The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(40)

Rather than ignoring the negative emotion of regret—or worse, wallowing in it—we can remember that feeling is for thinking and that thinking is for doing. Following a straightforward three-step process, we can disclose the regret, reframe the way we view it and ourselves, and extract a lesson from the experience to remake our subsequent decisions.





STEP 1. SELF-DISCLOSURE: RELIVE AND RELIEVE


Monkeys have constructed incredibly complex societies, but they have yet to establish a central bank that prints money and regulates its supply. Thus, when primatologists try to quantify what monkeys value, they introduce what they call a “liquid currency”—and what we non-primatologists call juice. By measuring how much fruit juice monkeys demand to behave the way researchers want, and how much they’re willing to sacrifice to behave the way monkeys want, scientists can price primate priorities.

Robert Deaner, Amit Khera, and Michael Platt, previously at Duke University, helped develop the technique, and in 2005, they used it to measure how much a group of male macaques valued signals of status and sex. The experimenters discovered that if they wanted monkeys to look at photos of a low-status macaque, they had to bribe them with lots of juice. But photos of high-status monkeys and of female macaque hindquarters were so enticing that the monkeys were willing to forgo juice just to glimpse them. In other words, the monkeys required “liquid payment” to view unimportant monkeys but were willing to “pay” to look at powerful or attractive monkeys—all of which suggests that these animals place a high value on markers of dominance and sexual fitness.[1]

In 2012, the psychologists Diana Tamir, now at Princeton University, and Jason Mitchell, of Harvard University, used a modified version of this technique to assess what those macaques’ close relatives—human beings—value most. In one study, Tamir and Mitchell presented their participants three choices: to reveal their beliefs about themselves, to judge the beliefs of other people, or to answer a trivia question. And they offered to pay varying amounts of money for each activity. Over 195 trials, people’s preferences were clear. They loved talking about themselves—so much, in fact, that they were willing to take significantly less money for doing that than for any other behavior. “Just as monkeys are willing to forgo juice rewards to view dominant groupmates . . . individuals were willing to forgo money to disclose about the self,” Tamir and Mitchell wrote.[2]

When Tamir and Mitchell then used functional magnetic resonance imaging to watch what was happening in the brains of these people, they saw that those who disclosed information about themselves had greater activation in the brain regions (the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area) that respond to food, money, and sex. The study, the researchers concluded, “provided both behavioral and neural evidence that self-disclosure is intrinsically rewarding.”[3]

The first step in reckoning with all regrets, whether regrets of action or inaction, is self-disclosure. We’re often skittish about revealing to others negative information about ourselves. It feels awkward, even shameful. But an enormous body of literature makes clear that disclosing our thoughts, feelings, and actions—by telling others or simply by writing about them—brings an array of physical, mental, and professional benefits. Such self-revelation is linked to reduced blood pressure, higher grades, better coping skills, and more.[4] Indeed, Tamir and Mitchell maintain that “our species may have an intrinsic drive to disclose thoughts to others.”[5]

Self-disclosure is especially useful with regret. Denying our regrets taxes our minds and bodies. Gripping them too tightly can tip us into harmful rumination. The better approach is to relive and relieve. By divulging the regret, we reduce some of its burden, which can clear a path for making sense of it.

For example, psychologists like Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, have conducted studies that suggest people should process negative and positive experiences in different ways. In this research, writing about negative experiences like regret, and even talking into a tape recorder about them, for fifteen minutes a day substantially increased people’s overall life satisfaction and improved their physical and mental well-being in ways that merely thinking about those experiences did not. Yet the reverse was true for positive experiences: writing and talking about triumphs and good times drained some of their positivity.[6]

The explanation—and the reason self-disclosure is so crucial for handling regret—is that language, whether written or spoken, forces us to organize and integrate our thoughts. It converts blobby mental abstractions into concrete linguistic units. That’s a plus for negative emotions.[7]

Again, regret can make us better when we use emotions as a signal for our thoughts. When feeling is for thinking, and thinking is for doing, regret can perform its decision-enhancing, performance-boosting, meaning-deepening magic. Writing about regret or revealing a regret to another person moves the experience from the realm of emotion into the realm of cognition. Instead of those unpleasant feelings fluttering around uncontrollably, language helps us capture them in our net, pin them down, and begin analyzing them. By contrast, the same approach for positive experiences is less effective. For life’s happy moments, avoiding analysis and sense-making helps us maintain the wonder and delight of those moments. Dissecting terrific events can diminish their terrificness.[8]

One misgiving we have with self-disclosure, particularly if we’re revealing our previous failures to be prudent, trustworthy, or courageous, is that others will think poorly of us. But that is much less of a concern than we realize. One can go too far, of course. Oversharing intimate details about yourself can make others uneasy. But the evidence shows that self-disclosure builds affinity much more often than it triggers judgment. One major review of the literature concluded that “people who engage in intimate disclosures tend to be liked more than people who disclose at lower levels.”?[9]