My Blog Of Knowledge: Common Regrets Can Help Motivate Us

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.on June 9, 2011

Common Regrets Help to Motivate While too many regrets can interfere with life and mental health, new research suggests some remorse can help us improve our current situation.

Researchers Mike Morrison, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Illinois, and Dr. Neal Roese of Northwestern University discovered a healthy amount of regret can motivate us to improve our lives.

The researchers telephoned a representative sample of nearly 400 Americans to ask them about what they regret.

The most frequent regrets of Americans are about love, education, and work. Romantic regrets—America’s most common—focused on lost chances for potential romances, and relationships that did not live up to their potential.

The other common regrets for Americans involved family, education, career, finances, and parenting.

Women were more likely to have regrets about relationships (romance, family), and men were more likely to have regrets about work (career and education).

It was the lack of romantic relationships and the lack of higher education that were regretted most.

An interesting finding in the research is that initially people tend to regret the things they’ve done more, than the opportunities they didn’t take. However, with the passage of time, people come to regret more keenly the chances they failed to explore.

In other words, over time, Americans mostly regret opportunities they let slide by rather than the choices they’ve made.

“We tend to regret matters that are most important to us,” said Morrison, “people crave strong, stable social relationships and are unhappy when they lack them.”

Regret can be painful, but it can also be useful.

“Some people say they try to live life without regret, and I think that’s being unfair to the human condition,” said Roese. “If we try to squeeze regrets away, we’re sacrificing a bit of our humanity.”

Their findings are found in the current issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Source: SAGE Publications

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