Regrets....Like invisible chains, regrets prevents you from taking flight.

Only a few hours of sunlight remains. The ocean blue and tranquil, the sky endless, and the view from the balcony, breath taking.

Standing there in the midst of a vibrant and seemingly endless beauty, her mind begins to wander.

Had she been a good steward of her life?

Had her choices that had brought her to this place been the right ones?

 

Life only happens now; the past can't be changed and the future is unknown.

No matter how much we may wish that we would have acted differently in some situations, the outcome of what happened cannot be changed. If only I had not.... If only I had.....

Thoughts, that can be so powerful that they keep us stuck in the past to the extent that we don't  notice what is happening in our present. Regardless of whether we are pondering our past or our future, the present keeps showing up.

We can not change what happened in the past, but by pondering the outcomes of choices we made in the past that we now regret, the present offers us the possibility to make different choices.

If we hurt someone in the past, and we regret doing so, we cannot take away the pain we caused, but in the present we can offer an apology, ask for forgiveness, ask the person if there is anything we can do now that may help heal the wound. If we have done things in our past (even if it was just yesterday), that has caused us to feel remorse, pain and or suffering, the present offers us the possibility to acknowledge that those things we did in the past, hurt us, and by doing so, we can choose to act in ways that rather than causing us to experience regrets, we have the chance to experience a heightened sense of self-esteem.

Psychologist Neale Roese, in a study done in 2011 on our most common regrets, list these as our most common regrets: regrets about our romantic choices, about our careers, our education, our financial choices, our families, and about parenting. However, he suggests that having regrets can have an "up-side" if we use them as a motivating force for us to change the things we can change. Many of us have probably thought: "If I knew then what I know now, I would have.....or...I would never had ..... "

Well, we didn't know then, but we do know now, so now we can choose differently.

We can't change mistakes we have made in the past, but if we view them as learning experiences, then wisdom and insight can be gleaned from them.

As well as regretting things we have done, we may also regret things we didn't do.

"I should have taken that job, I should have married him/her, I should have accepted that...., I should have studied at the University, I should have ......"

Regretting things we didn't do, may perhaps be even more problematic than regretting things we did: things we did that turned out to be mistakes we can learn something from, but what can be gleaned from regrets about things we didn't even attempt?

According to research, we get over our regrets about past mistakes much easier than our regrets over missed opportunities. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any distinctive answers to why this is so, so I will try to summarize what I have found.

Regrets about what "could have been" commonly seem to involve some form of wishful thinking.

"If I would have just gone to college, I would have been able to get a better job", which may be possible, but not necessarily so.  "If I would have married soandso, I would be happier now", which is possible, but not necessarily so. "If I would have taken the opportunity to........then I would have no financial problems now", which is possible, but not necessarily so. 

Regrets, whether about what we did, or what we could have done, unfortunately prevents us from living in the "now", and "now" may I suggest, is when we do our "actual" living.

So, what can be done about overcoming regrets? Some suggestions:

Acknowledge what you believe you could have done differently, (without obsessing over it), rather, allow it to motivate you to seek a positive change.

If you are regretting something you didn't do but wish you had, can you do it now?

If you are regretting something you did in the past, but can't change now, can you reframe how you view it?

"Hindsight is 20/20 vision", ..."I regret what I did........but it made sense to me according to who I was at the time." "I regret that I didn't grab the opportunity to....., but it made sense to me then, now I want to find out if I can perhaps find another opportunity to....."

Regrets are like an annoying little stone in one of your shoes; you can leave it in the shoe and keep walking (although every now and then it will hurt you), or you can acknowledge it's existence, and then remove it.

Like invisible chains, regrets prevents you from taking flight.

 

“We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past. But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here NOW with the power to shape your day and your future.” (Steve Maraboli)