When Tamir and Mitchell then used functional magnetic resonance imaging to watch what was happening in the brains of these people, they saw that those who disclosed information about themselves had greater activation in the brain regions (the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area) that respond to food, money, and sex. The study, the researchers concluded, “provided both behavioral and neural evidence that self-disclosure is intrinsically rewarding.”[3]
The first step in reckoning with all regrets, whether regrets of action or inaction, is self-disclosure. We’re often skittish about revealing to others negative information about ourselves. It feels awkward, even shameful. But an enormous body of literature makes clear that disclosing our thoughts, feelings, and actions—by telling others or simply by writing about them—brings an array of physical, mental, and professional benefits. Such self-revelation is linked to reduced blood pressure, higher grades, better coping skills, and more.[4] Indeed, Tamir and Mitchell maintain that “our species may have an intrinsic drive to disclose thoughts to others.”[5]
Self-disclosure is especially useful with regret. Denying our regrets taxes our minds and bodies. Gripping them too tightly can tip us into harmful rumination. The better approach is to relive and relieve. By divulging the regret, we reduce some of its burden, which can clear a path for making sense of it.
For example, psychologists like Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, have conducted studies that suggest people should process negative and positive experiences in different ways. In this research, writing about negative experiences like regret, and even talking into a tape recorder about them, for fifteen minutes a day substantially increased people’s overall life satisfaction and improved their physical and mental well-being in ways that merely thinking about those experiences did not. Yet the reverse was true for positive experiences: writing and talking about triumphs and good times drained some of their positivity.[6]
The explanation—and the reason self-disclosure is so crucial for handling regret—is that language, whether written or spoken, forces us to organize and integrate our thoughts. It converts blobby mental abstractions into concrete linguistic units. That’s a plus for negative emotions.[7]
Again, regret can make us better when we use emotions as a signal for our thoughts. When feeling is for thinking, and thinking is for doing, regret can perform its decision-enhancing, performance-boosting, meaning-deepening magic. Writing about regret or revealing a regret to another person moves the experience from the realm of emotion into the realm of cognition. Instead of those unpleasant feelings fluttering around uncontrollably, language helps us capture them in our net, pin them down, and begin analyzing them. By contrast, the same approach for positive experiences is less effective. For life’s happy moments, avoiding analysis and sense-making helps us maintain the wonder and delight of those moments. Dissecting terrific events can diminish their terrificness.[8]
One misgiving we have with self-disclosure, particularly if we’re revealing our previous failures to be prudent, trustworthy, or courageous, is that others will think poorly of us. But that is much less of a concern than we realize. One can go too far, of course. Oversharing intimate details about yourself can make others uneasy. But the evidence shows that self-disclosure builds affinity much more often than it triggers judgment. One major review of the literature concluded that “people who engage in intimate disclosures tend to be liked more than people who disclose at lower levels.”?[9]
Still, if you’re squeamish about what others think of you, you needn’t disclose your regret to anybody but yourself. The pathbreaking work of social psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas, begun in the 1990s and expanded by him and other scholars for the last thirty years, has shown that merely writing about emotional difficulties, even solely for your own consumption, can be powerful. Among the benefits: fewer visits to physicians, long-term improvements in mood, strengthened immune function, better grades for students, finding jobs more quickly for the unemployed, and more.[10] In addition, Pennebaker has determined that these benefits extend widely: “The disclosure phenomenon appears to generalize across settings, many individual difference factors, and several Western cultures, and is independent of social feedback.”[11]
The initial step in dealing with all forms of regret is to disclose the regret. Cheryl Johnson has done that—first by completing the World Regret Survey, and then by talking with me about the strong friendship she had failed to maintain. In our conversation, she told me that she’d never told anyone the full tale of her experience and that brought a moment of clarity and a measure of relief.
Self-disclosure is intrinsically rewarding and extrinsically valuable. It can lighten our burden, make abstract negative emotions more concrete, and build affiliation. So, to begin to harness your regrets to improve in the future, try any of the following:
Write about your regret for fifteen minutes for three consecutive days.
Talk about your regret into a voice recorder for fifteen minutes for three consecutive days.
Tell someone else about the regret in person or by phone. Include sufficient detail about what happened, but establish a time limit (perhaps a half hour) to avoid the possibilities of repetition and brooding.
STEP 2. SELF-COMPASSION: NORMALIZE AND NEUTRALIZE
After you disclose your regret, you are exposed—to yourself and others. And once exposed, you face a choice about how to respond. Do you dress yourself down? Or do you pump yourself up? Which is more effective—initiating a round of self-criticism or tapping your reserves of self-esteem?
The answer, it turns out, is neither.
As someone with an unbending commitment to self-criticism as well as a lifetime spent honing the technique, I was surprised when I went looking for evidence of its effectiveness. There isn’t much. Self-criticism can sometimes motivate our performance when we criticize ourselves for particular actions rather than for deep-seated tendencies. But unless carefully managed and contained, self-criticism can become a form of inner-directed virtue signaling. It projects toughness and ambition, but often leads to rumination and hopelessness instead of productive action.[12]