The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(12)

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. Selecting the wrong target for your regret—say, that you wore a red baseball cap at the blackjack table rather than that you took another card when you were holding a ten and a king—offers no improvement. And sometimes the initial pain can momentarily throw us. But most times, reflecting even a bit on how we might benefit from a regret boosts our subsequent showing.[14]

Feelings of regret spurred by setbacks might even be good for your career. A 2019 study by the Kellogg School of Management’s Yang Wang, Benjamin Jones, and Dashun Wang looked at a fifteen-year database of applications that junior scientists had submitted for a prestigious National Institutes of Health grant. The study authors selected more than a thousand applications that hovered near the rating threshold necessary to win the grant. About half the applicants just cleared the threshold. They got the grant, eked out a narrow win, and eluded regret. The other half fell just short. These applicants missed the grant, endured a narrow miss, and suffered regret. Then the researchers examined what happened to these scientists’ careers. People in the narrow-miss If Only group systematically outperformed those in the narrow-win At Least group in the long run. These Silver Emmas of science were subsequently cited much more often, and they were 21 percent more likely to produce a hit paper. The researchers concluded that it was the setback itself that supplied the fuel. The near miss likely prompted regret, which spurred reflection, which revised strategy, which improved performance.[15]





3. Regret can deepen meaning.


A few decades ago, I spent four years in Evanston, Illinois, where I earned an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. I’m generally happy with my college experience. I learned a ton and made several lifelong friends. But I’ve occasionally wondered what my life would have been like had I not been able to go to college or if I’d attended another university. And for some strange reason, those musings usually make me more, not less, satisfied with the experience, as if this small slice of time was somehow integral to the full story of my life.

Turns out, I’m not that special.

In 2010, a team of social scientists that included Kray, Galinsky, and Roese asked a collection of Northwestern undergraduates to reflect counterfactually about their choice of college and their choice of friends during college. When the students engaged in this sort of thinking, imagining they’d attended a different university or fallen in with a different set of pals, their reaction was like mine. The actual choice somehow felt more significant. “Counterfactual reflection endows both major life experiences and relationships with greater meaning,” the Northwestern study concluded.

And this effect isn’t limited to periods when we’re young and self-absorbed. 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. The indirect paths of If Only and At Least offered a faster route to meaning than the direct path of pondering meaning itself.[16] Likewise, when people consider counterfactual alternatives to life events, they experience higher levels of religious feeling and a deeper sense of purpose than when they simply recount the facts of those events.[17] This way of thinking can even increase feelings of patriotism and commitment to one’s organization.[18]

While these studies examined the broader category of counterfactuals, regret in particular deepens our sense of meaning, and steers our lives toward its pursuit. For instance, conducting a “midlife review” focused on regrets can prompt us to revise our life goals and aim to live afresh.[19] Or take Abby Henderson, a twenty-nine-year-old behavioral health researcher, who contributed to the World Regret Survey:[*]

    I regret not taking advantage of spending time with my grandparents as a child. I resented their presence in my home and their desire to connect with me, and now I’d do anything to get that time back.



Henderson grew up, the youngest of three siblings, in a happy home in Phoenix, Arizona. Her paternal grandparents lived in the small town of Hartford City, Indiana. Just about every winter, to escape the Midwest cold, they’d visit for a month or two, usually staying in the Henderson house. Young Abby was not into it. She was a quiet kid whose parents both worked, so she relished the time after school when she could hang out at home by herself. Her grandparents disturbed that peace. Her grandmother, waiting for her when she returned from classes, always wanted to hear about her day—and Abby resisted the attempts at connection.

Now she regrets it.

“The biggest regret is that I didn’t hear their stories,” she told me in an interview. But that has altered her approach to her own parents. Sparked by this regret, she and her siblings bought their father, who’s in his seventies, a subscription to StoryWorth. Each week the service sends an email that contains a single question (What was your mother like? What is your fondest childhood memory? And—yes—what regrets do you have?). The recipient responds with a story. At the end of the year, those stories are compiled into a hardcover book. Because of the poke of If Only, she said, “I seek out more meaning. I seek out more connection. . . . I don’t want to feel the way when my parents die that I felt about my grandparents of ‘What did I miss?’?”