How to Reimagine the Past Without Regret

How many times do you think back on a past event, whether moments, days, or years ago, wishing it had turned out differently? It’s almost impossible for you to recall that moment without feelings of regret washing over you.

Perhaps you sat down to what you thought would be a nice catching up with an old friend at your old favorite hangout. The conversation turned to an event from your teen years in which you, according to your friend, said something unusually harsh about them in front of a crowd. Although you thought you were being funny, it turns out that your words were hurtful and cruel. Somehow, you and your friend moved past this, but you learn now that your attempt at humor had long-lasting effects on your friend’s self-esteem. If only you could rewrite the past without that unfortunate incident.

The Nature of Regret

According to a new study by Temple University’s Crystal Reeck and Duke University’s Kevin LaBar (2024), “Regret involves a sense of responsibility and agency.” Although you might tend to imagine that this only involves feelings about the past, Reeck and LaBar point out that it can be both “experienced” and “anticipated” (p. 1). When you anticipate regret, you imagine how you would feel if an option you chose didn’t go as well as you had hoped. Rather than regretting your past moment of insensitivity, you might use regret to think what would happen if now, sitting with this person, you were to bring up the experience to try to work it through. Or should you just leave it alone?

Reeck and LaBar suggest that regret of either variety doesn’t have to create insurmountable sets of negative emotions. Through the process of emotion regulation, you can turn down your brain’s tendency to dwell on the “what if?” process that drives feelings of regret.

One way that might not strike you as what you would try involves thinking about negative events as a “portfolio.” Rather than focus on one single outcome, past or future, you instead take an approach that allows you to see that one instance in a larger context. You may have done that awful thing to your friend, but the rest of your relationship is filled with happy memories and deep feelings of connection. The Temple-Duke research team proposed that this big-picture approach can help people feel better about the decisions they make that don’t, or don’t seem as if they will, turn out all that well.

Testing the Big Picture Approach

A gambling scenario served as the framework for the Reeck and LaBar study. Their experimental participants had to make decisions about how much to bet on two different options differing in probabilities of financial gains or losses. The experimental team manipulated the context of these bets by instructing participants to view each bet either as an individual instance or as part of the entire block of trials. They also showed participants the outcome of their bet, an outcome that was randomly determined. Emotional reactivity was measured both by subjective assessments (how happy or sad participants felt) and physiological responses (sweat conductance on the skin). Participants also indicated their willingness to take risks on future trials based on the outcomes of their previous bets.

These were the two conditions. See what you would do in each of them.

Multiple: “Imagine you are considering one of the monetary decisions in this task right now. One way to think of this approach is to remember all that matters is that you come out on top in the end—a loss here and there will not matter in terms of your overall portfolio. You want to focus on making good choices overall and think about the long run. In other words, you win some and you lose some. It is important that you focus on these monetary decisions in the context of all of the other monetary decisions you will be making today.”

Individual: “Tell yourself that this trial is the only gamble that matters, that this one might be the one you get paid for. As such, you might win the positive amount, but you could just as easily lose the negative amount and lose that money. Approach each trial as if you are making only this one choice in today’s study… Just let any thoughts or emotions about that particular choice occur naturally, without trying to control them. It is important that you focus on the monetary decision in front of you at that time, in isolation from any context from other decisions in this study” (from Online Supplemental material).

If you lost, would you feel more or less regret in the individual vs. multiple condition, and how would the instruction affect your future decisions?

The results showed that the emotion regulation strategy of thinking in terms of multiple trials indeed helped participants both react less and feel better about their past bets, even if those bets didn’t work out. Both strategies helped to reduce aversion to loss in future bets to a similar degree.

Using the Multiple Trial Approach to Feel Better

As the authors concluded, “Regret is amenable to top-down regulation, and…emotion regulation can shift regret when making choices under uncertainty” (p. 7). Thinking about all of your life decisions as part of a pattern can, based on these findings, change your mindset enough to feel better about those decisions. When it comes to future choices, knowing that things may be left to a flip of the coin, in turn, can also help you feel less emotional should that choice turn out to be the wrong one.

It may be a stretch to extrapolate from this small experimental study on artificial bets the regret you feel over life experiences with real consequences. However, the idea that you don’t have to live with regret in and of itself may help you feel better about the consequences you didn’t particularly like. You could, returning to the example of your friend, either try to bring up that one past event or, instead, reminisce with your friend about the many more wonderful times that you experienced together.

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To sum up, regret may be a natural outcome of recalling events you wish had gone differently. However, by taking a broader approach, you can experience more positive, and fulfilling, emotions.