The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

Minimizing techniques like At Least counterfactuals do have their place, as I’ll explain in Chapter 12. They can soothe us, and sometimes we need soothing. But they can also supply us with false comfort and strip us of the tools to address cold reality,

Our cognitive apparatus is designed, at least in part, to sustain us in the long term rather than balm us in the near term.

In fact, other research has found that people who thought counterfactually about pivotal moments in their life experienced greater meaning than people who thought explicitly about the meaning of those events.

Human beings are both seasoned time travelers and skilled fabulists.

more often the performance prevents people from doing the difficult work that produces genuine contentment.

The only emotion mentioned more often than regret was love.[18]

This combination of time travel and fabulism is a human superpower. It’s hard to fathom any other species doing something so complex,

Regret is the quintessential upward counterfactual—the ultimate If Only. The source of its power, scientists are discovering, is that it muddles the conventional pain-pleasure calculus.[10] Its very purpose is to make us feel worse—because by making us feel worse today, regret helps us do better tomorrow.

To be sure, regret doesn’t always elevate performance. Lingering on a regret for too long, or replaying the failure over and over in your head, can have the opposite effect.