Why regret is wrecking your life
Hi! I’m Katie, and I’m a cultural and social psychologist—but you can think of me as your BFF with a PhD. I live in the desert of Texas alongside the cacti, roadrunners, and horned lizards. If you’re looking to understand your inner landscape and the whirlwind of the world around you, I hope you find something of value here. Make sure to subscribe—and you won’t miss a beat! Thank you so much for being here.
A study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin shows that 90% of people have deep regrets about their lives.
The study also found that regret isn't tied to age.
That means that regret isn't a phase we go through and then get over.
Rather, it is something we all fundamentally experience throughout the course of our lives.
This pervasive experience of regret is inherently linked to how we find meaning in our lives.
Something researchers call existential regret.
An article published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology defines existential regret as:
"profound desire to go back and change a past experience in which one has failed to chose consciously or has made a choice that did not follow one’s beliefs, values, or growth needs”.
It's all about making choices in our day-to-day that align with who we want to be in the world.
Think about it.
How many times have you kicked yourself later because you made a choice that wasn't in alignment with your identity, your core values, or your true, deep-down beliefs?
Maybe you made a choice because you felt pressured to.
Because everyone else was doing it.
Because you believed you didn't deserve something better.
Maybe over time you slowly began to shapeshift out of who you innately know yourself to be.
You adopted an identity that isn't truly you.
You slowly abandoned yourself.
Just so that you would belong, fit in, or to just be “normal like everyone else".
All of this leading to choices that leave you feeling terrible.
What are your regrets?
Those moments when you didn't follow your heart?
Picture the exact moment that you abandoned yourself to fit in.
Now, follow that feeling all the way down to your beliefs.
What did you have to believe in that moment—about yourself, about others, about the world—to betray yourself and your values?
If existential regret is bringing you down, I want you to know there's another way.
You can lead from your core values and your true identity.
As humans, we all want to feel in control of our lives.
Enough of this other people telling us who to be, how to think and what to believe.
We want to feel capable of making the changes that we desire to see in our beliefs and in our lives.
And, if you’re experiencing regret, you do have the power to enact change.
As women in today’s culture, we get really caught up in connection with other people, our social roles, who we are to others, and what we mean in relationship to others.
We tend to stay stuck because we feel stuck—and ultimately, we don’t want to disappoint others by changing.
But, one thing that is equally as important to all of that is our connection to ourselves.
It's something that we have a tendency to overlook as women.
But, you want to feel deeply connected to others—and to yourself.
If you’re feeling regret, you want a solid roadmap for knowing where you are today, for stepping into greater self awareness and for knowing where you want to be, and to seeing the path lit before you.
The big step is to become more self-determined in your life and specifically in your beliefs, because everything starts with your beliefs.
So, what does that mean?
What does it mean to be self-determined?
Self-determination is your ability to make choices.
It’s your ability to manage your own life.
An extension of that is your ability to manage your own beliefs.
Not feeling compelled to look to others to tell you what to believe.
Looking to others to define our beliefs for us may only leave us feeling that existential regret later in life.
We follow a path that’s not our own.
It’s someone else’s.
This is a key symptom of being other-determined.
When we are other-determined, we are likely to adopt something that we call learned helplessness.
We feel out of control.
Over time, we begin to feel helpless.
We feel like we can't enact change in our lives.
We can be other-determined in a number of different ways.
We can be other-determined in our beliefs.
We may be outsourcing our beliefs about ourselves, our value, or our worth.
We may be looking to others to tell us what to believe about what it means to be in relationship or what it means for us to be in a partnership.
Maybe, we’ve handed over our spiritual beliefs for someone else to determine.
We’re a part of a religious community that doesn’t feel right.
We’ve let someone else define what we believe about our skills or gifts, our occupation, or our purpose in this world.
If you’ve allowed this to happen in your life, you may begin to feel like others are in control of who you are and what happens to you and your life.
This is a dangerous place to be.
You might feel confused.
You might feel confused about who you are and what you want.
Because you have spent so much time allowing others to tell you who you are, what you value, what you should strive for or look for in life.
You may have spent so much time allowing others to define your life for you.
And, you feel a little stuck.
In psychology, we call this stagnation.
In life, we do not want to be stagnant.
We want to be generative.
We want to be moving.
We want to be fluid and constantly working towards growing.
Another symptom of handing over our lives to others is feeling indecisive.
You may not know how to make decisions, because you’ve never made them for yourself.
Because you are other-determined, you’ve set a pattern of looking to other people to tell you what decisions to make.
Over time, you then feel like you don't have the power, the autonomy, the control, or even the right to make decisions for yourself.
This may leave you feeling afraid.
You may even feel disappointed in the ways in which you are showing up in your life.
Or just flat out in what your life looks like.
If in reading this, you have said to yourself, “It's me. Hi.”
This piece is for you.
If you are feeling other-determined, you can move from being other-determined to becoming self-determined.
You can leave all of those things behind.
You can leave behind the feeling of being helpless.
You can leave behind the confusion.
Leave behind the feeling of being stuck.
The indecision.
Fear.
Even the disappointment.
Because when we are self determined, research has shown that we have greater self-esteem.
We feel better about ourselves.
We love ourselves more.
We are more likely to be motivated to enact change.
When we are other-determined, we can sometimes feel burnt out.
But when we are self-determined, we are motivated.
We feel excited.
We grow impassioned.
And, we are more likely to be creative and resilient in our lives.
When hard times come, because they will, we shine in our creativity and become innovative in our problem-solving.
We fight for the change we wish to see if the world and in our lives.
We are more likely to show up with clarity and with confidence in our day-to-day lives.
We grow more resilient.
And, one last thing!
Don’t get confused that self-determined is the same as selfish.
This is a message we have heard all of our lives as women in Western culture.
You have and will continue to hear that being self-determined and self-focused is selfish.
That being interested in your own needs, goals, wants, desires, or dreams is just egocentric.
Greedy.
Uncaring.
Unlady-like.
This is a tentacle of the belief that you must love others before you can love yourself.
And, what's really interesting is that the research shows the exact opposite.
In fact, when we are self-determined, we have better connections.
When we are connected to ourselves, we are more likely to be better connected to other people, as well.
Loving others before we can love ourselves is a false dichotomy.
We have to do both things, in tandem.
When we are focused on our own intrinsic needs, goals, desires, wants, and dreams, we are more likely to cultivate relationships that work for everybody.
For ourselves and for others.
So, the next time you sense that aching feeling of regret creeping upon you, take a step back.
Survey how self-determined you are feeling in your life.
Are you giving over your power?
Your beliefs?
Your choices?
Your life?
If the answer is yes, come back to yourself.
Ask yourself what you want out of your life.
And, chase after the life that’s yours.
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Cover art by Alena Ganzhela used under license