Ask HN: How do you stop regretting?

[regretting]

Early 30's and experience debilitating regret on a daily basis, over not receiving the best education, not having excelled in any one field, not having any piqued interests as a child, missed opportunities, paths taken that cannot be reversed, and so much more. Many of those things were due to external factors, yet my mistakes still played a big part. Friends are in better places who I never saw as more hardworking or intelligent than I, but perhaps I've been deluded. Efforts taken at this point to turn things around would be futile, whether that means going back to school or picking up a new skill; I would be in competition with others who've been practicing their trade for many years. It feels as if it's too late. I am objectively in a place I am not happy with, but am convinced things cannot get any better. You may say that I'm not speaking rationally, but reality can validate every one of my worries and regrets. I don't think I am exaggerating or fabricating anything, rather I am reflecting on what has happened and observing patterns, or so I think I am.

Do any of you have any experience with this?

[zerohp]

Almost 3 years ago something flipped in my brain. I felt similar to you for many years before that. At the time I was obese, so I worked on that first. Eight months later I was still overweight but significantly stronger and healthier.

During that time I saw how I had limited myself at work because I didn't feel confident enough to ask for more. During my annual review at work, I made it clear that I felt undervalued. My employer eventually responded, but it was too late. I had already started seeking a new job.

I interviewed at a few places and I took the highest offer, even though it was the least interesting work. That job allowed me to work from home and gave me a lot of solitary time to reflect. Even though I've been programming for my whole life and I earned a great salary, I had never gone to college. It was a regret I had held for many years. For the first time it was possible to go to college, because of the flexible hours allowed by my job as a telecommuter. So at 34 years old I started taking classes at my local community college.

Fast forward a year and a half, I quit work and transferred to one of the top computer schools in the country (top 5 in EE, CS, and CompE.) Sometimes it feels strange to be 15+ years older than my classmates, but then I remind myself that it's never too late to achieve my goals.

The last couple years have been the best years of my life. I have no more regret because I am doing everything I can to realize my potential. It's never too late.

TLDR: Be honest with yourself. Reflect, Analyze, and have the confidence to pursue your dreams.

[sbanach]

Do you have any visibility on what it was that triggered your change? I don't mean to pry, achieving a genuine change of outlook is rare, fascinating and to be celebrated. A lot of time the internal struggle is worsened because there doesn't seem to be any way to break out of the thinking patterns.

[danilocampos]

Hi. Sorry you're hurting.

A professional specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy might be especially helpful to you, in just a few sessions. You need to break the pattern of thought that leads you to fixate on your regrets, shortcomings and other negativity. With all of this taking up space in your mind, you'll have a hard time finding the attention or energy for the many exciting options open to you.

Put another way – with your hand full of the whip you're using to beat the hell out of yourself, it isn't free to work on real things.

Meanwhile, tonight, right now, take a moment and write yourself a letter. Write from the perspective of the kindest, dearest, most understanding friend you can imagine.

As this friend, express understanding and compassion for the hardships and missed opportunities you've endured. Offer encouragement. Catalog all the disappointments of your history if that's what you feel like doing – but do so in a way that says "Hey dude. That hurts. I totally understand why you're feeling bad. It's cool."

In short – give yourself a break. And repeat the exercise any time you're having a rough night like this one.

There's no time machine. There's nothing you can do to go back and change things. All you have is right now. Today. This moment. In any given moment, you get to decide your stance and attitude. You can't reverse your past, but you have full control over how you dispose of every single second between now, as you're reading this, and when you die.

It is guaranteed that your experiences are 100% unique to you. It is impossible to know what emergent qualities will arrange themselves to suit your unique success.

The other guarantee is that for as long as you spend time thinking of the past instead of building the future, the unique value of your experiences will remain locked up, unused.

The mind is an incredibly powerful yet fallible pattern matching engine. It can find anything, from any input, it seems. Just the same way you can make a face or a zoo animal from a pattern of water vapor in the sky, you're making a failure out of a pattern of events in the past. In both cases, it's illusion.

There's no instant fix. Patterns of thought take time and effort to change. All I can tell you as that only you can decide to change course. It'll be hard. It won't always be fun. It won't be overnight. But you can definitely do it. And anything is better than this feeling, right?

Here's Dave McClure's blog on his late bloom, which perhaps will give you some perspective on just how much road there still is ahead:

http://500hats.com/late-bloomer

[edanm]

"The mind is an incredibly powerful yet fallible pattern matching engine. It can find anything, from any input, it seems. Just the same way you can make a face or a zoo animal from a pattern of water vapor in the sky, you're making a failure out of a pattern of events in the past. In both cases, it's illusion."

I don't often recommend Tony Robbins, but one lesson from his work that is stuck with me is exactly that.

The way he puts it: "Our brain is amazingly good at answering questions. Any question you ask yourself, and your brain will come up with an answer. So if you ask yourself 'why am I such a failure?', you'll get an answer. On the flipside, ask yourself 'Why am I such a success?', you'll also get an answer. The trick is asking yourself the right questions". (This is heavily paraphrased, as I'm doing it entirely from my memory of a tape from 10 years ago).

This is also why I think the best self-help tool is the famous saying: "Fake it til' you make it". Pretending you're the kind of person you want to be is a great way to trick your brain into getting the patterns and habits such a person would have, and the fact that you essentially realize you're "fooling yourself" actually doesn't matter that much.

[rosser]

Just the same way you can make a face or a zoo animal from a pattern of water vapor in the sky, you're making a failure out of a pattern of events in the past. In both cases, it's illusion.

Wow.

Thank you for that.

[michaelgrafl]

I think this is sound advice. I was a long time sufferer of depression, and cognitive behavioral therapy has changed my life in profound ways.

The most important thing I learned from reading "Feeling Good" by David Burns is that it can wreak havoc on you if you tie your self-worth to your successes and failures. It makes you the victim of external circumstances, and who's to say what constitutes a success or a failure in absolute terms anyway? I felt like an utter failure for not having a job and never having released my debut album, and for having dropped out of college four times. I never saw that I was surrounded by friends who adore me because I give them joy and strength through listening and understanding.

I was having severe anxiety when I started doing the cognitive distortion exercises from the book. It's a bit of work, but change sets in immediately, and once habitualized, you don't need to write anything down anymore, or at least not as often.

OP, I hope you'll get better soon.

[fyfer]

This is phenomenal advice and very well-written. Thank you for sharing it.

[redschell]

Early 30s? You might like this:

“[Julius] Caesar served in 63 BC as a quaestor in Spain, where in Cadiz he is said to have broken down and wept in front of a statue of Alexander the Great, realizing that where Alexander had conquered most of the known world at thirty, Caesar at that age was merely seen as a dandy who had squandered his wife’s fortunes as well as his own.”

[gee_totes]

Your experience is familiar to me. It sounds like you are trapped in the negative thought cycle of depression. Your constant regretting is making you unhappy.

We get tired of being unhappy and think about what's wrong, what went wrong, how we got how we got here, etc. and try and think of a solution for our unhappiness.

Trying to think your way out of regretting will not work. Unfortunately, there is no trick or hack that will suddenly stop this cycle of regret cause it to unravel, leaving you happy and satisfied and confident with the decisions you've made.

"The problem is that we try to think our way out of our moods by working out what's gone wrong. What's wrong with me? Why do I always feel overwhelmed? Before we have any idea what's hit us, we're compulsively trying over and over to get to the bottom of what is wrong with us as people or the way we live our lives, and fix it. We put all of our mental powers to work on the problem, and the power we rely on is that of our critical thinking skills.

Unfortunately, those critical thinking skills might be exactly the wrong tools for the job."

What you might want to try is relating differently to these feelings of regret, especially when you notice that your mind is entering these cycles. It is important to realize that this is just a passing feeling.

"But we don't like to feel sad because it can quickly turn into a sense that we are somehow flawed of incomplete; so we call in the intellect to focus on the mismatch between what 'is' and what 'should be.' Because we can't accept the discomfort of the message, we try to shoot the messenger and end up shooting ourselves in the foot."

If the above blocks in quotation marks sound familiar to you, I suggest picking up a copy of the book "The Mindful Way Through Depression"[0]

Full disclosure: I'm reading this book right now, as it was recommended to me by a counselor a few years back. I also am not a psychiatrist (or lawyer, or doctor).

[0]http://www.amazon.com/The-Mindful-Way-through-Depression/dp/...

[tunesmith]

Others have written more eloquently than I, but just a couple of data points.

I'm in my early 40's right now and have recently gotten interested in a couple of technical subjects and have been learning at my own pace. I gotta say, these last few months of doing so have felt extremely rewarding. It doesn't seem to matter so much that other people out there are more experienced and also younger. There are also plenty of people that don't know a darn thing about what I'm learning. What is mattering is that it is interesting to me.

Ten years ago I think I compared myself to others a lot more, at least in a debilitating sense. So it might be something that calms down over time.

Also, there's one other trick that I've done in the past that has helped a lot. Sometimes we have those black cloud moments where it seems like things won't get better. Next time you're in a moment like that (or now, if it applies), promise yourself to take a mental snapshot of who you are right now. And promise yourself that if (when) you experience a moment of feeling better, you will remember that snapshot, and talk to that version of yourself, and reassure that version of you that things really did get better.

First time I managed to do that, I experienced that future black clouds were much, much easier to deal with - because I had proven to myself that they were just illusions.

[wilhelm]

All of this may be true. What are you going to do about it? Remain in that hole of sweet self-pity until retirement? As the song goes: "it's not going to stop - till you wise up". It's easy and comfortable to give up and whine instead. I know. I've been there.

First, get a shrink. Yes, really.

Second, get to work! It takes ten thousand hours to truly master a craft. That's about five working years. You'll probably be working until you're 67 or so. If you start learning a new skill now, you'll master it at 37 - and for the remaining 30 years of your working life, you'll do great.

Sure, the ambitious 20-somethings may have a head start. But over the next decade, that'll even out. Just stop feeling sorry for youself and do the damn work that's needed.

(Note: The following paragraph assumes you're not supporting a family.)

If you hate your job, quit. Yes, I know you probably don't have enough savings to feel good about that. But there's no better motivation than impending doom. If you know your runway is up in two months, you'll hustle like mad thouse two months. And you'll get there. Really, what's the worst thing that can happen?

Is that really worse than where you're at now?

[lisper]

> Efforts taken at this point to turn things around would be futile

That's the depression talking. Others have said this, but I'll pile on because it's true: talk to a therapist.

I know what you're thinking: no therapist can possibly help you. You're so much smarter than any therapist. You've thought this through, and you haven't been able to figure out the answer, so a therapist won't be able to either.

You're wrong. Here's why. You're a geek, so you're used to thinking about every challenge as a problem with (at least potentially) a solution. Depression isn't like that. It's not a problem with a solution, it's something that happens to you that you need to learn how to manage. You can't fix depression any more than you can fix getting sleepy or having to go to the bathroom. What you can do is learn how to deal with it. And a good therapist can help you with that. It's not an easy process, but it's well worth the effort. You'll still get depressed, but it will hurt less.

[corporalagumbo]

Someone once told me a nice metaphor for life. It goes: life is like a big, big river. Everyone starts at different points in the river - some start further upstream, some start further down. No matter who you are though, there are always people who started usptream from you. You'll see them cruising down the river, laughing and splashing, like it's second nature. And it's easy to be jealous of them, even to become fixated about the part of the river they saw and you didn't. So you try and swim up the river to get back to where they started from. Of course that doesn't work, because the current is far too strong, so you just end up tiring yourself out, and when you get too exhausted to keep going, you look around and realise you're in exactly the same place as when you started.

You can do that for as long as you want. Ain't gunna do anything except tire you out. Eventually though you can accept the place you started in the river, and let the current take you down-stream. That's when you start living - when you accept the limitations of how you started in life and open yourself up to your own unique possibilities of your life adventure.

Also, my dad was 42 when he started university. He became a lawyer. Granted, university in my country was cheap at the time, and granted, he would be more comfortable now if he'd started earlier. But he made a good start, and it was better than sitting around and resigning himself to being unqualified.

On that note, I want to stress: it is never too late to re-qualify. And it's always worth it. Don't be embarrassed, don't come up with reasons why you'd never be successful - just go for it. Give it a shot. It'll work out in the end.

[mikecane]

OK, I'm older than you and have been going through this right now. Let me tell you what the biggest pile of absolute bullshit is in what you just wrote:

>>>Efforts taken at this point to turn things around would be futile

That is absolute bullshit. You don't know what the future looks like nor can you say any new efforts would be futile. You've just jumped the tracks, are stuck in a rut, and all you're seeing is the damned rut. I can't help you get out of that rut -- the rut is different for each of us -- but you must find your way out. Having great days isn't a matter of just waking up to great days. It's building great days one small step at a time during lousy days. Think of it like compound interest with money. Do at least one damn thing to move forward each day. You don't need a plan -- plans won't help, only create the potential for more disappointment -- you just need to move. Move, move, move I'll leave it to others here to suggest practical steps. But standing still in that rut is death and life -- even miserable life -- is better than death. Death is finality. Life is practically infinite potential, whether you can see that right now or not.

[akulbe]

I have some experience with this. I never went into a slump that I would consider clinical depression. I'm not sure if that's what you're going through, or not. I'm certainly not that kind of professional.

My experience is this: regret is a black hole of the worst kind. It sucks you in, and there is no end to it, and it is unmerciful in the worst way.

However, how you choose to respond to your circumstances is completely within your control. This was something Victor Frankl (a man who survived the concentration camps during the Holocaust!!) talked about in "Man's Search for Meaning"

I will hit 40 in November, and there are parts of my life that I wish had ended up differently, but I don't poke that bear.

I have learned to be thankful for where I am, and what blessings I have in my life now.

(for me, I'm happily married, and have a health baby girl, a home of my own, a job I enjoy)

I would posit to you that it would help, if you took an inventory of what you have to be thankful for... and started from that position, that life may look a bit brighter.

You can change your circumstances in life. It may not come as quickly as you like... but it will come, with work.

I am sorry you are hurting... but I couldn't disagree with you more, that efforts to turn things around now would be futile. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you like, I can share with you where I've come from. My history isn't something I'd like to put here publicly, but I'd be happy to share with you, through a different venue. You can email me at the address listed in my profile.

[_Flynn]

This.

"I would posit to you that it would help, if you took an inventory of what you have to be thankful for... and started from that position, that life may look a bit brighter."

[fusiongyro]

Sounds to me like undiagnosed depression. Treatment helps, and I do mean antidepressants. Fooled by Randomness also helps. Volunteerism helps. Doing things helps. Throw yourself in with the salt of the earth.

Once you get your mood straightened out, you will find that day two of progress is worth more than years wasted on regret, but the mood disorder is not something you should expect to succeed at thinking your way through.

[bane]

First: Everybody has regrets, often very deep and hurtful regrets. Remember that when you think about the successes of another. They're living with their own unique set of places where life didn't work out for them.

Second: There's going to be somebody who's better than you in anything you do. But nobody is going to be better than you in everything you do. You are a unique collection of skills and should only really think about self improvement for your own sake, not about competition against others on cherry picked sets of capabilities.

Third: Try and live a life that, if you picked out only the highlights and wrote a book about it, would be a damn interesting read. Meditate on those good parts, those personal adventures, those things you never thought you would ever see, hear or experience. Take great satisfaction in those things -- for they are yours and yours alone. If you think you haven't done that yet, start today. That transition into a life of experience will in and of itself be a place in your life's book where the adventure began.

[JacobAldridge]

Past > Present < Future

I cannot change the past. I cannot change the future. I only have choice in the present, so that is my point of power.

Past > POWER < Future

This simple little framework helps me avoid regret, and also becoming lost in fantasy-land about what my future may entail. Note that it doesn't absolve me of responsibility to learn from the past or plan for the future - but both learning and planning are 'present' actions!

[rooshdi]

Forget everyone else's "success". Forget the past. It's irrelevant. What do you want to do now and into the future? What are your dreams? Life is fairly short and not fair to many people, but most of us are quite fortunate to have good health and opportunities to seize our dreams. What are yours? Start with realistic dreams you can achieve now and work step-by-step towards larger ones. You can do it. Failures are the footsteps of success. Just keep dreaming towards that door. It will open one day.

http://youtu.be/hzBCI13rJmA

[rosser]

Here are a few things from my experiences with regret you should consider:

0. You could probably benefit a great deal from talking with someone professionally about what you're going through. It's not a panacea, but it can definitely help.

1. There's absolutely no point in comparing your life to someone else's. They simply aren't comparable. Your life is yours; their lives are theirs. You're here in this world to have your experience, not theirs. Judging your experience of life in light of what you perceive to be another's experience will do you no good whatsoever. Worse, you're probably wrong in how you perceive their life. For all you know, the people you think have it so awesome are miserable, themselves, and secretly think your life is the shit — and round and round we go... Just Stop. Now.

(Full disclosure: I still have trouble with this one myself, to an extent, but only with age any more. I turned 40 last year, and work in technology, so I'm always surrounded by 20-something youth and vitality. Maintaining my equanimity can sometimes be challenging in that environment.)

2. Whatever it is that you're regretting, you need to understand that you couldn't have acted differently at the time. Between the circumstances around the event, who you were at the time of the event, who the other people involved were at the time, and so on, there really wasn't much anyone could have done, but exactly what they did. (Aside: as much as people reading along at home might want to, please don't use my phrasing here to spawn a free will vs. determinism debate. While I, personally, find that stuff fascinating, this really isn't the place for it.)

This was a very, very hard one for me to come to grips with. I used to have some pretty debilitating regrets, myself. There were choices I'd made that, when I thought of them, I'd feel physical pain, as if struck. Seriously, I remember many occasions where I'd be in the shower (the most common place for this to happen, for whatever reason), or going about my day in some other fashion, when Situation X would pop into my head, and I'm suddenly doubled over as if someone just punched me in the gut. I'm not exaggerating.

Worse, those regrets were holding me back in situations like the one I was regretting. Let's suppose, for sake of discussion, that my regret was over "blowing it" with "the girl of my dreams." Every time I was in an even remotely romantic situation after that, my regrets would be foreground in my mind, instead of being present to the situation I was in. I doubt I have to belabor how much life I missed out on because of that...

After a lot of soul-searching, and a rather expensive and painfully-wrought epiphany or seven, I realized exactly what I describe above: given who I was at the time, who the other people were, the circumstances we were all in, &c, there simply wasn't another outcome for the situation. The only way it could have played out is exactly as it did. After that, regret for my choices made as much sense as regretting it being cold that day.

Please take care not to misunderstand: that doesn't mean you shrug and walk away. Every experience in life, pleasant or painful, has something to teach us. Often enough, the more painful the experience, the more there is to learn from it — we learn that fire is hot by being burned far more quickly than we do by being told. So whatever the lesson(s) might be in your situation(s), sit down with yourself and strive to find them, honestly, and without judgement. They're there, and the rest of your life will open and flow out of what you take from them.

[smky80]

I could have written the original post word for word, and I enjoyed your post. However, what torments me personally is the knowledge that the outcome could have been very different had small things been very different. A few freak twists of fate don't happen, I give a little more thought to decisions that turned out to be huge mistakes, etc.

[jkonowitch]

This is a great and compassionate answer.

[YuriNiyazov]

Honestly, there's a whole field of professionals that's designed to deal with problems like these; it's called psychotherapy. It helped me, though not for this exact problem, but for something related.

[mynameishere]

it's called psychotherapy

You were perhaps trying to say "psychiatry". Psychotherapy is a pseudoscience right up there with dream interpretation. And everyone else posting might consider that the OP isn't apparently an imbecile, and so is well-aware that an industry of therapists/doctors/quacks (etc etc etc) exists for mental health problems and that recommending it is pretty much redundant.

[factorialboy]

I had a similar feeling few years ago. What worked for me: Meditation.

Why? Because it stresses on the now.

It's practical too. There's nothing you can do about the past. And sitting and internally whining doesn't help. Do whatever you're doing now and give it 100% attention.

In the end, if you're lucky, you'll realize the futility of it all! :)

[bbunix]

I'm 50. Made millions. Lost millions. Regrets? Sure.

But it's really a question of perspective. A friend of mine needs 2 kidneys and a liver (try having the "regrets" discussion with them). When I look around, really look around and see the situation a lot of people are in, I get grateful. And gratitude is the answer to that situation. Make a list of all the things you have to be grateful for. You're on HN, you're educated, a bunch of people here care.

Go help someone else. Volunteer at a homeless shelter. Visit the sick in a hospital. Go to the SPCA and pet the animals. Take action.

It's also the middle of winter. I used to suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder living in Canada. Fish oil + vitamin D + exercise helps. Moving to Key West helped more :)

Finally, I had to accept that I was exactly where I wanted to be. I took all the actions to get me here. I take the blame. I own it. Mine. Figure out where you want to go, big goals, small goals - and take daily steps to get there... you're either getting better or getting sicker... make the choice to take the actions to get better.

And this may involve asking for help. You've made a good start here, but there might be underlying depression as others have mentioned... therapy of some sort... meditation (my favorite)... stopping drinking or drugging...

This too will pass. Hang in there. Use this situation as the impetus you need to change some shit that needs changing. And I want to see the next post from you as "Tell HN: Feeling Better, here's why"

Good luck!

[j45]

Share more about meditation if you don't mind.

[visualR]

Early 30s is not too late. I know a guy going back for a MS in Stat who is 40s -- no previous data related jobs. Stop comparing yourself to other people, just work on things youre passionate about. Most people dont. You are already successful if you can do that.

[davidroberts]

I'm 55 and currently barely scraping by on temp jobs and freelance gigs. As I look back at all the mistakes and missed opportunities, mainly caused by obvious glaring faults of my own, or in what in retrospect could be considered very dumb decisions, I certainly feel some regret. Lack of focus, maybe ADD long before people knew it existed, quitting great jobs to start a failed business or non-profit or to work overseas. Going to grad school, then skipping classes and homework to spend all night on personal projects that never really amounted to anything, getting mediocre grades, then eventually dropping out. Not able to make up my mind what I want to do for a living.

But then I see my loving wife of 30 years who has put up with me, two kids in college who call me up for advice (not necessarily taking it, but it's the thought that counts) and a high school kid who talks to me and laughs at my jokes, good health, a decent if small home, and many, many, many friends from all the places I lived, and not really even one real enemy.

Then I wonder. Would I have been as happy if I had gotten that fancy degree? Kept that job that would have had me away on 6 week business trips twice or three times a year? If I'd not followed my dreams, even though they didn't pan out?

When I die (and at 55 it starts looking a lot closer), although I never amounted to much, maybe I'll have friends and family saying goodbye as I slip away and it will seem more important at that moment than a big job and major accomplishment. At least I can feel that maybe the world is happier and nicer a little bit because I was here. I smiled at people and they smiled back and there were two more smiles added to the world happiness account. Maybe it turned out OK not focus on career and DOING BIG THINGS.

Maybe nothing has stuck for you so far, because you haven't found what would really make you happy. Please, keep looking. Be open. Cultivate positive relationships. Help other people who are suffering. Make the world cleaner, nicer, safer, brighter, more fun, even if just through a kind word to the person sitting next to you at Starbucks, or picking up a piece of litter and dropping it in a trash can.

And if you do want to turn things around, it's definitely not too late, if you want to try again. I've had at least two great chances since I was 40. The only reason I'm not doing them now is because I ended up moving on because they weren't really what I wanted. Maybe they'll be what you want.

Most of all, don't let the world's idea of what is worth doing define how you evaluate your life. They have no idea what constitutes true happiness for you. Only you can know that, and sometimes it takes a while to find out.