Photo by Kyoko Hamada; model: Reich New York; stylist; Maura Sircus
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Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda
By David Dudley, January & February 2008
The new midlife crisis: coming to terms with the road not taken
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The story was typical: she’d married young; she thought she loved him. Thirty-five years later, the children were grown and the truth was obvious. She had made a terrible, irrevocable mistake.
Mary is a central-Texas homemaker in her late 50s, a mother of two, and the owner of a paralyzing cartload of regrets. For Mary, the seeds of sadness were sown in a neglectful childhood and then amplified by her fear of repeating her parents’ mistakes. She married to escape her mother and ended up with a man who belittled her. Now she berates herself for the impact her chronic unhappiness may have had on her kids. “I wish they could have seen me stand up for myself,” she says. “I regret that I wasn’t strong enough to stand up for them.” She recites this litany of if-onlys with a matter-of-fact flatness: nothing to be done.
The sharp, corrective sting of regret teaches us where we went wrong.
Jane has another story, just as typical. While her friends started families, she focused on her career as a real-estate broker. She made a lot of money, living it up a little and hurtling through relationships with men who seemed as uninterested in settling down as she was. Then, approaching 50 and restless with her job, something changed. “I woke up one day and said, ‘What have I done?’ ” she says. Jane craved the children she always thought would just arrive at some point but never did. And now she felt it was too late. “All the real substance of life had slipped by.”
The Hit Parade
The five most common life regrets
1. Education
Americans consistently cite education as the source of their greatest regrets. Psychologist Neal Roese, Ph.D., says that misgivings about not attending college or grad school may reflect the importance of education in determining one’s career, spouse, and life path. “Education is a gateway to so many other things in life,” he says.
2. Career
People who express job regrets either bemoan a lack of success in their chosen field or wish they’d picked another career entirely.
3. Romance
Long-lost loves, unrequited affections, ill-advised affairs, and marriages gone sour are popular sources of later regrets.
4. Family
Most people have doubts about their own parenting, including not spending enough time with their children or making poor child-care choices. Other common regrets involve estrangements from one’s parents or siblings.
5. The Self
Many people are disappointed in their own abilities, attitudes, and behaviors. “If only I had more self-control” is a frequent complaint of this group.
Regret, according to those who study it, is all but universal, spanning age and culture in its agonizing variations. For every choice we make—good and bad—a numberless multitude of options are left untried, each one an opportunity to second-guess, brood, and ask yourself the perilous question: What if? Social psychologists call this “counterfactual thinking,” and it’s among the most complex feats of cognition the human mind is capable of. “If you talk about the emotion of regret, you want to differentiate that from simpler emotions like pain and fear, which seem to be experienced pretty much the same way by animals,” says Neal Roese, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of Illinois. “Regret is a very complicated emotion that involves all these things coming together—it’s raw feeling plus all the complicated imaginings of future possibility.”
Thinking about the what-ifs requires a complex mix of real and imagined events, and it’s essential to our decision-making process. Faced with a choice, we automatically spin out alternative worlds in which we marry the other woman, don’t order the clams, buy the bigger car, or stay in school. This endless procession of possibilities is essential for helping us make sense of the world: the sharp, corrective sting of regret teaches us where we went wrong and how to do better the next time. But when the system breaks down—when reflecting on a flawed past becomes a crippling fixation—the results can be devastating, physically and mentally. Carsten Wrosch, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Concordia University in Montreal, has linked high regret with a variety of maladies, including sleep problems, migraines, chest pains, and skin conditions.
“Make the most of your regrets,” Henry David Thoreau counseled. “To regret deeply is to live afresh.” All well and good, but how? A life without regrets isn’t a realistic answer for most of us—after all, the hard-earned lessons of our sins and slip-ups make us who we are. “Maybe all one can do,” as playwright Arthur Miller wrote, “is hope to end up with the right regrets.”
For all the new scientific interest in teasing apart the mechanisms of regret, the emotions surrounding it are as old as humanity itself. And we’re not getting any better at coping. “There’s anecdotal evidence that this generation, and this society, really has a harder time with regret,” says Hamilton Beazley, Ph.D., a scholar-in-residence at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, and the author of No Regrets: A Ten-Step Program for Living in the Present and Leaving the Past Behind (Wiley, 2004). He also conducts workshops and seminars on the art of overcoming our accumulated life woes. “In a sense,” he says, “it can be said we’re in an Age of Regret.”
If regret is a growth industry, that may be partly a reflection of the vast number of graying boomers entering their regretting years. “One of the primary psychological tasks of people between the ages of 40 and 65 is to go through a period of re-evaluation and introspection regarding their lives,” Beazley says. “And because the baby boomers have always had such an impact on society, we drive the Zeitgeist of our time.”
But there’s more to it than that. In Beazley’s view, the prevailing sunniness of growing up in postwar America—the “can-do sense of prosperity and faith in technology” that the boomers were inculcated with as they came of age amid revolutions in science and culture and personal expression—has primed a nation to have its youthful dreams dashed by the narrowing of options that time brings. “This generation has greater idealized expectations—the ones that can’t be met—than previous generations,” Beazley says. “The baby boomers really believe that negative events, even things like getting older, shouldn’t happen.”
Dwelling on past mistakes or missed opportunities consumes one’s ability to enjoy the present, Beazley adds. His ten-step No Regrets technique is designed to fight back with a regimen of journaling, self-analysis, and forgiveness-seeking that bears a not-unintentional resemblance to the 12-step program familiar to recovering alcoholics. “Letting go of regrets is a process—it’s not a one-time event,” he says. “This culture hasn’t been good at telling us how to do that. They just tell us, ‘Get over it.’ ”
Letting It Go
Do-it-yourself strategies for leaving regrets behind
Write It, Forget It
The mere act of writing down one’s woes helps to ease them. One researcher is studying a novel variation: list someone else’s regrets instead of yours, to change the frame of reference.
Consider It Final
The sooner you accept the finality of a decision, the more satisfied you will be with the results, good or bad.
Look on the Dark Side
Rather than dwell on how your life would have been better if you’d done this or that, think of the ways in which it might very well have gotten worse.
Do Something About It
It’s generally the regrets over the things you don’t do that will linger. If you always wished you had a college degree, go back to school. Even if your late-life pursuit of modern dance is a disaster, you might learn some valuable lessons.
Regret is also a topic of growing interest to cognitive researchers, says Roese, whose book If Only: How to Turn Regret Into Opportunity (Broadway, 2005) explores the role of what-if thinking in behavior, history, and popular culture. Studies of people with a neurological inability to experience regret show just how essential this mental skill is: without regret, basic decision-making and social skills are severely impaired. “There’s a value in negative emotions,” Roese says. “Regret in particular is useful for signaling to people that it’s time to change their strategy. If you’re ruminating daily on how things could have been better, that’s not good, but a sharp, rapid emotional response followed by a behavioral change, followed by the disappearance of the emotion—that’s perfectly good for us.”
In other words, regret—and our acute desire to avoid it—is a major part of healthy living. “Regret is not something that’s just a curse or a nuisance to our daily living,” says Roese. “It’s an indicator of our brains trying their best to guide us through complicated social environments.”
Researchers have noticed age-related distinctions in how and why we experience regret. The young are more likely to regret things they did rather than things they didn’t do. After all, at that stage in life there’s still time to see Australia, climb K2, or write a novel. But as we age, this tendency reverses, and it’s what you didn’t do that stings. When you look back and see all the mountains left unclimbed, the sense of loss can be devastating.
How we respond to regret depends on several factors, including our ability to correct whatever we did (or didn’t do) wrong. It’s the element of control that makes the regret powerful. “If you can fix it, the negative emotions, especially regret, tend to be stronger and longer lasting,” Roese says. “If you can’t fix it, something in our brain kicks in and shuts it down. ” In studies on consumer satisfaction, shoppers seem to prefer not having the option to return an item. “The mere fact of being able to return it makes you less satisfied—you’re still wringing your hands about it a month later,” Roese says. “If you can’t take it back, it’s a done deal, and you’re actually more satisfied.”
For Jane, the real-estate broker, it was the terror of making the wrong move that led her into a world of regret later. “For 30 years I made my life choices based on fear,” she says. “There were all kinds of opportunities I didn’t take because I was afraid that they wouldn’t work out.” Instead, she drifted from job to job and relationship to relationship. “It’s always been difficult for me to pick—I was overwhelmed by all the options. I just went along until the decision was made for me.”
Barry Schwartz, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, has termed this the paradox of choice—the more choices we have, whether in televisions or careers, the greater the likelihood we’ll be dissatisfied with the results. Or, like Jane, we’ll defer making any decision at all: in one study, subjects presented with dozens of kinds of jams proved less likely to buy any jam than did participants who could choose from only a few. Applying the model to life decisions, a mild case of buyer’s remorse becomes a major source of life regret. “In a world where there are an almost infinite number of choices, the number of things you could have done will be much greater,” says Schwartz, who argues that the more-than-tripling rate of clinical depression in the past two generations is related to the concurrent explosion in choice, consumer and otherwise.
The problem, Schwartz warns, could be exacerbated as people face a new supermarket of options for health care and retirement planning—and a society that places unprecedented responsibility on the individual to choose his or her own doctors and savings plans. “One of the things all these choices do is make it very hard not to blame yourself for the things that go wrong,” he says. “It’s going to be hard to convince tomorrow’s 70-year-olds that everything in their lives isn’t their fault.”
"For 30 years I made my life choices based on fear," says one woman.
But other researchers caution that the older mind has its own techniques for dealing with the what-ifs that accumulate over a lifetime. If time amplifies some regrets, it also eases others. “There seems to be a corrective mechanism in place that shifts the regret experiences of people as they get older, so they tend to focus less on their own actions,” says Roese. If you’re haunted by a strained relationship with now-deceased family members, you can offload the blame to other factors: you tried to reconcile, but they pushed you away. Or perhaps things weren’t as bad as you’d originally recalled. “On average, people become better regulators of regret as they get older,” says Concordia’s Wrosch, who leads the Personality, Aging, and Health Lab there. Much of the work he and his staff focus on is about how letting go of unattainable goals can lead to greater well-being—in other words, he stresses “the positive aspects of giving up.”
In a culture that celebrates stick-to-itiveness, learning how to throw in the towel is hardly second nature. But according to the many questionnaire-based studies Wrosch has led, strategically “redirecting life goals” is a function of healthy aging. Funneling time, effort, and emotional energy in the pursuit of a lost cause, however noble, can lead to depression and illness. It may seem counterintuitive, but in truly hopeless situations, it’s healthier to simply admit that things are out of your hands.
Plus, there’s evidence that elderly people subconsciously immunize themselves to the kinds of corrosive regret that prey on younger or middle-aged people. It’s called the positivity effect, according to Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology and director of the Stanford Center on Longevity at Stanford University. Older people generally score higher in self-reported tests of happiness than younger people do—in part, she believes, because they are more likely to remember events and memories that improve their emotional well-being and selectively ignore ones that might make them unhappy. She believes this selectivity is a function of the relative importance of being happy in the present. “As people age, they take into account the amount of time they have left,” Carstensen says. But instead of aggravating regret, this awareness in late life can redirect emotional attention away from potential regret-producers. “When time is perceived as being constrained, people tend to pursue goals related to feeling states that pay off in the moment.” Carstensen predicts that even the Me Generation will navigate the golden years in the traditional fashion, gradually adjusting goals to accommodate the time they have left. “People will be motivated to accept the choices they made in order to achieve happiness,” she says.
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It’s a journey that Mary from Texas is already pursuing. With the support of her son and daughter, she finally divorced her husband, and she’s coming to terms with the mistakes she made when she was younger. “When I did the things I did, I didn’t know any better,” she reasons. “I did the best I could at the time.” She’s also trying to concentrate on the positive things: both her kids are happy and successful. And Mary is resuming the education she cut short when she married at 21. She’s taking art classes, pursuing a passion for painting that lay dormant for decades. And, slowly, the burden of a lifetime of regret is easing. “It’s an ongoing process,” she says. “But I feel like I’m a lot better.”
For Jane, coming to terms with the choices of her youth means focusing less on the material things she pursued for so long. She’s doing volunteer work and starting a new career in antiques restoration. Sometimes she still pokes around in what she calls “the dark corners of my life,” thinking about the lost opportunities. But now, she tries to see it all from another perspective. “Who knows? It might have been better,” she says carefully. “But it might have been worse.”
David Dudley is the editor of The Urbanite in Baltimore.
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