What to do with regrets?
Many of us have experienced a regret or two in our lives. It can be a deeply painful experience. Regret itself is a feeling and comes with a whole plethora of other feelings. The cocktail you never wanted to drink. With regret, you might also feel sadness, embarrassment, and disappointment in yourself. And I don’t know about you, for me, there’s not much worse than feeling disappointed in myself. Regret simply feels bad in your body. You might be tense, feel constricted, or even have physical reminders of said regret. Regret can lead to rumination and good old fashioned self-hatred. Or you might feel inclined to ignore it completely, pretending it didn’t happen. Anxiety, unfortunately, loves avoidance, the more you avoid something, the bigger your anxiety will grow. To boil all this down, regret sucks.
So, what do you do with regret? For starters, don’t ignore it, remember that will increase your anxiety. Next, care for your body. An activated body makes an activated mind. Once your body has been tended to, now comes the big work: Accountability. Regret comes from a choice, an action or inaction, that you made. Remember when we talked about personal responsibility? Yea, now is the time to practice it. Taking accountability and owning your personal responsibility in your choices allows you to both make different choices in the future and remedy the consequences of the choices you have regrets about. Maybe you need to apologize or have a hard conversation. Maybe you literally need to fix something. Taking accountability is vulnerable and uncomfortable, I know. It’s also healing to relationships and improves your sense of trust in yourself. You can trust that even when you mess up (because you will), you can grow from it. Finally, channel the energy you spend on the hard feelings as a motivator to learn from this experience so it doesn’t happen again, this is when our natural inclination to avoid pain is actually quite helpful. Obviously, I’m going to say something about self-compassion. You can take accountability while still offering yourself compassion. So you messed up, ok. Acknowledge it, take responsibility for your actions and the consequences of them, don’t let yourself off the hook, but don’t beat yourself up, and do something about it. Yes, regret sucks, it’s also just one of the many painful parts of the learning process of life. So be kind to yourself too, life is hard enough with all this learning from our mistakes without you adding fuel to fire.
Questions to ponder.
What is a recent regret you had?
How can you take accountability for what you regret?
What can you learn from this regret? What do you want to do differently?
