How to Use Regret Instead of Wallowing in It

Looking backwards doesn’t have to feel like standing still.

Excerpt: "Regret, my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2016, is “the emotional price we pay for free will.”

If we were just pawns tossed around on the chessboard of life, she explains, there’d be nothing to regret. Most of us would probably take that trade-off: Better to make mistakes than to have no control at all. But even so, none of us enjoys the experience of regret.

Looking backward can be an act of desperate refusal to accept the passage of time: What if? If only. I should’ve. I could’ve.

But maybe there’s a way to make regret less about the past—by giving in to those feelings of sadness or disappointment or guilt, just for a little while, we might learn something new about ourselves right now, in the present."