our character and our personality. Instead,
we should evaluate that behavior in isolation. Right. It's just
a reflection of a behavior in a particular moment of time,
and we shouldn't overgeneralize, which we as humans so often do,
especially again hypercritical people. Oh my god, this must mean
(22:01):
that I am a bad person. This must mean that
I'm a terrible decision maker, or what have you. That
is one of the secret to process and regret effectively.
But I also think it's one of the secrets to
leading a life where you're not torturing yourself. We say
that if I made a mistake, I'm a bad person,
(22:22):
rather than I did a stupid thing, and you're always
better off evaluating the behavior rather than making some kind
of broader assessment of the person. So there's a temporal
aspect of it as well. You have to understand that
any mistake that you make, any screw up, any regret,
any blunder, is a moment in your life, not the
(22:43):
full measure of your life. We're willing to make universal
attributions about our entire lives based on a moment, always
a negative moment, and essentially neglect the other ninety nine
of our lives and our evaluation. Don't do that. That's
a recipe for that's a recipe for unhappiness. And you know,
(23:03):
when you explain this to people, they get it, and
if you coach them, they can stop doing that. The
problem is is that, I think it's a bigger problem
is that I don't think we've done a very good
job equipping people with how to deal with negative emotions.
I think at some level we've sold them a bill
of goods about the need to be positive all the time,
and what we should be doing is saying, yeah, have
lots of positive emotions. Positive emotions are great. They make
(23:26):
life fantastic. But you're going to have some negative emotions.
And these negative emotions are adaptive. They're functional if you
know how to treat them. When we're back from the break,
Dan teaches us how we should treat our regrets and
why regrets about long lost romances and miss job opportunities
are far more similar than we might think. And I
come in with some hot takes about whether we're maybe
(23:49):
putting too much weight on our deathbed regrets. We'll be
back in a moment with a slight change of plans.
As Dan Pink was researching regret, he first wanted to
learn what people tend to regret. He launched the World
(24:10):
Regret Survey and collected tens of thousands of regrets from
people all over the world. Researchers have previously sorted regret
into specific life categories, like romance regrets or education regrets,
but when Dan analyzed the results of his survey, he
realized these categories weren't telling the full story. What I
(24:30):
found is that when you listen to what people are saying,
what matters is not the domain of life. It's something
else going on just beneath the surface. And the easiest
way to make that clear is With an example, I
was shocked by how many people who went to college,
especially in America, regret not studying abroad. It blew my mind.
(24:52):
And the reason they didn't study abroad is that, oh,
I don't know, it's kind of risky. I'm not sure
I want to do that. And I was surprised by
how salient that regret was. And then there were lots
of people all over the world who had a regret
that basically went like this, X years ago. There was
someone who I really liked wanted to ask them out
on a date, but I was too chicken to do that,
and I've regretted it ever since. Okay, that's a romance regret.
(25:15):
We've got an education regret. We've got a romance regret.
Then I have lots of people all over the place
who say, ah, I always wanted to start a business
rather than staying in this dead end job, but I
didn't have the guts to do that, and now I
regret it. That's a career regret. But to my mind,
those are all the same regret. They're in different domains
of life, but they share a common root. And if
the common root is this, you're at a juncture in
(25:37):
your life. You can play it safe or you can
take the chance. And most people regret not taking the chance.
Not all the time. There are people who take the
who took the chance and regret it because things went
south on them. But for every one of those, there
are dozens and dozens and dozens who have the opposite regrets.
So that's one of the four core regrets. Boldness regrets
if only I'd taken the chance, And let's stick into
(25:58):
boldness of it, because this one's really interesting. You talk
about the fact that when we're in our twenties right,
what we would call in action regrets, so things that
we didn't do an action regretting things we did do
are roughly the same in number, but by the time
we hit fifty, in action regrets are twice as likely
to be felt than before. And help me understand why
(26:21):
it is that as we age, we increase the ratio
of the things we regret not having done then the
things we have done. I think it's an interesting question.
I'm not sure we know the full answer to that,
but I think that we can speculate certain kinds of
action regrets. We can find the silver lining in. We
can do it. At least we can say, oh, I
(26:43):
shouldn't have moved to Houston, but at least there is
in a state and come technics okay, So you can
find the silver lining in that. The other thing is
that certain kinds of action regrets we can undo. If
we fullied somebody, maybe we can make amends and make
an apology. If we've stolen from somebody, maybe we can
make restitution. I have one guy who I wrote about
(27:06):
who got a tattoo that said no regrets, decided that
he didn't like it and decided to have his tattoo removed.
And so we can remove our tattoos. So with action regrets,
we can we can make peace with them at some level.
We can at least them, we can undo them. In
action regrets, you can't do that. You typically can't find
it at least and there's nothing to undo. Could you
(27:28):
haven't done anything? So I think that's a big part
of it. You know, in the research on aging, like
Laura Carsonson's work, for example, she finds that as we
get older, we tend to have fewer anxieties because there's
just less future to be anxious about. And I do
wonder if there's a parallel here, which is, as we
get older, you know, the range of opportunity that lies
(27:50):
ahead for us that we could potentially explore diminishes pretty considerably,
and so that might make us lust after past moments
when we actually did have opportunity but didn't take advantage
of it. I think that's very plausible. I think that
we do have a sense that many of us, not
all of us, have a sense that when we're young,
there are boundless opportunities, and then at some point, relatively
(28:12):
early in our lives, we get a bracing reality check. Okay,
so we've talked about boldness regrets. Do you mind talking
about the three other categories? Sure? So one category is
what I call foundation regrets. These are regrets that people
have where they made small decisions or small mistakes early
(28:33):
in life, no single one of which is consequential, but
that accumulate into nasty consequences. So a very common one
would be I spent too much and save too little,
and now I'm broke. Now I have no money. And
the same thing was true with health. You know, I
didn't exercise, I didn't eat right, and it's not like
for one day I did that. For years and now
I am in ill health or woefully out of shape.
(28:57):
So foundation regrets are if only I'd done the work.
Moral regrets are if only I'd done the right thing.
So you're at a juncture in your life. You can
take the high road, you can take the low road.
And when people take the low road, not everybody, but
most of everybody regrets it because I think most of
us are good and want to be good. And in
(29:17):
that category, we had a lot of regrets about marital infidelity,
a lot of a huge number of regrets about bullying.
I couldn't believe how many regrets we had about bullying.
Morality ends up being a little bit more complicated because
people have different moral taste buds. And then finally, our
connection regrets. These are regrets about relationships, and not only
(29:37):
romantic relationships, but all the relationships in our lives. And
what often happens is that these relationships that were intact
come apart. And what I found is that many of
these relationships come apart in very uncinematic ways. They just
drift apart. And what happens is that one person wants
to reach out. They say, oh, man, I was such
(29:58):
good friends with Maya ten years ago, I really should
reach out and say hi to her, and then we say,
oh man, no, no, no, it's been ten years. That's
going to be so awkward. And besides they don't want
to hear to me, so and besides Mina doesn't want
to hear from me. She doesn't care. And then we
waited another few years, and then it's like, okay, and
now it's thirteen years. Oh man, it's even more awkward
to reach out. That ends up being a colossal mistake
(30:19):
on both fronts, because it's when we do reach out,
it's way less awkward than we think, and the other
side almost always cares. I like that there's a signaling here,
which is, you know, these categories that you've talked about,
because we tend to regret them. What that teaches us
is that those are the things we care most about
in life. Yeah. I mean, I think that for me,
a personal pultle I was trying to resolve, was, you know,
(30:43):
reading through all these regrets every day here in my office,
why was I not more bummed out? I got these
people opening up their hearts and telling me the mistakes
that they made and how terrible they feel about it.
Why did they not bring me down? And I finally,
over time realized that when people tell you what they
regret the most, they're telling you what they value the most.
So it is, as you say, this very powerful signal.
(31:06):
If you think about all the decisions that any of
us may today or yesterday, or this week or last week.
I don't remember half of I don't remember most of them.
But if you remember a decision or an indecision from
a year ago, or five years ago or ten years ago,
and it bugs you still, you got to pay attention
(31:26):
to that. Man, that's a very strong signal. That is
an airhorn screaming in your psyche telling you pay attention
to me. It's telling me something, and it's what's telling
us is this is a signal about what you value,
and it's a signal about how to do better in
the future. So let's see, Dan, I'm listening to this
episode and I'm thinking to myself, Okay, Dan's convinced me
(31:49):
I need to engage with my regret more proactively and
also in this productive way. What are some strategies that
you could give me the listener for taking a regret
and actually turning it into something productive. When you have
he agreat treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Recognize
that your regrets are part of the human condition. That's
(32:10):
a big part of it too. We have this kind
of pluralistic ignorance where we think, oh my god, I'm
the only person who regrets bullying. I'm the only person
who regrets being too timid in my choices, when in fact,
I got a database of nearly twenty two thousand people
with your exact same regret. Another thing that we should do.
I think there's a very strong argument to make for
disclosing our regrets, even if it's only in private writing.
(32:33):
I actually think the power of disclosure, even if we
don't disclose it publicly is a conversion process, is in
some ways a transmutation process, because emotions, by their nature
are blobby, their abstractions, and that's what makes positive emotions
feel good, but it's also what makes negative emotions feel bad.
And when we write about our negative emotions, talk about
(32:54):
our negative emotions, we convert these abstractions into concrete words,
and those are just less menacing, and they can begin
the sense making process and then we move forward. It's
very important to draw a lesson to extract a lesson
from our scroups from our regrets, the chat ledge is
that we're terrible at solving our own problems. We're too
caught up in the details. And I actually like the
(33:15):
technique of using our crazily amazing brain's ability for time
travel is essentially having a consultation with the U of
ten years from now and asking the U of ten
years from now what you should do, Because I think
we can make a pretty safe bet what the U
of ten years and now is going to care about?
I want to Okay, So I think I have a
(33:35):
broader question, just generally about regret, which is why it
is we put so much weight on regrets that we
may feel later in life. So there's this proverbial deathbed regret,
and people often say, well, you know, Dan, when you're
on your deathbed, are you really going to regret A?
Aren't you going to regret B? Instead? And that calculus
(33:57):
can really influence our present day decisions. And I want
to challenge this thinking a bit because it seems to
be grounded in the idea that the values we express
at the end of our lives somehow represent a truer
or more accurate expression of either what we care about
or what we ought to care about. Right, it's prescriptive,
(34:18):
and this way of thinking implies that there is just
one constant, true set of things that we ought to
care about. And another way to think about it, at
different framing is that we are people whose values naturally
change and evolve over time. And if you take that view,
then there's no obvious reason why we should privilege the
(34:39):
values of future Maya over present day Maya. Absolutely, and
so this is one reason why there's a reason that
I say ten years and not deathbed I am very
skeptical of deathbed regrets. I'm skeptical of the accuracy of
the reporting of them, because it's purely anecdotal. The numbers
are not very vast. And also I don't think that
(34:59):
what we're thinking in a moment of fog when we're
about to perish from the earth is necessarily the clearest
and highest expression of what we value. Exactly as you say, well, look,
I'm already super happy if we're just constraining the time
frame with which we view the future. So I'm on
board with the like ten years from now, Maya. The
deathbed stuff just drives me nuts, because, like you said,
in our final moments, there's a lot of factors that
(35:21):
are weighing into what we say we regret, what we
think we should be saying about what we regret in
order to maybe pass by people who live on planet Earth.
I don't know, there's just lots of things. That's a
very good point. That's one that I hadn't thought about,
is that there could be a kind of performative side
of it. There could be a kind of oh my god,
I gotta get you know, I gotta get my last
argument in here before the final decider decides whether I
(35:43):
go up or down, if you have kind of apologize
or make right with so and so. But I just
think it's important in general, as much as we can
value regret, to remember it is also just a feeling.
Regret is a feeling that can be transient and can pass,
and it's not always something we I say this only Dan,
(36:03):
because regret often gets this trump card. It's like we're
making a decision. We're trying to weigh costs and benefits.
I don't really want a kid right now, but I
think I might regret not having a kid later in
the minute. Our society. Here's the word regret. It's like,
oh my god, then go do the thing right. And
so I just want to make sure we're not elevating
it to too important a category, because, like a lot
of other negative emotions, it is just a feeling. I
(36:25):
think that's a fair point. And the other thing empirically
is that there's a decent amount of evidence showing that
if we over index on our anticipated regret, we end
up making suboptimal decisions. We can end up making decisions
that actually are a little bit more risk averse, because,
as Dan Gilbert says, we end up buying emotional insurance
(36:49):
we don't need and so and so and so. Anticipating
regret is not a perfect decision making tool. This is
why I think there's some nuance in it. I think
one should anticipate what I think most people will regret
in the future, but actually chill out on most stuff,
and also recognize that some regrets are ephemeral. I'd love
(37:11):
to end on a personal note. Dan, I'm wondering, you
know you've been in the world of regret for I
imagine several years now, right researching for this book, writing
this book. What is something that you had long regreted,
or you do still regret, but that you now see
through a different lens. I felt pretty bad about certain
(37:35):
regrets that I had with regard to kindness, and I
never talked about them, but I had them. I harbored
these regrets about kindness. Now it's a moral regret, although
it's a peculiar kind of moral regret, because my moral
regrets about kindness where regrets of inaction, not action. So
they're not regrets about bullying people, but they're regrets about
being in situations where people were not being treated well,
where people were being left out or being made fun
(37:57):
of or being excluded. And I didn't participate in that,
but I saw it and I knew it was wrong,
and I didn't do anything. And I have to say
that has bugged me so much for so long, to
the point where I kind of sublimated it. I said, Okay,
I don't want to deal with this. And one of
the things about reading through all these regrets is that
(38:18):
I started seeing that regret among other people, and I've
started in a weird way that made me feel better.
It's like, oh my god, I'm not the only person
who did this, and the other thing that it did
is that if you listen to that, Okay, so this
is a good example of how you process or regret.
So I could feel that that kindness regret and I
could say, no regrets. It's in the past. I'm going
to look forward. I don't want to be negative. That's
(38:41):
a bad idea. I could also say, oh my God,
earlier in my life I wasn't as kind as I
could be. I am just an wretched, awful, worthless individual.
I am this the worst. That's a bad idea too.
What I could what I could do instead is like, wow,
twenty five years later, this is bugging me. This is
(39:01):
something I need to pay attention to. And what it's
teaching me is it's clarifying what I value in ways
that I didn't realize. I guess I value kindness more
than I expected. And it's instructing me on how to
do better so that when you know, I try as
much as I can when people are being excluded in
way smaller large to say something, to do something to
pull people in. I'm not saying I'm perfect in doing that,
(39:23):
but that spear of regret is prompting me to do
better in the future because I don't want to feel
that feeling again, and that feeling is telling me what
I value and I need to pay attention to that. Hey,
(40:06):
thanks so much for listening. Please join next week for
an episode that is really close to my heart. My guest,
Christy Warren, is actually a Slight Change of Plans listener,
and she reached out to me about her experiences working
as a paramedic and firefighter for more than two decades.
As a first responder, Christie made rescuing people her life's work,
(40:27):
but she eventually had to learn to save herself when
the psychological impact of the job became too much. Every
time I got off work, I'd start crying on the
way home. So this day I said, I'm not going
to cry, Like I'm going to make it home and
I'm not going to cry. And then I was going
to go meet somebody to play tennis. And I got
in my car drive to the tennis courts, and the
(40:48):
whole world came just tumbling down on me. Everything just
blew open and blew apart, and I was like, I
can't do this anymore. I can't go back to work.
I just can't. A Slight Change of Plans is created,
(41:10):
written an executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight
Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our story editor
Kate Parkinson Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vestola, and our
associate producer Sarah McCrae. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song,
and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change
(41:30):
of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big
thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special
thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change
of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. See you
next week. And what they did is they told kids
(42:09):
a story about two boys who lived near each other
in the same neighborhood and each day rode their bikes
to work. So one kid's name was Bob. Is it
to work or school? Because they're little kids, right, Okay,
these are some very advanced kids you've got, Yes, indeed,
indeed they're they're they're child actress. And so this is
a is taking place in Hollywood, and they're going to
(42:32):
quickly descend into drug addiction and despair. But first they're
going to ride their bucke
Pushkin. I don't think we've done a very good job
equipping people with how to deal with negative emotions. I
(00:35):
think at some level we've sold them a bill of
goods about the need to be positive all the time,
and what we should be doing is saying, yeah, have
lots of positive emotions, they make life fantastic, but you're
going to have some negative emotions. And these negative emotions
are adaptive, they're functional if you know how to treat them.
That's best selling author Dan Pink, who believes that negative
emotions can be a force for good in our lives.
(00:57):
Dan is most interested in the emotion of regret, which
is the focus of his book The Power of Regret,
How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. But it took Dan
a while to figure out why regret was such a
valuable emotion. You know, reading through all these regrets every
day here in my office, why was I not more
bummed out? I got these people opening up their hearts
(01:18):
and telling me the mistakes that they made and how
terrible they feel about it. Why did they not bring
me down? And I finally, over time realized that when
people tell you what they regret the most, they're telling
you what they value the most. On today's episode, how
to transform our relationship with regret to live happier and
(01:39):
more fulfilling lives. I'm Maya Shunker, and this is a
slight change of plants, a show about who we are
and who we become in the face of a big change.
(02:01):
So I guess I'll start Dan by talking about how
much I loved this very visceral description of regret that
you share in your book. You call it the stomach
churning feeling that the present would be better, in the
future brighter, if only you hadn't chosen so poorly, decided
so wrongly, or acted so stupidly in the past. Of
(02:22):
all the feelings to study, why did you choose this
one to examine in particular? Because my stomach was churning,
because I had that emotion and I wasn't sure what
to do about it, And at some level I was
at a point in my life where, to my surprise,
I had Mila john By, I had a room to
look back, and like many people who look backward, I
(02:44):
look backward and I see, Oh, if only I had
been kinder, if only I had taken more risks, if
only I had worked harder if only I had done
that rather than that, And my stomach was churning in
a way that made me want to talk about it.
And when I very tenderly began mentioning it to other people,
I discovered that everybody wanted to talk about regret, and
(03:05):
that our perception of this emotion and what it meant
to people was very different from how it lived in
people's hearts and heads. Yeah, I love that. I think
you probably identified there was something counterintuitive we might discover
if you were to go down that path. Before we
analyze how regret affects our lives, I first want to
recognize just how remarkable it is that we as humans
(03:28):
are even capable of feeling this thing called regret. I mean,
as a cognitive scientist, I'm always marveling at human abilities,
but this one, in particular kind of knoxster socks off.
You say that our ability to feel regret depends on
at least two pretty complex mental abilities. Do you mind
painting a picture of what those are? Sure? The two
(03:48):
mental abilities are time travel and storytelling. So time travel
is essential in our ability to experience regret. If you
think about this, So suppose that somebody has a regret
about marrying Steve rather than Bob. I married Steve, and
I should have married Bob if only I'd marry Bob.
All right, So the thing about that, so what are
you doing. You're getting into a time machine and your
(04:08):
traveling back in time to when you first got to
know Steve and Bob. Now, that itself is pretty amazing
that we can travel through time in our heads. That's
amazing in itself. But wait, there's more, because what we
do is we go back and imagine what happened, but
then rewrite the story, essentially negate what really happened, overwrite
(04:31):
it with our own tail. Hey I'm going to marry Bob.
That's amazing too. But wait, there's more, because then we
get back in our time machine and come back to
the present, and suddenly the present looks entirely different because
we've reconfigured the past. And so that's an incredible cognitive ability.
This ability of counterfactual thinking. Counterfactual thinking is when we
(04:54):
imagine a situation that runs counter to the actual facts.
So counterfactual thinking can be it rained yesterday, if only
it were sunny yesterday, that's counterfactual thinking. How would my
life be different if it were sunny yesterday. It's one
reason why I mean, as a a scientists, you know
that little kids can't do this. Their brains are not
fully developed enough to do this kind of processing. So
(05:17):
I love to dig into the fact that kids can't
do this because it is fascinating from a child development perspective. Absolutely. So.
This is an experiment done by a couple of developmental
psychologists and what they did is they told kids a
story about two boys. One was named Bob and one
was named David. Now these boys live near each other,
(05:39):
and each day Bob and David would each ride their
bikes to school and they would take a path that
went around a pond. Now, you can go around the
right side of the pond to get to school, or
you can go around the left side of the pond
to get to school, and both paths are equidistant. It's
(06:00):
the same length, the same amount of time. But every
day Bob goes around the right side of the pond
and David goes around the left side of the pond. Okay,
so what they tell the kids is, this is the
following story. One morning, Bob rides around the right side
of the pond, but unbeknownst to Bob, a tree has fallen,
(06:22):
smacking itself into the center of the path, and Bob
collides with the branch. He falls off the bike, He
hurts himself and is late to school. The left side
of the path was fine now that same morning, David
who gets up. I guess a little bit later, David
who always takes the left side of the pond. He says, no,
(06:44):
what today, I want to take the right side of
the pond. David also hits the branch, he gets thrown
off his bike, He's injured two and he is late
for school. And so the question that these researchers asked
these young children is who would be more upset about
riding along the path that went around the right side
(07:06):
of the pond. Bob who does it every day, David
who just did it that one day, or would they
feel the same? So five year olds said, ah, they'd
be the same. They would be totally bombed out because
they hit a branch and fell out their bike and
relate to school. But seven year olds realized that it
was actually David who would be more upset because he
(07:27):
deviated from his ordinary path. He'd be more likely to
feel regret. In this case, exactly, David would feel more
regret because a seven year old is saying, if only
David had taken the left side of the pond, he
would have avoided that branch and gotten to school safely
and on time. You know, five year olds and seven
(07:49):
year olds are only two years apart, but a lot
goes on in that time for these young brains to
acquire the strength and the muscularity to perform this kind
of mental trapeze act that we're talking about, where you're
swinging back and forth between past and present, between reality
and imagination. That's a very hard act to perform. And
(08:12):
you need the muscle memory, you need the strength, you
need the dexterity, and that happens somewhere probably between the
ages of five and seven. Yeah. Man, it's so funny.
I'm literally in this moment, I'm feeling star struck by
our own minds, so part of me while I just
have a moment. It's incredible. Though I'm such a nerd.
I'm with you. I'm astonishing what our minds can do.
(08:34):
I mean, it should, honestly, it should take our breath away.
That is when I was reading the Neuroscience and the
cognitive science. It's like, Wow, our brains are awesome. They're
a little glitchy and certain circumstances, but it's a pretty
good piece of equipment. You know. I'm not returning it
to the factory. I've said. I've said before, I feel
(08:55):
like we as humans are so hard on ourselves, but
actually we should just feel like we're crushing it every
moment of our existence, just by virtue of existing and
doing like nine percent of the things we do on
any given day. So, you know, who needs celebrity sightings? Dan,
When you got the human brain, That's what I say,
you can get absolutely Just pull up your just pull
up your your MRI. You'll and you'll see that's that's
(09:18):
your celebrity sighting for the day. That's exactly right. Um okay.
So to summarize the Bob and David's study, we see
that five year olds are able to identify, of course,
that Bob and David are both experiencing negative emotions, right,
They're probably feeling sad, there might be a little concerned
about the bruises they have. Then there's this huge developmental
milestone where for the first time we seem to understand
(09:41):
intuitively that David would feel more of this thing called
regret than Bob would. And so with that in mind,
you know, there's lots of negative emotions we feel, and
one of the things you do in your book is
you differentiate regret from some of these other negative emotions.
I'm curious to hear what you see as the necessary
ingredients for feeling regret as opposed to another kind of
(10:05):
negative emotion. What race You're very different? Are two things.
It's compare and it is blame essentially, So with regret,
we compare one set of circumstances to another set of circumstances.
So regret doesn't exist in absolute terms. It exists in
comparative terms, and so we're comparing one set of circumstances.
(10:25):
It's a set of facts to another imagined set of facts.
Perhaps even more important is blaming. Regret is your fault,
all right, and that makes it different from other kinds
of emotions. It makes it different from, say, the emotion
of disappointment. I could feel disappointed that it's raining today,
but I can't feel regret that it's raining because I
(10:46):
don't control the skies. I can feel regret if I
leave the house without an umbrella, and I know that
it's raining because that's on me. But regret and disappointment,
the big demarcation is agency. Regret is your fault. And
for those listening who are as self critical as I am,
this is also why regret stings so much, right because
(11:07):
of this agency component. It just makes it such a
painful feeling, right because you can't pin it on somebody else. Okay, So,
now that we have a better handle on what regret
is and the conditions that must be satisfied in order
for us to feel regret, let's talk for a bit
about how common it is for us to experience regret. Oh.
(11:27):
Absolutely so. There's research and social psychology from years ago
showing that in people's everyday conversations, the negative emotion that
people expressed the most in everyday to conversations is regret.
It was, in this particular piece of research the second
most common emotion of any kind that they expressed, even
after love. And one of the exciting things about this
project was I was able to do some research of
(11:49):
my own, and I was able to conduct a very
large quantitative survey, the largest public opinion survey of American
attitudes about regret ever conducted, and I asked people a
bunch of questions, including the question how often do you
look back on your life and wish you had done
things differently? Now I agonize over the wording of that
question because I wanted to describe regret without saying it. Yeah,
(12:13):
but I didn't want to use the R word because
there's such a stigma attached to the R word. And
what we found is that eighty two percent of the
US population did this thing at least occasionally. We have
this performed idea that I have no regrets. I always
look forward, I never look backward. But the proceuge of
people who said they never do this was one percent.
(12:38):
You know, in this culture, especially Western culture, where it's
you know, it's all about positive emotions, all about positive feelings, Luke,
with no regrets is the anthem that people are just
screaming from the rooftops. One thing that really landed with
me when reading your book, as you say, to live
is to accumulate at least some regret. It is almost
definitionally the case that if one has lived, they will
(12:59):
feel regret. And I think there's actually a common element
to that message. Yeah, I agree, I'll see that point
and raise you and say that if you're feeling regrets
actually a good sign. It's like, oh, my cognitive machinery
is working. I am experiencing regret. If you don't experience
a regret, truly, it's a sign of a potentially grave problem.
(13:20):
You know. It's interesting, Dan, because when we engage in
mental time travel and counterfactual thinking, we don't have to
imagine how things could have gone better, right. We could
instead imagine how things could have gone far worse. But
what's interesting is that we as humans have a very
strong bias towards the former, which helps explain why we
(13:41):
so often regret things. And you capture this point really
nicely when you talk about framing a thought in terms
of at least versus if only yes. So, when we
think about counterfactual thinking, there are two different varieties of it.
One is an upward counterfactual. So you imagine how things
could have been better if only I had become an
(14:03):
accountant rather than an engineer. Everything in my life would
be fantastic, Right, so you imagine a better scenario upward
kund of factuals if only make us feel worse, but
they can help us do better. But there's another kind
of counterfactual, a downward counterfactual, where you imagine how things
could have become worse, and so you say, oh, I
(14:26):
shouldn't have married Edward, but at least I have these
two great kids. You find the silver lining in that.
What that does is that minimizes the sting. It makes
you feel better, but it doesn't help you necessarily do better.
And I think what's curious is that we're much more
inclined to do the counterfactual thinking that makes us feel worse.
(14:47):
Our brains are built for progress and efficiency, and they
know that those upward counterfactuals, those if only while they hurt,
they're going to make us better if we do it right.
There's a really interesting study around Olympians and their response
to winning different types of metals that I think illustrates
(15:07):
this at least if only kind of thinking. Very well,
do you mind sharing that study? This is a really
really interesting study of Olympic medalists. And what they did
is they showed a group of participants photographs of medalists
on the Olympic platform, the gold medal winner, the silver
(15:28):
medal winner, the bronze medal winner, except they blocked out
the actual medals that these olympians won, and they had
these participants who didn't know what the researchers were studying
evaluate how happy the people looked, and they ranked the
olympians based on how happy they were. And so, as
(15:49):
we would expect, the person who won the gold medal
looked the happiest, which makes sense, right, But then there
was a bit of a surprise. The person who was
the next happiest looking was the bronze medalist, and the
silver medalist often didn't look all that happy, which is weird, right.
(16:09):
You just want a silver medal in the Olympics. You
should be pumped two And except they weren't. The bronze
medalists were beaming. The bronze medalists in some cases, we're
looking as happy as the gold medalist. And the way
we explain this riddle is through counterfactual thinking. The bronze
medalist is doing and at least a downward counterfactual. They're
(16:33):
imagining how things could have been worse. The bronze medals
is saying iron and bronze medal, which is great because
at least it wasn't like that. Shmow finished fourth who's
going home with no hardware but the silver medals is saying,
if only I had they're a swimmer reached for the
wall a little bit earlier. If only I had kicked
(16:53):
a little harder, I would be wearing that gold medal
instead of this crappy silver medal. Yeah. You know, naturally,
regret gets a really bad rap, right, because as you've
just described with that swimmer, and it's just such an
unpleasant feeling that you make the case stand and I
think a very convincing case that we should see regret
as something we should embrace and learn from. And so,
(17:16):
what are some of the positive effects that you feel
regret can have when we engage with it in the
right way. Yeah, And the key is that we have
to engage with it in the right way. I think
too often we're kind of conditioned to ignore regrets. Oh
it's negative, don't even think about it. Just move on,
look forward, don't look back. That's a bad idea. But
sometimes I think if we're not equipped to deal with
it properly, we get captured by our regrets. We wallow
(17:40):
on them, we ruminate on them. Yeah, what we should
be doing is listening to our regrets, confronting them, using
them as signals, as data, as information. And when we
do that, there are many many benefits. For instance, there's
research and social psychologies showing that it can help make
us better negotiators. You do a negotiation, you think about
what you regret in that negotiation, you often do better
(18:01):
in the next one. It can help us become better
problem solvers, better strategists. There's even evidence that it can
actually help us deepen sense of meaning in our lives.
And so when we treat this emotion properly, and that's
a big if we can use it as an engine
for moving forward. Yeah, regrets really serving as a catalyst
here right, for actually driving meaningful action. Sure, And I
(18:25):
think I think what's I think what's puzzling here is
to people is that, you know, a solution in some
cases is to invite this negative emotion, not to bat
it away, not to ignore it, but in some sense
to invite it. And that seems a little counterintuitive because
you're inviting something that feels bad. And the thing about
(18:46):
regret is that regret can clarify what we value and
instruct us on how to do better. And people like that,
but it comes with discomfort. It comes with some amount
of pain and people don't like that, but that's not
the deal. It's a package deal. You've got to have both.
And arguably I think that pain and discomfort is the
(19:08):
source of the clarification and the instruction. Yeah, it's signaling
to your brain that you've acted in a way that
might conflict with value exact for example. Yep. There's also
research you talk about in your book that when we
engage with regret in a meaningful, constructive way, it can
also increase our performance. Do you mind talking about some
of the studies in this area, sure. I mean there's
(19:30):
a lot of research in experimental psychology where you give
people puzzles, especially anagrams, and what it shows in general
is that you put people into a problem solving situation,
they solve the problem, and then you ask them to
reflect on what they regret doing or not doing in
that problem solving exercise. Again, you're inviting this negative emotion.
(19:50):
They often do better in the next round because they've
felt bad. That bad feeling is a signal to the
brain saying huh, maybe I should do things differently. It's
a form of instruction, and so if you think about
those puzzle solvers if they actually subscribe to the no
regrets philosophy. They said, I screwed up this anagram. I
(20:11):
did it slowly, I didn't get the right answer. But
no regrets. I'm always positive, I never look backward. They're
not going to get any better at performance on a
whole array of problem solving skills. And how can regret
deep in our sense of meaning? Well, I mean what
it does in many cases that when we think about counterfactually,
(20:32):
at some level, we sometimes will appreciate what we have,
which deepens our sense of meaning. But it can also
help clarify what we actually value in our lives. So
there's one person I wrote about who regretted not spending
time with her grandparents. Every winter of the grandparents would
come and visit her, and she hated it. As a kid,
she thought they were intruding, she didn't want to talk
(20:52):
to them, she would standoffish, And when her grandparents passed away,
she regretted it because she missed hearing their stories and
hearing what their lives were about. And it actually prompted
her to collect her own parents' stories because that feeling
of regret spurred at least a quest for meaning and
understanding of her own life and her own story. I
(21:16):
want to dig in a bit to this notion of
doing regret right, because I think this is so important.
We want to make sure that we are not ignoring
the negative feeling, ignoring the regret. We also want to
make sure that we're not marinating in it, We're not
ruminating in this unproductive way. But just as importantly, we
need to draw the right conclusion from the regret. And
(21:37):
we shouldn't code or regret as something that reflects this
deep underlying flaw in our character and our personality. Instead,
we should evaluate that behavior in isolation. Right. It's just
a reflection of a behavior in a particular moment of time,
and we shouldn't overgeneralize, which we as humans so often do,
especially again hypercritical people. Oh my god, this must mean
(22:01):
that I am a bad person. This must mean that
I'm a terrible decision maker, or what have you. That
is one of the secret to process and regret effectively.
But I also think it's one of the secrets to
leading a life where you're not torturing yourself. We say
that if I made a mistake, I'm a bad person,
(22:22):
rather than I did a stupid thing, and you're always
better off evaluating the behavior rather than making some kind
of broader assessment of the person. So there's a temporal
aspect of it as well. You have to understand that
any mistake that you make, any screw up, any regret,
any blunder, is a moment in your life, not the
(22:43):
full measure of your life. We're willing to make universal
attributions about our entire lives based on a moment, always
a negative moment, and essentially neglect the other ninety nine
of our lives and our evaluation. Don't do that. That's
a recipe for that's a recipe for unhappiness. And you know,
(23:03):
when you explain this to people, they get it, and
if you coach them, they can stop doing that. The
problem is is that, I think it's a bigger problem
is that I don't think we've done a very good
job equipping people with how to deal with negative emotions.
I think at some level we've sold them a bill
of goods about the need to be positive all the time,
and what we should be doing is saying, yeah, have
lots of positive emotions. Positive emotions are great. They make
(23:26):
life fantastic. But you're going to have some negative emotions.
And these negative emotions are adaptive. They're functional if you
know how to treat them. When we're back from the break,
Dan teaches us how we should treat our regrets and
why regrets about long lost romances and miss job opportunities
are far more similar than we might think. And I
come in with some hot takes about whether we're maybe
(23:49):
putting too much weight on our deathbed regrets. We'll be
back in a moment with a slight change of plans.
As Dan Pink was researching regret, he first wanted to
learn what people tend to regret. He launched the World
(24:10):
Regret Survey and collected tens of thousands of regrets from
people all over the world. Researchers have previously sorted regret
into specific life categories, like romance regrets or education regrets,
but when Dan analyzed the results of his survey, he
realized these categories weren't telling the full story. What I
(24:30):
found is that when you listen to what people are saying,
what matters is not the domain of life. It's something
else going on just beneath the surface. And the easiest
way to make that clear is With an example, I
was shocked by how many people who went to college,
especially in America, regret not studying abroad. It blew my mind.
(24:52):
And the reason they didn't study abroad is that, oh,
I don't know, it's kind of risky. I'm not sure
I want to do that. And I was surprised by
how salient that regret was. And then there were lots
of people all over the world who had a regret
that basically went like this, X years ago. There was
someone who I really liked wanted to ask them out
on a date, but I was too chicken to do that,
and I've regretted it ever since. Okay, that's a romance regret.
(25:15):
We've got an education regret. We've got a romance regret.
Then I have lots of people all over the place
who say, ah, I always wanted to start a business
rather than staying in this dead end job, but I
didn't have the guts to do that, and now I
regret it. That's a career regret. But to my mind,
those are all the same regret. They're in different domains
of life, but they share a common root. And if
the common root is this, you're at a juncture in
(25:37):
your life. You can play it safe or you can
take the chance. And most people regret not taking the chance.
Not all the time. There are people who take the
who took the chance and regret it because things went
south on them. But for every one of those, there
are dozens and dozens and dozens who have the opposite regrets.
So that's one of the four core regrets. Boldness regrets
if only I'd taken the chance, And let's stick into
(25:58):
boldness of it, because this one's really interesting. You talk
about the fact that when we're in our twenties right,
what we would call in action regrets, so things that
we didn't do an action regretting things we did do
are roughly the same in number, but by the time
we hit fifty, in action regrets are twice as likely
to be felt than before. And help me understand why
(26:21):
it is that as we age, we increase the ratio
of the things we regret not having done then the
things we have done. I think it's an interesting question.
I'm not sure we know the full answer to that,
but I think that we can speculate certain kinds of
action regrets. We can find the silver lining in. We
can do it. At least we can say, oh, I
(26:43):
shouldn't have moved to Houston, but at least there is
in a state and come technics okay, So you can
find the silver lining in that. The other thing is
that certain kinds of action regrets we can undo. If
we fullied somebody, maybe we can make amends and make
an apology. If we've stolen from somebody, maybe we can
make restitution. I have one guy who I wrote about
(27:06):
who got a tattoo that said no regrets, decided that
he didn't like it and decided to have his tattoo removed.
And so we can remove our tattoos. So with action regrets,
we can we can make peace with them at some level.
We can at least them, we can undo them. In
action regrets, you can't do that. You typically can't find
it at least and there's nothing to undo. Could you
(27:28):
haven't done anything? So I think that's a big part
of it. You know, in the research on aging, like
Laura Carsonson's work, for example, she finds that as we
get older, we tend to have fewer anxieties because there's
just less future to be anxious about. And I do
wonder if there's a parallel here, which is, as we
get older, you know, the range of opportunity that lies
(27:50):
ahead for us that we could potentially explore diminishes pretty considerably,
and so that might make us lust after past moments
when we actually did have opportunity but didn't take advantage
of it. I think that's very plausible. I think that
we do have a sense that many of us, not
all of us, have a sense that when we're young,
there are boundless opportunities, and then at some point, relatively
(28:12):
early in our lives, we get a bracing reality check. Okay,
so we've talked about boldness regrets. Do you mind talking
about the three other categories? Sure? So one category is
what I call foundation regrets. These are regrets that people
have where they made small decisions or small mistakes early
(28:33):
in life, no single one of which is consequential, but
that accumulate into nasty consequences. So a very common one
would be I spent too much and save too little,
and now I'm broke. Now I have no money. And
the same thing was true with health. You know, I
didn't exercise, I didn't eat right, and it's not like
for one day I did that. For years and now
I am in ill health or woefully out of shape.
(28:57):
So foundation regrets are if only I'd done the work.
Moral regrets are if only I'd done the right thing.
So you're at a juncture in your life. You can
take the high road, you can take the low road.
And when people take the low road, not everybody, but
most of everybody regrets it because I think most of
us are good and want to be good. And in
(29:17):
that category, we had a lot of regrets about marital infidelity,
a lot of a huge number of regrets about bullying.
I couldn't believe how many regrets we had about bullying.
Morality ends up being a little bit more complicated because
people have different moral taste buds. And then finally, our
connection regrets. These are regrets about relationships, and not only
(29:37):
romantic relationships, but all the relationships in our lives. And
what often happens is that these relationships that were intact
come apart. And what I found is that many of
these relationships come apart in very uncinematic ways. They just
drift apart. And what happens is that one person wants
to reach out. They say, oh, man, I was such
(29:58):
good friends with Maya ten years ago, I really should
reach out and say hi to her, and then we say,
oh man, no, no, no, it's been ten years. That's
going to be so awkward. And besides they don't want
to hear to me, so and besides Mina doesn't want
to hear from me. She doesn't care. And then we
waited another few years, and then it's like, okay, and
now it's thirteen years. Oh man, it's even more awkward
to reach out. That ends up being a colossal mistake
(30:19):
on both fronts, because it's when we do reach out,
it's way less awkward than we think, and the other
side almost always cares. I like that there's a signaling here,
which is, you know, these categories that you've talked about,
because we tend to regret them. What that teaches us
is that those are the things we care most about
in life. Yeah. I mean, I think that for me,
a personal pultle I was trying to resolve, was, you know,
(30:43):
reading through all these regrets every day here in my office,
why was I not more bummed out? I got these
people opening up their hearts and telling me the mistakes
that they made and how terrible they feel about it.
Why did they not bring me down? And I finally,
over time realized that when people tell you what they
regret the most, they're telling you what they value the most.
So it is, as you say, this very powerful signal.
(31:06):
If you think about all the decisions that any of
us may today or yesterday, or this week or last week.
I don't remember half of I don't remember most of them.
But if you remember a decision or an indecision from
a year ago, or five years ago or ten years ago,
and it bugs you still, you got to pay attention
(31:26):
to that. Man, that's a very strong signal. That is
an airhorn screaming in your psyche telling you pay attention
to me. It's telling me something, and it's what's telling
us is this is a signal about what you value,
and it's a signal about how to do better in
the future. So let's see, Dan, I'm listening to this
episode and I'm thinking to myself, Okay, Dan's convinced me
(31:49):
I need to engage with my regret more proactively and
also in this productive way. What are some strategies that
you could give me the listener for taking a regret
and actually turning it into something productive. When you have
he agreat treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Recognize
that your regrets are part of the human condition. That's
(32:10):
a big part of it too. We have this kind
of pluralistic ignorance where we think, oh my god, I'm
the only person who regrets bullying. I'm the only person
who regrets being too timid in my choices, when in fact,
I got a database of nearly twenty two thousand people
with your exact same regret. Another thing that we should do.
I think there's a very strong argument to make for
disclosing our regrets, even if it's only in private writing.
(32:33):
I actually think the power of disclosure, even if we
don't disclose it publicly is a conversion process, is in
some ways a transmutation process, because emotions, by their nature
are blobby, their abstractions, and that's what makes positive emotions
feel good, but it's also what makes negative emotions feel bad.
And when we write about our negative emotions, talk about
(32:54):
our negative emotions, we convert these abstractions into concrete words,
and those are just less menacing, and they can begin
the sense making process and then we move forward. It's
very important to draw a lesson to extract a lesson
from our scroups from our regrets, the chat ledge is
that we're terrible at solving our own problems. We're too
caught up in the details. And I actually like the
(33:15):
technique of using our crazily amazing brain's ability for time
travel is essentially having a consultation with the U of
ten years from now and asking the U of ten
years from now what you should do, Because I think
we can make a pretty safe bet what the U
of ten years and now is going to care about?
I want to Okay, So I think I have a
(33:35):
broader question, just generally about regret, which is why it
is we put so much weight on regrets that we
may feel later in life. So there's this proverbial deathbed regret,
and people often say, well, you know, Dan, when you're
on your deathbed, are you really going to regret A?
Aren't you going to regret B? Instead? And that calculus
(33:57):
can really influence our present day decisions. And I want
to challenge this thinking a bit because it seems to
be grounded in the idea that the values we express
at the end of our lives somehow represent a truer
or more accurate expression of either what we care about
or what we ought to care about. Right, it's prescriptive,
(34:18):
and this way of thinking implies that there is just
one constant, true set of things that we ought to
care about. And another way to think about it, at
different framing is that we are people whose values naturally
change and evolve over time. And if you take that view,
then there's no obvious reason why we should privilege the
(34:39):
values of future Maya over present day Maya. Absolutely, and
so this is one reason why there's a reason that
I say ten years and not deathbed I am very
skeptical of deathbed regrets. I'm skeptical of the accuracy of
the reporting of them, because it's purely anecdotal. The numbers
are not very vast. And also I don't think that
(34:59):
what we're thinking in a moment of fog when we're
about to perish from the earth is necessarily the clearest
and highest expression of what we value. Exactly as you say, well, look,
I'm already super happy if we're just constraining the time
frame with which we view the future. So I'm on
board with the like ten years from now, Maya. The
deathbed stuff just drives me nuts, because, like you said,
in our final moments, there's a lot of factors that
(35:21):
are weighing into what we say we regret, what we
think we should be saying about what we regret in
order to maybe pass by people who live on planet Earth.
I don't know, there's just lots of things. That's a
very good point. That's one that I hadn't thought about,
is that there could be a kind of performative side
of it. There could be a kind of oh my god,
I gotta get you know, I gotta get my last
argument in here before the final decider decides whether I
(35:43):
go up or down, if you have kind of apologize
or make right with so and so. But I just
think it's important in general, as much as we can
value regret, to remember it is also just a feeling.
Regret is a feeling that can be transient and can pass,
and it's not always something we I say this only Dan,
(36:03):
because regret often gets this trump card. It's like we're
making a decision. We're trying to weigh costs and benefits.
I don't really want a kid right now, but I
think I might regret not having a kid later in
the minute. Our society. Here's the word regret. It's like,
oh my god, then go do the thing right. And
so I just want to make sure we're not elevating
it to too important a category, because, like a lot
of other negative emotions, it is just a feeling. I
(36:25):
think that's a fair point. And the other thing empirically
is that there's a decent amount of evidence showing that
if we over index on our anticipated regret, we end
up making suboptimal decisions. We can end up making decisions
that actually are a little bit more risk averse, because,
as Dan Gilbert says, we end up buying emotional insurance
(36:49):
we don't need and so and so and so. Anticipating
regret is not a perfect decision making tool. This is
why I think there's some nuance in it. I think
one should anticipate what I think most people will regret
in the future, but actually chill out on most stuff,
and also recognize that some regrets are ephemeral. I'd love
(37:11):
to end on a personal note. Dan, I'm wondering, you
know you've been in the world of regret for I
imagine several years now, right researching for this book, writing
this book. What is something that you had long regreted,
or you do still regret, but that you now see
through a different lens. I felt pretty bad about certain
(37:35):
regrets that I had with regard to kindness, and I
never talked about them, but I had them. I harbored
these regrets about kindness. Now it's a moral regret, although
it's a peculiar kind of moral regret, because my moral
regrets about kindness where regrets of inaction, not action. So
they're not regrets about bullying people, but they're regrets about
being in situations where people were not being treated well,
where people were being left out or being made fun
(37:57):
of or being excluded. And I didn't participate in that,
but I saw it and I knew it was wrong,
and I didn't do anything. And I have to say
that has bugged me so much for so long, to
the point where I kind of sublimated it. I said, Okay,
I don't want to deal with this. And one of
the things about reading through all these regrets is that
(38:18):
I started seeing that regret among other people, and I've
started in a weird way that made me feel better.
It's like, oh my god, I'm not the only person
who did this, and the other thing that it did
is that if you listen to that, Okay, so this
is a good example of how you process or regret.
So I could feel that that kindness regret and I
could say, no regrets. It's in the past. I'm going
to look forward. I don't want to be negative. That's
(38:41):
a bad idea. I could also say, oh my God,
earlier in my life I wasn't as kind as I
could be. I am just an wretched, awful, worthless individual.
I am this the worst. That's a bad idea too.
What I could what I could do instead is like, wow,
twenty five years later, this is bugging me. This is
(39:01):
something I need to pay attention to. And what it's
teaching me is it's clarifying what I value in ways
that I didn't realize. I guess I value kindness more
than I expected. And it's instructing me on how to
do better so that when you know, I try as
much as I can when people are being excluded in
way smaller large to say something, to do something to
pull people in. I'm not saying I'm perfect in doing that,
(39:23):
but that spear of regret is prompting me to do
better in the future because I don't want to feel
that feeling again, and that feeling is telling me what
I value and I need to pay attention to that. Hey,
(40:06):
thanks so much for listening. Please join next week for
an episode that is really close to my heart. My guest,
Christy Warren, is actually a Slight Change of Plans listener,
and she reached out to me about her experiences working
as a paramedic and firefighter for more than two decades.
As a first responder, Christie made rescuing people her life's work,
(40:27):
but she eventually had to learn to save herself when
the psychological impact of the job became too much. Every
time I got off work, I'd start crying on the
way home. So this day I said, I'm not going
to cry, Like I'm going to make it home and
I'm not going to cry. And then I was going
to go meet somebody to play tennis. And I got
in my car drive to the tennis courts, and the
(40:48):
whole world came just tumbling down on me. Everything just
blew open and blew apart, and I was like, I
can't do this anymore. I can't go back to work.
I just can't. A Slight Change of Plans is created,
(41:10):
written an executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight
Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our story editor
Kate Parkinson Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vestola, and our
associate producer Sarah McCrae. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song,
and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change
(41:30):
of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big
thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special
thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change
of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. See you
next week. And what they did is they told kids
(42:09):
a story about two boys who lived near each other
in the same neighborhood and each day rode their bikes
to work. So one kid's name was Bob. Is it
to work or school? Because they're little kids, right, Okay,
these are some very advanced kids you've got, Yes, indeed,
indeed they're they're they're child actress. And so this is
a is taking place in Hollywood, and they're going to
(42:32):
quickly descend into drug addiction and despair. But first they're
going to ride their bucke
Host
Dr. Maya Shankar
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