Don't Regret

 Kathryn Schulz is talking about regrets, their components and how to leave them. As a good example she presents the example of tattoo, which is very a common problem for nowadays among young generation (so is for me, as one of my dreams is to make tattoo).  People mostly want to make tattoos up to 25 ages, but some part of them after having it, after age 30 regret about that. 

One of the most important issues here is to understand what     means “regret”. So let’s consider the question: what is “regret”?                                                                    

 It is some kind of feeling about the current conditions and situations that they would be better, if we have done some actions differently in the past. There are 2 important things for regret. First one is decision: to be sure that you are ready and want to do that. And the second one is imagination: to feel and understand into what that decision will lead in the present. We often feel regret when we think we are responsible for decisions results of which were badly but almost were good. The example of such regret is being late for the train or airplane for 5 minutes and 25 minutes. In the case of 5 minutes we regret more than in the case of 25 minutes.
 Researchers found out the answer to the other important question: what do people most regret in life? Among top 5 regrets are education (32%), career (22%), romance (15%), parenting (10%) and self (5.47%). All these we know about regret come from finance, but in life there are many other regrets that are not classified by finance. 

In psychological terms there are 4 components of regret:

•         Denial (make it go away)
•     Bewilderment (How could I have done that?)
•      Punishment (correct herself/himself)
•     Perseverations (continuously think and look at the same thing).

But according to Schulz, 1 more component exists, which she called “wake up call”.

 There are 3 things that help us to leave regret. First of all is to take some comfort in universality, the second way of leaving regret is to laugh at ourselves, the third way is through passage of time. Some of personal regrets are not as bad as we think they are.

“If we have goals and dreams, and we want to do our best, and if we love people, and if we don’t want to hurt them or lose them, we should have feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn’t to live without any regrets; the point isn't to hit ourselves for having them. We need to learn love the flood of imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly; it reminds us that we know we could do better”. -- Kathryn Schulz