Transforming Regret Into Future Action

This is an IHART podcast . Guaranteed Human . Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities, and drive growth. Chase for Business helps business owners like you with personalized guidance and convenient digital tools all in one place . With that guidance and your determination, you can take your business farther and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more at chase . com slash business . Chase for business , make more of what's yours. The Chase Mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply, JP Morgan Chase Bank NAMBER FDIC copyright twenty twenty six , JP Morgan Chase and Company . de la Stuperva podcast Paris Copa Monde la Fifa, Armor La Comovecan Colas Stencia at the Home Depot. Vista to Patio Parallaccio Concept Perde Espresso, Unasadorfen of Menal, Unec ampintau, Elmhoot Plan Paraglafesta Fovolta, Siga Stamuchus Pres de Silvato final. Equal entrigger rapid gratita Seralehandaria, the home depot, from a tour official de la Copa Mondia Fif dozmil ventilates . This mood check is brought to you by State Farm, Port ug ar Tambiang Merese Protexon. Let's keep it real for a second. Honey German, checking in Contigo. If your animal is low, your group chat's dry and not even your musica is hitting like usual, prespira profundo. You don't have to do it all today, undia ala ves, little by little. You're doing better than you think. Like a good neighbor, stay farm is there. Indeed, sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Spend less time searching, and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress , less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollars sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium stat us it deserves at Indeed. com slash podcast terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. Pushkin Hey Happiness Lab listeners, welcome back to our Happiness Hot Take series, a whole season in which I call out the bad happiness advice that I hear so often on the internet. In today's Happiness Hot Take, we're going back to the Happiness Lab Archives to tackle a happiness misconception that's so common, it's even got its own hashtag. Hashtag No regrets . The idea that we should stand by the bad decisions we make with confidence, that we should ignore all those pangs of remorse that don't feel so hot. Well today's throwback happiness hot take is that no regrets is no way to live. And you'll see why in this Incase You Missed it episode. I hope you enjoy it I'm going through a breakup right now. And so that's there's regret in choosing to be together and there's regret and also choosing to be apart. We all replay dumb things we did in the past. I think a lot of my regret stems from school work. Every school year comes around and I'm like, this year I'm gonna do better and then like I, don't. Or fret about the things we didn't do. I was afraid to come out for a long time to my parents. It was that fear of rejection regardless of whether they would have really rejected me. I was like hiding myself for two other people , and that is something that I regret a lot. From time to time, regret sets up shop in all our heads and makes us wonder about what we could have, should have or would have done differently. I've done a lot of mistakes. Like I spend a lot of money. I paid for a lot of people. I got used by a lot of people , and I did not know my worth. Our feelings of regret mostly kind of suck. We can experience it as a mild pang, a sort of throbbing emotional toothache , but sometimes the anguish of regret reduces us to tears or saddles us with grief that lasts a lifetime. I was in a relationship and it was very toxic. I should have put my foot down way earlier because now it kind of affects me to this day and it's just like dang I could have prevented all of this feelings from happening if I just would've left it in the beginning. And so it's natural to fantasize about a life without this painful emotion to strive to be without the burn that comes from looking back . I mean, who needs regrets? Hashtag, no regrets. I do not believe in regrets or have any regrets in my life. My mistakes are me . But is the whole no regrets thing really right ? I mean, could it be possible that embracing regret is the key to living a better, more authentic, and even a happier life ? Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy, but what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction . You're listening to the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos . Hey, I'm Malcolm Gabo. Here's my grad. When I graduated from college, I had this idea that I would spend a year in Jamaica, getting a graduate degree at the University of West Indies. My instinct was that my early twenties were the perfect moment to broaden my horizons, experience a new culture, and take a risk . Instead , I moved to Indiana. Oh man, I blew it. Life is full of choices . Forks in the road where we have to pick one path or the other. Sometimes we make those decisions under pressure or with incomplete information, or at times when we're not our calmest, most rational selves. And sometimes, once we begin to regret the path we've taken, it's too late to turn around. That's how it was for author and illustrator Liz Vosaline. As the child of European immigrants, Liz spent a lot of her youth traveling back and forth to visit relatives. I just have a lot of happy childhood memories there, and it felt like a link to this bigger family that I don't feel that I have in the U. S. But with families, it's not always vacations and holiday get togethers . There are sometimes emergencies and bereavements. So my grandmother died when I was in my early twenties and my mom who rarely shows emotion or asks for much asked me to go with her to pack up the house . Loose dropped everything, right? I mean, she wasn't gonna let down her mom at the very moment she needed her presence and support the most . And said no. Liz had just landed a great new consulting job, a position she'd badly wanted and had worked hard to win. I was like, I have so much going on at work. I just can't take two weeks off for an international trip. It's just too much for me to take on right now. And so Liz's mom flew across the Atlantic to deal with the death of her mother all alone. Decades later, that decision still causes Liz tremendous anguish. Like even now I'm starting to get tears in my eyes because I think of my mom alone on this eight hour plane ride to go pack up like her childhood and my childhood and are linked to our family . Though painful, regrets like these are a creative spur for Liz . Along with author Molly Westuffy, she's part of a duo known online as Liz and Molly. They're responsible for a popular Instagram feed of illustrations that show how we can deal with all kinds of painful feelings, the types of things that we too often keep to ourselves. There's just so much, especially when we talk about big feelings that all of us are experiencing on a daily basis that we don't share with people . I'm a huge fan of Liz and Molly's work. I share their simple yet powerful cartoons with my students all the time. They're not just poignant, clever, and funny. They also include lots of science backed tips for dealing with those big feelings . So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that the duo were also putting out a new book. It's called Big Feelings How to Be OK When Things Are Not OK. The book gives advice for navigating seven of our most p ainful negative emotions the usual emotional culprits, things like sadness, anger, and even burnout . But there's also one that doesn't get as much attention. You guessed it, regret . Research shows that it's one of the most common emotions that people feel. I think it's after love or something like that. Some studies estimate that over ninety percent of people report having severe regret about some decision they've made in their lives. Over ninety percent of people , that's basically everyone. And yet one of the misconceptions about regret is that it's actually even possible for us to live that hashtag no regrets life. It's just a completely inaccurate view of the world . There is no life in which you will have no regrets . A second misconception goes something like this Okay , so maybe I can't have a perfectly hashtag no regrets existence , but I'd definitely be able to have a hashtag mostly no regrets life if only I could get everything I want. We assume that if we had the perfect job and a swanky house and an amazing partner, we'd never experience that painful twinge of what if. But this too is a spot where our minds are lying to us. And part of that is because you can only choose one life . Even if your current life path is mostly awesome, there's probably something great out there in the universe that you're not going to get a chance to experience . Another fork in the road you could have chosen, but didn't. And sometimes we can't help but regret not taking it. And we also have a tendency to put on rose colored glasses when we consider that alternate path, especially in moments when our current reality is a little harder. I feel like we have a lot to learn about regret , so I decided to call in an expert. My name is Daniel Pink. I'm the author of The Power of Regret how looking backward moves us forward . Daniel developed what he calls the World Regret Survey, which collected the experiences of tens of thousands of people from more than a hundred countries. It's one of the largest databases of regrets ever. With all that data to draw on, I was hoping that Daniel could give us a bit of a crash course on regret , starting with a definition. I think one way to start is that a regret is an emotion and it's an emotion that makes us feel bad and it's em anotion that arises from , I think, some really fascinating and interesting powers of our brain. Regret requires a few complicated and possibly unique cognitive abilities . The first of these is the ability to accept blame. Unlike other negative emotions, like say disappointment, regret requires agency . We can only regret stuff that we caused. You experience regret because it's your fault. Regret also requires the capacity to time travel. Regret forces us to hop in a mental time machine and travel back to some remembered event of the past. And once we get there, our brains engage in a third impressive cognitive feat. What Daniel calls fabulism . We imagine making a different decision than we actually made. And then what's even more crazy is that we negate that experience. We get back in our time machine. We arrive back in the present and we now see a present that is reconfigured because of this decision that we've undone in the past. And that's the final cognitive superpower we engage in when feeling regret, what's known as counterfactual thinking . We create a new, completely imaginary timeline that runs counter to the facts. And there are two kinds of counterfactual thinking. One of them is known as a downward counterfactual. So that is we where imagine how things could have been worse. Downward counterfactuals often involve the phrase well at least . So let's say you miss your morning flight because you spent too long getting ready. You might engage in a downward counterfactual and say things like well , at least there was a later flight, or well, at least I didn't miss my connection. Downward counterfactuals help us remember that it could have been worse. They usually make us feel better . But less helpfully, we also engage in upward counterfactuals , which is how you imagine things could have been better . Upward counterfactuals make us say if only . If only I had spent a year in Jamaica, if only I had helped my mom when she needed me , if only I had done this thing or that thing differently, then everything now would be so much better. I kind of regret going to college. I might've like ended up, I don't know, working on a flower farm. Upward counterfactuals convince us that we've totally screwed things up. They kind of make us feel like crap . And sadly, they also dominate our thoughts. Because I'm a lawyer , but it would have been nice to find something that I'm passionate about, an actress, a science teacher, or I'm going to be a doctor because I love health, nutrition, and that kind of stuff. Researchers have looked at how often we use each of these two kinds of counterfactual s. Those painful if only counterfactuals, they beat out the nicer feeling of at least counterfactuals more than eighty percent of the time. We are biased in this case toward the negative. We're biased toward the upward counterf actual toward the if only's. I think the interesting thing here as we try to sort out the puzzle is, you know, why would we do that ? Why would we be prone to do something that makes us feel worse. And so there must be something about this that confers a benefit. There must be something about this that is adaptive . So becoming happier must involve banishing those negative if only's, right? Well, Daniel argues that wouldn't be such a smart thing to do. I'm all for positivity or I'm all for positive emotions, but here's the thing, I don't want to have only positive emotions because negative emotions serve a function. I think that no regrets, the philosophy of no regrets that you should never look backward, you should always look forward, never be negative, always be positive is a profound ly bad idea . I think it is an unhealthy recipe for living . I think what we have to do is actually use our regrets as information, as signal, as data, not ignore them, not wallowing them, but use them to help clarify what we value and instruct us on how to live better . When we get back from the break, we'll explore just how we can use these if only's to live a better life. We'll see that regret can be a critical signpost for the version of ourselves that we most want to be , and we'll see that if we better understand that ideal self, we can start to use this painful emotion to live a healthier, happier and more authentic life. The Happiness Lab will be right back I've been thinking about my spaces lately, and I've realized just how much thoughtful design can change the feel of my everyday routines, but I honestly never expected a toilet to be part of that conversation until I experienced the Kohler Smart Toilet Collection. Kohler has been elevating bathroom design since eighteen seventy three, and you can really feel that legacy in the way their products are designed. Take the Kohler Vale smart toilet. That design immediately stands out. It's modern, sleek, almost like a functional work of art. It just makes your entire bathroom experience feel more elevated. It's a reminder that the right design can make everyday moments feel cleaner, more comfortable, and more intentional. Kohler has been redefining bathroom design for more than one hundred fifty years, and their smart toilets really show how design and innovation can transform even the most routine parts of life. Design changes everything, and Kohler smart toilets are a really great example of that. Experience the difference of Kohler smart toilets . Find more at Kohler. com as the weather changes , I've been thinking more and more about my wardrobe . And these days, I've been trying to get more intentional about what's in my closet. I want getting dressed to feel simpler. So I've been leaning into pieces that feel effortless and comfortable, but still look put together. This spring, I've been obsessed with Quintz's one hundred percent organic cotton poplin tiered maxi dress. It's got a fit that feels sleek, but it's still super comfortable, and I couldn't believe how great the price was. Quintz makes it easy to refresh your everyday wardrobe this spring with pieces that feel as good as they look. Quince uses premium materials like one hundred percent European linen, organic cotton and ult rasoft denim. Plus, Quintz works directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality and craftsmanship, not brand markup. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quince dot com slash happiness for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. That's Q INCE dot com slash happiness for free shipping and three hundred sixty five day returns quince dot com slash happiness . This message is in partnership with Simple Mills. On our show, we talk a lot about how small choices can have a big impact on your well being . And one choice that often gets overlooked, the snacks you reach for during the day . It might sound simple, but the right snack can help you feel energized and focused, two things that make sticking to healthy habits so much easier. When your body feels good, your mind follows. That's why I feel good talking about Simple Mill's almond flour crackers . They are made with real nutrient rich ingredients like almond flour, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds. And the bonus, these crackers have a unique cr unchy texture. They're absolutely delicious, and I promise they'll make you look forward to snack time. We all know that unhealthy snacking can derail even the best intentions. Simple Mills crackers do the opposite. Now, I hope you know, I'm not a big adspeak person , but when they say simple Mills crackers taste like sunshine in every bite, it's actually a pretty good description. They're light, satisfying, and instead of weighing you down, you feel a little more energized. Choosing snacks that fuel your body well is one of those small but powerful steps that make other healthy habits stick. And if you're looking for something filled with its own little reward system, check out Simple Mill Pop M s. Yes, spelled with three M's. These light airy popable cheesecrackers are loaded with real vegetables, so you get that quick crunch without compromising your energy. It's a mindful choice that feels good and tastes great. The bottom line, habits don't happen in isolation. They're supported by the environment you create and the choices you make along the way. When you pick snacks that help you feel good, physically and mentally, you're setting yourself up for success. And success should taste good. Find simple mills at your local grocery store. There's always something you want to get better at. For me this summer, it's all about learning more about music. If you're a fan of the Happiness Lab, you know that I love my sing alongs, but these days I've been thinking about learning how to DJ so that I can supplement that. And that's why I turned to masterclass. With Masterclass, no matter what you're interested in, you can find a class taught by someone who's actually the best in the world at that thing. When I first learned how to DJ, I found classes by amazing teachers like Quest Love, and Masterclass fits into my busy professor life. I love their short lessons, which I can watch on my phone or on my TV. And with audio mode, MasterClass can turn your commute or workout into a classroom. Masterclass keeps adding new classes, so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show , you get at least fifteen percent off any annual membership at masterclass dot com slash Laurie. That's fifteen percent off at masterclass dot com slash lawy. Head to masterclass dot com slash lawyer to see the latest offer. I'm Maya Shunker, host of a slight change of plans. When I was around eleven years old at summer music camp, I had the biggest crush on another violin ist, Shinsuke Sato. He was cute, a total violin prodigy, and was really funny too. I thought maybe he liked me as well, but I could never tell for sure. One day, a mutual friend of ours just asked me point blank, hey, do you like Shinsuke? I think he might like you. Shinsuke was an earshot, and I remember seeing him lightly smile in response to her question . But even with that affirmation, I was too embarrassed and said no . He could have been my summer boyfriend but I was too much of a wimp . And it took me until I was nineteen to actually have my first boyfriend . How different things could have been for me. Regrets can feel so troubling that we'd move mountains to change things . Like I would give a lot, a lot, a lot of money to go back and make a different decision. Liz Vosseline still hurts when she reflects on her grandmother's death and not being there for her grieving mother. But Liz argues that experiencing the painful big feelings that come with regret have helped her to learn what really matters in life. Remembering how painful it was n't just regret, it was pain , it was shame, it was guilt, it was all these sort of really, really thorny, difficult feelings that were welling inside me. But that really, really clarified the decisions I wanted to make going forward. Liz tackled this idea in a recent Liz and Molly comic on Instagram. In it, a tiny dejected looking figure looks regretfully back into the past . But another similar figure turns to the future and asks, What if I do things differently from now on? Liz and Molly then quote the author, Augustine Burrows To live in regret and change nothing else in your life is to miss the entire point . And the science shows that this is one of the big benefits of being a creature that can feel regret, our regrets can help us to better understand the kind of people we want to be , even if we're not currently living up to those standards . Just as our brains are good at simulating imaginary counterfactual situations , say, asking out that person we liked but never spoke to or going to graduate school in the Caribbean rather than working in Indiana, so too can our brains simulate imaginary counterfactual versions of ourselves. When I'm having a tough day as a professor, I might simulate a version of Lori who's an astronaut or a veterinarian or a beach bum. Perhaps more usefully, I can also simulate a better version of Laurie who doesn't skip her workouts, who never spends too much time on social media and who always gets enough sleep . Research has found that paying attention to the different kinds of better selves we simulate can help us to make choices that could ultimately make us happier. Back in the nineteen eighties, Columbia University psychologist Tory Higgins proposed an idea he called self discrepancy theory. It started from the observation that people tend to compare their real actual self to two very different kinds of model selves . The first is what he called the ideal self. Your ideal self is the truest, most authentic version of you. Ideal you ignores what society says and fearlessly shoots for all your hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Liz knew exactly what her ideal self wanted. So this is the career that makes you come alive versus the career that you feel pressured to pursue. But we also fantasize about a second counterfactual self , the ot self. The ought self is all about duty, obligation and doing what's expected of you. So for me, that is being a doctor. My parents are both immigrants, academics, it was very much like doctor Banker lawyer, that is success . My own ought self is a me that never takes a break. That Lori is a perfectionist who has the perfect body and great clothes and a flawlessly clean house. But Ideal Laurie has a completely different set of aspirations. Ideal Laurie does want to do good work in the world, but she also wants to take care of herself and live her dreams. And the odd self and ideal self sometimes require you to pick two very different paths. When Liz's grandmother died far away across the ocean, idealized and auntliz clashed about what to do next. Liz's ideal self would have hands down risk upsetting her new boss es to help her mom in that moment of grief. The ideal self is someone who shows up for the people that I care about in the moments that really matter . But her odd self won out . Rather than following her heart and going to the airport , she headed to the office . I really felt like I could not fail, especially early on in this job, otherwise it would ruin my career forever. And looking back now, I totally understand that that was ridiculous catastrophic thinking. And there are many examples of this in my early twenties like I cannot believe some of the things I did like the time Liz passed out and spent the night in the hospital . The next morning her ought self convinced her that she needed to go to work anyway. And I looked terrible and my boss asked what had happened and I briefly mentioned that I had been in the ER and he just stared at me and was like, You need to go home. It's not okay that you are here . But again, it was a similar compulsion of like, I have to be present, I have to be showing up. So given that we have these two different imaginary versions of ourselves on our shoulders , each screaming different things , which ones should we listen to? Well, Tori Kiggins found that ignoring either of these voices doesn't feel great in the short term. If Liz had flown to Europe, she'd probably have worried about her job as soon as the airplane left the Tarmac. But research shows that when it comes to long term regrets, the severe kind that give us anguish years after the fact , they're much more likely to stem from ignoring the person we ideally want to be. If you pursue the path that brings you closer to your ideal self . You tend to be happier if confronted with, hey, this is the job that really sings to my soul versus this is the job that everyone has expected me to take. But the thought of taking it actually fills me with a deep existent ial dread you should go with the ideal self job. It may sound grim, but people at the very end of life bear out this observation. Palliative nurse Bronnie Ware had years of experience living with patients in their final weeks , and she repeatedly witnessed the pain and anguish of their regrets. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, she once said . Moored by their stories and hopeful to share the wisdom she'd gained from her patients, she wrote a bestselling book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying . All of the top five regrets Wear Shares in her book involve disappointing the ideal self rather than the odd self. The dying regret not being emotionally available to their friends and loves, being too devoted to proving themselves at work, and caring too much about what other people think. Social psychologists Tom Gilavich and Shy David Eye did a more empirically based survey of long term regrets . They studied a very different cohort of people, not the terminally ill , but everyone, from college students to residents in an old age home. People's regrets about not living up to the person they ideally wanted to be far outnumbered their regrets about not living up to what they ought to do to please bosses, neighbors or the wider society . Findings like these have shaped how Liz now listens to her two different counterfactual selves. When I'm faced with something and when I have this little voice within me that says like whoop at work is really busy this week and no, remember the pain that you're trying to avoid in the future. Just put that sort of perfectionist odd self to the side and go show up because that's what you're going to remember in ten years. I truly do not know what I was doing at work that week. I can tell you nothing about the project I was working on, about how it turned out. It just wasn't as important in the long run. Liz is now convinced that past regrets are great learning points . That recent Liz and Molly cartoon I mentioned also included an important quote, regrets can be burned as fuel . But regrets burn hot , and we can only become better people if we're committed to directly embrac ing our regrets and the pain they cause . Because I think when we do that, there's a lot of evidence that it is a powerfully transformative emotion . The Happiness Lab will be right back I've been thinking about my spaces lately, and I've realized just how much thoughtful design can change the feel of my everyday routines, but I honestly never expected a toilet to be part of that conversation until I experienced the Kohler Smart Toilet Collection . Kohler has been elevating bathroom design since eighteen seventy three, and you can really feel that legacy in the way their product s are designed. Take the Kohler Vale smart toilet. That design immediately stands out. It's modern, sleek, almost like a functional work of art. It just makes your entire bathroom experience feel more elevated. It's a reminder that the right design can make everyday moments feel cleaner, more comfortable, and more intentional. Kohler has been redefining bathroom design for more than one hundred fifty years , and their smart toilets really show how design and innovation can transform even the most routine parts of life. Design changes everything , and Kohler smart toilets are a really great example of that. Experience the difference of Kohler smart toilets. Find more at Kohler. com . As the weather changes, I've been thinking more and more about my wardrobe . And these days, I've been trying to get more intentional about what's in my closet. I want getting dressed to feel simpler. So I've been leaning into pieces that feel effortless and comf ortable but still look put together . This spring, I've been obsessed with Quintz's one hundred percent organic cotton poplin tiered maxi dress. It's got a fit that feels sleek, but it's still super comfortable, and I couldn't believe how great the price was. Quince makes it easy to refresh your everyday wardrobe this spring with pieces that feel as good as they look. Quintz uses premium materials like one hundred percent European linen, organic cotton , and ultrasoft denim. Plus, Quint works directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality and craftsmanship, not brand markup. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use . Head to quince dot com slash happiness for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. That's QI NCE. com slash happiness for free shipping and three hundred sixty and five day returns quince. com slash happiness . This message is in partnership with Simple Mills. On our show, we talk a lot about how small choices can have a big impact on your well being , and one choice that often gets overlooked, the snacks you reach for during the day. It might sound simple, but the right snack can help you feel energized and focused, two things that make sticking to healthy habits so much easier. When your body feels good, your mind follow s. That's why I feel good talking about Simple Mills almond flour crackers . They are made with real nutrient rich ingredients, like almond flour, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds. And the bonus, these crack ers have a unique, crunchy texture. They're absolutely delicious, and I promise they'll make you look forward to snack time. We all know that unhealthy snacking can derail even the best intentions. Simple Mills crackers do the opposite. Now I hope you know I'm not a big ad speak person, but when they say Simple Mills crackers taste like sunshine in every bite, it's actually a pretty good description. They're light, satisfying, and instead of weighing you down, you feel a little more