Don't regret your regrets

Regret is normal; the absence of regret is indicative of a person unable to self-reflect or someone without a moral conscience

- Christopher Paul Szabo & Shaun Read

Walk down the self-help aisle of any book store and you are bound to find numerous works telling you how to live a life without regrets.

This sentiment is echoed in the line from My Way, sung by Frank Sinatra: “Regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention.”

The attraction of life without regrets is obvious given that regret is a powerful and negative emotion that can, in certain cases, be incapacitating or life-altering, where there seems no way to remedy it.

Research shows that regret is the most common negative emotion we experience and, after love, the second-most experienced emotion. Therefore, the search for the holy grail of a life without regrets seems to be to “dream the impossible dream”, to quote another song. In fact, the absence of regret is often associated with psychopathy and those with an incapacity for self-reflection or without a moral conscience.

The most common form of regret is that related to the most common emotion, namely, love. A simple example would be an unresolved conflict with a loved one, against the background of the death of that person.