Tortured by regret? Here’s a trick to make peace with the past

We all have regrets. And they come in myriad shapes and sizes. Some people stew over a minor bad decision, like an unnecessary impulse purchase. Others ruminate over major fork-in-the-road moments, like turning down a potentially exciting career opportunity. For some, regret might be slow-brewing indecision that amounts to loss, like not having children.

But what if you could reimagine your memories — both recent and from long ago — to vanquish feelings of regret?

That’s the focus of a new study, “Reining in regret: emotion regulation modulates regret in decision making,” co-authored by Temple University’s Crystal Reeck and Kevin LaBar, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University.

The study, published in the journal “Cognition and Emotion” in June, employed a gambling framework — you win some, you lose some — to explore participants’ decision-making processes. Sixty people were individually presented with several pairs of bets, each representing different probabilities of winning or losing real money. They were paid $10 for the one hour of questioning as well as bonus money for points they’d racked up during the experiment. If they answered questions incorrectly, they lost real money and may have felt a pang of — you guessed it — regret.

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Reeck and LaBar were able to gauge the intensity of their regret through questioning and psychophysiological recordings that measured how participants’ bodies were experiencing emotion at the time.

Participants were encouraged to use two different emotional regulation strategies when faced with uncertainty during the study. The first, which researchers called the “portfolio approach,” encouraged them to recognize that not every decision will work out, and to focus on the big picture in the long run.

“The idea is not to experience as many individual highs and lows but to smooth out your reactions and be more even-keeled,” Reeck said.

The second strategy was an “all my money on one bet” approach, which focused on each gamble as if it was the only one.

“What we found was: using the portfolio approach led people to experience less regret and have less strong emotional reactions during the decision-making task,” Reeck said.

That same approach can be applied to decision making in real life by traveling down memory lane, reviewing past decisions and assigning a different framework to them, Reeck says. The end goal? To make better choices in the present and, ultimately, experience less regret.

“Inevitably, every choice we make doesn’t work out,” Reeck says. “We are all going to experience some losses. But when you try to focus on the gains, it is easier to not be bogged down by past regrets.”

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We spoke with Reeck by phone to learn more about how we can use her findings to get over our regrets — no matter what size they come.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why was regret an especially attractive emotion for you to work with? Were you seeing anything in society or the people around you that drew you to the idea?

Regret is ubiquitous. When a decision doesn’t work out the way we had hoped, and we see that if we did something else things would have been better, we experience regret. And the especially challenging thing about regret is we can experience it even for decisions we’re contemplating but haven’t made. For example, you might consider getting a sports car but then imagine how you would feel if it broke down and needed maintenance. That anticipated feeling of regret could lead you to choose a safer vehicle.

I worked on this project in my 20s and 30s, a time when friends and family were making a lot of big decisions — getting married, changing jobs, pursuing more education, making their first big purchases. And I noticed that some of the worry around those big choices is that they’ll regret something. Understanding better how regret works and how to overcome regret can help people navigate those big decisions, including when it doesn’t work out. So that was part of the draw.

What role does regret play in our lives and what’s at stake when we seek to reshape our feelings around it?

Regret can help us learn from our mistakes. Especially when there was a better option we could have chosen, those negative feelings of regret can help us choose more wisely in the future. And anticipated regret — like with the sports car — can help us avoid risky decisions. The problem is: sometimes regret can lead us astray, like when we used a good process and made a good choice, it just didn’t work out in your favor this time. Regret can steer you away, when you should actually make that same decision again in the future.

A key example of where this comes up is the stock market. Sometimes, like in recent weeks, the stock market may drop dramatically. You might feel regret that you lost money and pull your investment. But that’s not what you should do if your reasoning for being invested was sound — you’ll just end up missing out when the market recovers.

Tell us about the study itself. Why did you employ a gambling framework?

We needed a way to induce people to feel regret in the lab so we could study it. To do that, we asked them to make decisions between two different options that each had some risk — there were no guaranteed outcomes. At some point, people choose an option that makes less money than the other option would have made, leading them to feel regret.

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How can we use the gambling framework to reshape our own feelings of regret?

Think about overall how you made the decision. If the logic or approach you used was sound, you can feel more comfortable with the choice. You probably just got unlucky and if you made the same decision 10 times it would have worked out in most of them.

One of the cool things about regret is there is a formula for calculating its influence on decision making. So you can look at things like pursuing the options with the highest value and if regret is interfering with that. We found that for many of our participants, the portfolio approach led them to make better decisions that were less influenced by regret.

Here’s a scenario: I’m an adult with a gnawing regret— let’s say it’s not buying the house of my dreams when I could afford it. How do I use your framework to reshape my regret?

Focus on your reasons for not buying the house — were they sound and did they make sense with the information you had at the time? If so, give yourself some grace for the choice you made. And remember that feeling of regret when the next once-in-a-lifetime opportunity comes along.

How can we reimagine our memories to alter past feelings of regret? Walk us through that exercise.

Think back to where you were when you made the decision. What information did you have at the time? And did you use what you knew well? Was the way you approached the decision reasonable and did you use a good strategy? If so, offer yourself some grace. Remember that you win some, you lose some.

Think about if the decision you made had actually happened 10 times instead of just 1. Would you get the outcome you wanted most of the time, and you just got unlucky? Keep in mind you just want to do well overall, even if the occasional decision doesn’t work out.