Arthur Brooks describes a three-step journaling practice for regret: write down a failure, return after one month to note what you learned, and after six months to ask what door it opened. He calls this metacognition, a way to move emotional reactions into your prefrontal cortex so you can use failures productively instead of being trapped by them.
Something bad happens and you have a regret, you write it down, and then you come back to it in one month and six months, and you leave two lines below each failure. The first line you come back to, and in one month you have to write down underneath it, what did I learn? Because you don't know. For a month you write down, what did I learn? And in six months you come back to, what door did that failure open for me? And there's always something. Here's the problem. If you're just ruminating. If it's a phantasm of the limbic system of your brain, you'll never move it to the executive center. You'll never be able to use it. This is a process called metacognition, where you move feelings and desires and appetites and attachments and good and bad and everything else in between. They manage you. You can manage them when you move them to the prefrontal cortex of your brain. Which is, by the way, what therapy basically is, is the process of learning about yourself. And metacognition can do it yourself, the cheap way. If you write things down and say, what did I learn and what did I gain? Is that a fair summation? Absolutely.
