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Regrets: that’s why they can improve our lives

In life, it’s better to have no regrets. How many times have we heard or said this sentence to ourselves? Lost opportunities, missed goals, dreams abandoned in a drawer or good intentions left there, in the inevitable list at the beginning of the year: all situations that turn into regrets and that we live like heavy ballast from which we would like to free ourselves. The good news? That of life without regrets is nothing more than a false myth from which we should all learn to free ourselves. Looked at from the right perspective, in fact, regrets can have very positive effects on our lives.

Effects that have also been witnessed by science, as it explains very well in a article that appeared in Psychology Today Vanessa LoBue, professor of psychology at Rutgers University-Newark and director of the Child Study Center.

Regrets are inevitable

The author points out that in her book, The Power of Regret, Daniel Pink starts from a fundamental but often ignored assumption: a life without regrets is nearly impossible. Regret is in fact not only a normal component of human experience but even healthy, since it is closely linked to ability to think about ourselves over time and of reflect on decisions that we have made, comparing them to other decisions that we would have could take.

It is about what is defined counterfactual reasoning (the ability, that is, to imagine possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred) and although it is a type of thinking that is difficult for children up to 6 or 7 years of age to achieve, it becomes something in adulthood that cannot be avoided to experiment.

There are different kinds of regrets: there are things we didn’t do but should have done. Things we did but shouldn’t have. There are people we should have contacted, places we should have visited, things we should have said, and things we should have kept to ourselves.

According to Pink, however, we regret more often the situations over which we had some kind of control, those to which we have not remained faithful and have abandoned. The classic example? Regret having dropped out of school.

The positive side of regret

Once you understand that regrets are inevitable, then it pays learn to make peace. This certainly does not mean spending time feeling sorry for yourself: what is useful to do is instead see what good our regrets have to offer us.

For example, points out the author of the article that appeared on PsychologyTodaywe can look at our regrets as to a teaching that can allow us to do better next time.

Studies on the benefits of regret

To underline how regrets can have a positive function there were some too Scientific studies.

In particular one study conducted on a group of students enrolled in a course on negotiation showed how those who could identify regrets related to previous negotiations, obtained better results in subsequent negotiations than those who showed no regrets.

Regrets can therefore help us to try harder to achieve a better result than we have achieved in the past.

In a other studyemphasizes Dr. Vanessa LoBue, the researchers asked university students to form as many words as possible from a set of letters.

Subsequently, some students were asked to reflect on how they could have done the task better. Participants who were asked this question performed better on the next anagram exercise than a control group who did not reflect on their mistakes.

The conclusion? Instead of letting regrets eat us up or chasing the (false) myth of life without regrets – suggests the expert – it could be much more useful take time to analyze closely what we regret so to understand what do we want to change in our life.

Other Stories by Vanity Fair that may interest you:

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What It Means to Be a Jellyfish Parent (And Why You Should)

Source: Vanity Fair

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