You must adopt this behavior to avoid the biggest regret of your life
Technically, when we become adults, we know that our actions will have consequences. What if adopting daily behaviors were enough to reduce the bitterness of regret?
Descartes said of regret, “From the good past comes regret, a kind of sorrow.” The resulting nostalgia is mixed with a flood of negative emotions: frustration, guilt, disappointment, anger… how to avoid them? According to a study conducted by Harvard University, adopting this specific behavior is a real measure of regret.
A behavior that increases healthy life expectancy!
“If I had known…” This sentence sometimes keeps roaming in our mind. Can we avoid this unpleasant feeling i.e. regret? For philosophers, avoiding it is not a solution because regrets also happen, why not prevent them from forming Do you know the behaviors that should be avoided? Harvard researchers looked at this question in the largest survey on happiness, reported by Professors Robert Waldinger and Mark Schultz in The Good Life (Leduc). 2023), experts surveyed a group of volunteers of all ages and all social classes on their feelings of happiness. For up to 85 years, participants approaching the end of life had to reveal their biggest regrets, most of which replied: Not spending much time with the people they loved.
People who had cordial relationships felt happier. But the surprising thing is that they are also the ones who live the longest and healthiest lives. Why ? Because loneliness and isolation are elements of stress and cause very high levels of inflammation in the body. Surrounding yourself with people you love protects you from regrets and increases your life expectancy with good health.
Regrets also have benefits…under certain conditions
Regrets can eat away at the souls of those who experience them. But at the same time, paradoxically, they play a major role in our mental health. They help with awareness, learning, acceptance and allow us to explore our deepest psychological needs.
Regret allows us to recognize our mistakes and learn from them. For Kant, they reflect the moral conscience and lead to moral behavior as an opportunity to improve our future choices to maximize happiness. Freud believes that remorse expresses the tension between our actions and our personal ideals, which results from the ego’s reaction to a transgression. Finally, in psychotherapy, regrets become tools to explore our identity, our internal conflicts, enrich our self-awareness, and better understand our motivations.