Its opposite, self-esteem, can be more effective. Highly prized in certain parenting and education circles, where praise gushes and participation trophies gleam, self-esteem measures how much you value yourself. How good do you feel about who you are? How favorably do you evaluate your traits and behaviors? For example, in surveys, people with high self-esteem award themselves top marks for their looks, their brains, and their popularity—while people with low self-esteem make the opposite assessment. (Curiously, neither evaluation correlates with how smart, attractive, or popular someone actually is.)?[13] We all need some baseline level of self-esteem to survive today and flourish tomorrow. And efforts to boost self-esteem can lift performance and lessen depression and anxiety.
But self-esteem brings downsides. Because it offers indiscriminate affirmation unconnected to genuine accomplishment, self-esteem can foster narcissism, diminish empathy, and stoke aggression. Criminals, for instance, have higher self-esteem than the general population. It can also promote bias toward one’s own group and prejudice toward other groups.[14] Because self-esteem is comparative, to assess myself favorably, I often must denigrate others. These defects are why some of the finest social scientists of the last fifty years—among them, Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, and the late Albert Bandura—have long explored alternatives to self-esteem.
The most powerful and promising alternative—and the second step in the regret-reckoning process—was pioneered nearly twenty years ago by University of Texas psychologist Kristin Neff. It is called “self-compassion.”
Self-compassion emerged in part from Neff’s recognition that when we stumble or fail, we treat ourselves more harshly than we would ever treat friends, family, or even strangers in the same predicament. That’s counterproductive, she has shown. Rather than belittling or berating ourselves during moments of frustration and failure, we’re better off extending ourselves the same warmth and understanding we’d offer another person. Self-compassion begins by replacing searing judgment with basic kindness. It doesn’t ignore our screwups or neglect our weaknesses. It simply recognizes that “being imperfect, making mistakes, and encountering life difficulties is part of the shared human experience.”[15] By normalizing negative experiences, we neutralize them. Self-compassion encourages us to take the middle road in handling negative emotions—not suppressing them, but not exaggerating or overidentifying with them either.
Self-compassion is also something that people can learn.[16] And when they master it, the benefits are considerable. Research by Neff and others has found that self-compassion is associated with increased optimism, happiness, curiosity, and wisdom;[17] enhanced personal initiative and emotional intelligence;[18] greater mental toughness;[19] and deeper social connections.[20] It can protect against unproductive mind-wandering,[21] and help students cope with academic failure.[22] It also correlates with less depression, anxiety, stress, perfectionism, and shame[23]—and reduces symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.[24] A 2019 meta-analysis of more than ninety studies showed that self-compassion can even promote better physical health, including improved immune function.[25]
In a sense, self-compassion delivers the benefits of self-esteem without its drawbacks. It can insulate us from the debilitating consequences of self-criticism, while short-circuiting self-esteem’s need to feel good through vanity and comparison.
Its powers are especially evident with regret. In 2016, psychologists Jia Wei Zhang, now at the University of Memphis, and Serena Chen of the University of California, Berkeley, explored the effect that self-compassion has in helping people overcome and learn from their regrets. The researchers recruited several hundred participants and asked each of them to list their biggest regret.
Then they randomly divided participants into three groups. One group wrote a letter to themselves about their regret “from a compassionate and understanding perspective.” The second group wrote a letter to themselves about the regret “from a perspective of validating your positive (rather than negative) qualities.” The third group, which served as the control, wrote about a hobby they enjoyed.
The people who addressed their regret with self-compassion were more likely to change their behavior than those who approached their regret with self-esteem. Even this modest writing intervention led people to plan ways to avoid the behavior in the future—regardless of whether the regret involved action or inaction. “Self-compassion appears to orient people to embrace their regret,” Zhang and Chen write, “and this willingness to remain in contact with their regret may afford people the opportunity to discover avenues for personal improvement.”[26]
For a regret like Cheryl’s, self-compassion doesn’t mean exonerating herself for not making more of an effort to maintain her friendship. It means treating herself with the same graciousness she’d treat someone else who regretted a splintered friendship. It means “remaining in contact” with the regret, as Zhang and Chen put it, but not making the dissolved friendship the defining feature of her character. And it means moving past language like “I really screwed up,” which Cheryl told me several times, and instead recognizing how normal, universal, and human her regret is.
A self-compassionate approach does not foster complacency, as some might fear.[27] While self-flagellation seems motivating—especially to Americans, whose mental models of motivation often begin with howling, red-faced, vein-popping football coaches—it often produces helplessness. Self-compassion, by contrast, prompts people to confront their difficulties head-on and take responsibility for them, researchers have found. As Neff writes, “Far from being an excuse for self-indulgence, therefore, self-compassion pushes us forward—and for the right reasons.”[28]
So, drawing on the science of self-compassion, the second step in transforming our regrets is to ask ourselves three questions:
If a friend or relative came to you with the same regret as yours, would you treat that person with kindness or contempt? If your answer is kindness, use that approach on yourself. If your answer is contempt, try a different answer.
Is this type of regret something that other people might have endured, or are you the only person ever to have experienced it? If you believe your stumble is part of our common humanity, reflect on that belief, as it’s almost always true. If you believe the world has it out for you alone, please reread Chapters 7–10.
Does this regret represent an unpleasant moment in your life, or does it define your life? Again, if you believe it’s worth being aware of the regret but not overidentifying with it, you’re on your way. If you believe this regret fully constitutes who you are, ask someone else what they think.
These three questions, which form the heart of self-compassion, bring us to the last step of the process.
STEP 3. SELF-DISTANCING: ANALYZE AND STRATEGIZE