Three ways to handle regret: treat yourself with kindness instead of criticism, talk or write about it to feel closer to others, and step back to view your situation from outside yourself. Self-distancing helps turn regret into a lesson rather than a wound.
There are 3 ways to reckon with our retrospective, our previous regrets. I like to look at it as inward, outward, forward. So what is inward? Inward is you have to reframe the way you think about the regret and yourself. When we talk to ourselves, we're brutal, we're vicious. We talk to ourselves with a degree of evil. That's a bad idea. There's no evidence that that's effective, nor is boosting your self-esteem effective. What's more effective is something called self-compassion. So treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt, and that relieves you to go to the next step. Outward, talking about and even writing about your regret. Disclosure is a surprising way to build affinity with others. The final thing is to Extract a lesson from it. And we tend to be pretty bad about extracting lessons for ourselves, but we tend to be pretty good at solving other people's problems. So what you want to do is you want to do something called self-distancing, which is a way to sort of think about yourself as another person. You can talk to yourself in third person. So instead of saying, what should I do? You say, what should Chase do? What does the you of 10 years from now want you to do? If your best friend came to you with this dilemma, what would you tell her to do? And that's it. And all that does is like very calmly normalizes the regret and uses it and sort of enlists it as a tool rather than shrink from it as a threat.
