‘Harvard Thinking’: Breaking the regret cycle

“Health ‘Harvard Thinking’: Breaking the regret cycle Illustrations by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff Samantha Laine Perfas Harvard Staff Writer May 13, 2026 long read In podcast, experts offer a better way to cope with mistakes and missed opportunities If you’ve ever felt bad about the way you handled a situation at work or beat yourself up about not asking the person of your dreams out on a date, you are not alone. Regret can haunt all of us in one form or another — yet it’s something we can control. In this episode of “ Harvard Thinking ,” host Samantha Laine Perfas talks with three experts — palliative care specialist Susan Block , behavioral scientist Leslie John , and neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps — about how to make peace with our actions, and inactions, and why we tend to regret the things we didn’t do more than the things we did. Listen on: Spotify Appl e YouTube The transcript Liz Phelps: If you’re wallowing in regret, you have to start to think about: “What is it I got from that situation that might be helpful? And what kinds of things can I use that for to help me in the future? And how do I think about it differently in such a way that it will actually take me out of this stuck situation to one where I can think about growing in the future?” Samantha Laine Perfas: We all make mistakes. Sometimes we’re able to brush off these experiences and learn from them, but other times, we’re left with regrets. We regret that thing we said, how we handled that situation, or the choice we made. And often, we come to regret the things we didn’t do just as much as the things we did. How do we make peace with the actions — or inactions — that still haunt us? Welcome to “Harvard Thinking,” a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today, I’m joined by: Leslie John: Leslie John. I’m a behavioral scientist and a professor at the Harvard Business School. Laine Perfas: She just published a book called “Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing.” Then: Phelps: Liz Phelps. I’m the Pershing Square Professor of Human Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Laine Perfas: She’s a cognitive and affective neuroscientist who specializes in emotions, influence on learning, memory, and decision making. And finally: Susan Block: Susan Block. I’m a professor of psychiatry and medicine at Harvard Medical School. Laine Perfas: She has been a national leader in the development of the field of palliative medicine. And I’m your host, Samantha Laine Perfas. I’m a writer for The Harvard Gazette. Today, we’ll talk about regret and how we can use moments of regret to help us grow. I would love to start with a definition of regret and the primary drivers that cause us to feel this emotion. John: To me, regret is largely a cognition that’s driven by counterfactuals of, “I wish something had been different,” or, “I wish I had done something.” And it’s a cognition that causes a lot of stress and anxiety and causes a lot of negative feelings. Phelps: I would second that. I think of regret as a counterfactual emotion, and it does have a little bit more cognitive mediation than, say, something like disappointment or anger, right? For regret, you have to have some sense of personal responsibility, as if, “I could have taken a different action” or “I could have done something differently,” which brings in a sense of agency that some other emotions don’t have. Block: I’d add, regret is about something that affects you. And I distinguish it from remorse. I think those two get entangled in different ways. Remorse is a feeling of wishing you had done something different, the counterfactual that led to somebody else being harmed. Regret has more to do with your own inner experience, and it’s about making amends with yourself. Remorse I think of as having the potential to lead to making amends to another person. And I think we get those two ideas confounded sometimes. Laine Perfas: Are certain personality types more prone to feeling regret? Phelps: The only work I know on that would be in psychopathology, for instance. We don’t think that there’s a lot of regret in psychopathology, nor a lot of guilt. To the extent that individuals who wouldn’t fit that category, by a standard metric, show tendencies in that direction, I suspect there’s a lot of variability in the likelihood of feeling regret across individuals. “The negative side effects of under-sharing come in the form of missed opportunities, right? Colleagues who never quite trust you. Friendships that never blossom. Romances that never spark.” Block: When we talk about psychopathology though, to differentiate different types of psychopathology, sociopathy, and psychopathy, severe narcissism are all associated with a lack of guilt and concern about the impact of their actions, whereas somebody who has a depressive disorder may be constantly ruminating about regrets and all the things that they did wrong. John: Susan, I have a follow-up question for you. As we were talking about personality disorders, I think of a classic sociopath as someone who lacks empathy. And I’m curious how you think of empathy, guilt, regret, remorse — how do you think of those constructs? Block: I think empathy is the capacity in a sense to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and to imagine what they would be feeling. John: It’s got a perspective-taking component. Block: Exactly, exactly. And it goes back to early child development issues around how do you learn to take another person’s perspective and so on. Regret can — this is what I’m struggling with as I was thinking about this podcast — you can be regretful, but it’s primarily about what it did to you. It has to do with the internalization versus the externalization. I’ll give you an example. OK, so I was not a very good sister to my younger sister. I was not that nice to her when she was little. And I regret that. I feel very badly about that. But I also have another feeling, which is a kind of guilt, where I feel a remorse. I felt, and I have tried to make amends to her for being not the kind of sister I would’ve wished that I was. With regret, you’re not necessarily making amends. With remorse, that is part of what happens. And so I think they’re a little different and they’re very related and it’s a little messy. John: I feel like that in of itself, though, makes you a good sister. The desire to want to make reparations. Laine Perfas: Listening to your response, Susan, I think about the remorse, and the empathy of like, “Wow, for my sibling, that must have been really hard to have such a mean older sister, and I, from that sense of remorse, can attempt to make repair.” But then there might still be that lingering regret, that feeling of, “Ugh, I wish I could change it. And I can’t,” because you can’t go back in time and change what you did. You can make amends, but it’s still never going to clean the slate. John: That’s why this distinction about regrets of things you did versus did not do is really fascinating. Because here I’m thinking of the famous psychologist Thomas Gilovich, who’s studied this extensively, and many others, on how right after doing something you wish you hadn’t done, you feel more regret in general on regrettable actions, sins of commission. But the thing is, over time, it reverses such that years and years later, you tend to regret the stuff you didn’t do, like telling your high school crush that you love them or something, over the regrettable things you did. And one of the reasons for that is because when it’s something that you did not do, your mind can fantasize about all the ways you could have told your love that you loved them and you fail to empathize with your prior self about how hard that would’ve been in the moment. You don’t know where to begin to repair that. But if it’s a sin over something you did, it’s easier to repair because it’s more clear. You can talk to the person, you can do something. But for those sins of omission, those, “Oh, I wish I had said that,” they tend to sting more over the long run because they’re more abstract and harder to repair in a way. Block: I would echo that in what I have heard from my patients who are facing the end of their lives and are thinking a lot about regret. It is more things that weren’t done. Part of working with people like this is helping them see what agency they still have, that you’re still here, there are things you can do to make things better. Phelps: I also think part of what underlies the regret of actions getting better over time is that we all have a psychological immune system, right? We have a way of reinterpreting the things that we do right in ways that make them seem better. We do this because we don’t want to feel bad all the time, right? So someone who was a bully will describe the things that they did in a different light than somebody who was bullied by somebody. They’ll have reasons for why they did it. They’ve justified it to themselves over time. And we all do this. We all try to imagine the things we did and try to feel better about them. This is adaptive for us. We don’t want to walk around feeling bad all the time. That’s easier to do for something you did than something you didn’t do. Block: Is that a problem, though, is my question. John: Ah. That’s a great question. It’s so easy to rationalize things away. At what point is it healthy coping and processing versus rationalizing stuff? Sometimes the boundary’s a little murky, isn’t it? Block: Those are what we call in my family AFGOs: Another F’ing Growth Opportunity. John: I love that. Block: If you rationalize it away, you don’t grow. You just don’t grow from that. And so I think it’s a really important idea, that ideally there’s some kind of balanced understanding of why you did the things that you did or didn’t do, but also some reflection on “What can I learn from this feeling of regret that I have?” Laine Perfas: I wanted to talk a little bit about the types of regret that we feel. I don’t remember who mentioned it first, but it is correct that we often regret the things we didn’t do more than the things that we did. Another major regret is things related to love — people we love, and either not sharing that we love them or just doing things to people that we love. With the things that we do not do, what is often holding us back? What are factors in that decision-making preventing us, in the moment, from doing the thing that we later are like, “Oh, why didn’t I do that? I should have done that.” John: Here’s an example. I ran a nationally representative survey where I asked people, “Have you ever said I love you to someone?” Among the people who have been the first to say “I love you,” I then ask them, was it requited or not? It turned out that in this survey, the aggregate was 80 percent of the time it was requited. Now, this isn’t to say if I chose — of course it’s not to say any random person in any random relationship, that if they did it, it’d be requited, but rather among people who feel it’s the time and do it, 80 percent of the time they’re requited. But I thought that was an interesting data point, suggesting sometimes we may over-worry about these things. And so I’ve done further research where, as you can tell, I’m obsessed. I wrote a book on opening up and its promise and its perils. One thing that I’ve been doing a lot of is I’ve given people scenarios, a dilemma, disclosure dilemma: Should you tell your children about your partying ways? Should you tell your partner about that old flame? Should you tell your boss you have ADHD? All these things that there may be benefits, but risks. And when people think these things through, almost always they fixate on the risks of revealing. They’re like, “If I tell my bosses I’m going get fired,” “If I tell my children, this thing, it’ll be a bad example.” You immediately come up with the risks of revealing. And so this is a pattern that causes us to over-worry about opening up and under-worry about not opening up. Because when I get people to then think through the full two by two, the risks and rewards of revealing and concealing, they often change their minds and think of these decisions differently. Laine Perfas: Could you explain the two by two? John: To make a fulsome decision of whether to reveal something or not, we want to think about this in a good, fulsome way, which requires thinking about the risks of revealing and the rewards of revealing. It also requires thinking about the risks of not revealing and the benefits of not revealing. So — nerdy — it’s a two by two. So one axis is reveal or do not reveal, and the other is the benefit and the risks. So there are benefits of revealing, benefits of not revealing, risks of revealing, and risks of not revealing. Block: Yeah, I can totally resonate with that from my experiences at work, with patients. There’s an anxiety about being hurt, about being shamed, about being unheard that holds people back from talking about anything where they’re vulnerable. The common scenario that I see it in is there are two partners — one is very ill, the other’s taking care of that person. And the person who’s very ill is reluctant to talk to their spouse, their partner, because they don’t want to hurt them. And the partner is reluctant to talk with the patient because they don’t want to bring up how ill they are, and they’re both sitting there alone, struggling with these feelings without being able to connect. It’s universally helpful for people to talk about those feelings. It also comes up all the time in regrets after somebody dies, that there are lots of regrets because there’s now no chance of making amends or sharing or changing the dynamic. John: That’s so powerful. When you notice this dynamic, have you come up with ways of trying to — I could see on the one hand not wanting to intervene at all, it’s their lives — but given your expertise and your experience, I can also see coming up with ways of trying to help them? Block: I think it is a source of suffering, and I see that, as a palliative care doctor, as part of my responsibility in these settings is to relieve suffering. And so, yes, we do intervene in those situations. Part of it is asking each partner what they think the other partner is thinking, and the idea that two of them can help each other face what each of them are facing individually is really powerful. John: That just gave me goosebumps. Laine Perfas: It is so crazy how much fear plays into our decisions. Why is that? Why is fear such a strong driver in how we make these decisions? Phelps: When you get into the decision context, here we talk about the amygdala a lot. The amygdala is one of the brain’s threat detectors. One thing that comes into regret particularly is this notion of loss aversion. We’re more afraid of things we’re going to lose than things we’re going to gain sometimes. By opening up, you may lose the respect or you may bring on bad consequences — and so you may be focusing more on that than what you actually would gain from sharing, for instance. We know that loss-aversion specifically involves the amygdala and that to the extent that you show more arousal to negativity, to things you might potentially lose, you’re going to be more loss-averse. We call the value we give to things we don’t do fictive signals, right? They are not real; they didn’t actually happen. But nevertheless, you’re valuing both of those things every time you make a decision. And that’s kind of why we can use things we didn’t do to help learn about actions in the future. In terms of decision-making, we need to think about the fact that regret is about loss. If we think about it evolutionarily, loss aversion in decision-making is often thought of as an error in decision-making. I don’t think of it that way. John: It’s adaptive. Phelps: It’s adaptive, right? The threats to your survival are way more important than “Did I miss that food in that one situation,” right? The things that could kill you are way more important. So I understand why we might lean that way to value losses more than gains, but then we take it to all sorts of abstract things that it probably doesn’t apply to. Laine Perfas: That aversion to loss, if we are someone who preemptively holds back consistently, does that affect our long-term well-being in any way? Block: I do think that you holding yourself back is a sign of some kind of lack of confidence in your own perceptions, your own emotions, in a sense. And that is something that tends to hold people back in lots of ways. If you continually hold back and miss opportunities for the things that you care about and that are meaningful to you, there is a sense of ongoing loss of that and a loss of opportunities. It creates some loneliness, some isolation, those things that we know are associated with poorer mental health. “The amygdala is one of the brain’s threat detectors. One thing that comes into regret particularly is this notion of loss aversion. We’re more afraid of things we’re going to lose than things we’re going to gain sometimes.” John: In writing my book, I was super-submersed in this question. I think it’s a really important one. Something that is actively on your mind that you’re ruminating about, it’s preoccupying, it’s bad for your mental health for lots of reasons. But then there are also amazing studies, these are James Pennebaker’s studies, showing that when you write about something that’s on your mind, you don’t even have to give it to someone. Just that process of getting out of your head, putting words on paper, can really help you deal with difficult events. He’s done many randomized studies on that. There’s another thing that I encountered that I find is so fascinating, to this question of holding back, and holding back in surprising ways, and how it can cause harm. There’s a construct called Mind Reading Expectations — I only encountered this the last year. And a mind reading expectation in a relationship is like that implicit belief that your partner should just know what you think and what you feel. And these are very insidious beliefs because it’s a trait. We have them. They’re pretty stable, person to person. Each person is different. And we’re often unaware we’re doing it. That was my case. And then I took the scale and I realized that, oh yeah, whenever I get into an argument or whatever, or a disagreement, it’s actually because I’m assuming that he knows what I’m thinking and feeling. And there are so many studies on how this is correlated with well-being in relationships: Lower mind reading expectations are predictive of more positive relationships. So yeah, it’s such a great question. Laine Perfas: Leslie, I had a question for you. I think you talk about this in your book a bit, but you mentioned there’s this balancing act of sharing too much versus sharing too little. I’d love to hear you talk about some of the risks and rewards on both ends of that spectrum. John: I mean it’s interesting because I made up a word in my book, or a phrase: Too Little Information, TLI, where we treat TMI as the greatest social sin. But the more I studied it and the more I wrote about it and learned about it, I thought, TLI is at least as big of a problem, and now I’ve become a little tilted toward, personally, I would rather have a sin of TMI than TLI, hands down. I’m a researcher, and I dispassionately did research, and then when I wrote this book, I actually treated myself as the guinea pig and I applied all the stuff. I kept moving the line a little bit further, a little bit further, and I kept finding it was positive most of the time, nine times out of 10, when I said the thing. Which comes back to, like, why do we beat ourselves up so much in prospect? It’s because if we censor and we don’t say the thing, then we actually never learn of the benefits because we never experience them. It’s like a truncation of learning when we do that. After having studied it, I forced myself to do it. So to answer your question, I think that the negative consequences or negative side effects of under-sharing come in the form of missed opportunities, right? Colleagues who never quite trust you. Friendships that never blossom. Romances that never spark. And they’re social in creation, most of these. And that’s where so much joy comes out of life — we are social animals. And on the other hand, the crimes of TMI, they’re like embarrassment, shame, maybe we hurt someone. But again, if you said something a bit edgy at the office, you can talk to them later and you can apologize and you can do something. So coming back to this theme of you can often make amends of sins of commission: TMI, oversharing. And now, certain things, there is TMI for sure — there are many things, especially at work, that I would not say. But my point is that if you’re a little bit more open, a lot of the time, I, for one, have benefited, and the science suggests that we have a lot to benefit. Laine Perfas: OK, so here’s an example that I wanted to talk about. Let’s say you decided to go all in on whatever this big scary thing is. You told someone you love them, or you go have that really difficult conversation with your boss that you’ve been dreading. And then you fall flat on your face and it doesn’t go the way that you were hoping it would. What then? What do we do in those moments where it feels like we just confirmed the reason why we were struggling to do that thing in the first place? John: What I immediately thought of is that this is where I think self-reflection is really important. First of all, if you never feel like you’ve crossed the line, if you’ve never felt like you’ve fallen flat on your face and you’ve overshared, you’re not doing it enough. It’s just like Linda Babcock, that wonderful economist who studies gender and negotiation, she always said to me, “Leslie, if you get everything you want all the time, you’re not asking for enough.” So pushing the line, it’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s learning. But the other thing I realized is that so many of my own TMI moments — many of which I include in the book, you’re welcome — when I reflected back on them, some of the moments, there’s often upside. It’s rare that it’s strictly negative, but that’s how we code them. Block: I’m much more on the TMI side than a lot of people are, particularly in medicine. But I think that one of the other things about sharing is its permission-giving to other people to share more. It makes you less threatening in certain ways. It allows people to feel safe being vulnerable with you because you’ve been vulnerable with them. And it creates the conditions for just a different kind of connection and communication. And then the other thing that I’ve learned in my work, because I have a lot of very difficult conversations with people where it doesn’t always go well because they’re just intrinsically such painful conversations. What I’ve learned is that you can go back and check in. And showing that you noticed — “Gee, maybe I shared a little bit too much there” — and, to ask what it was like for them and to try to rebuild the connection, I think, is really helpful. And it’s frequently the case that when that first conversation doesn’t go well, the second one, when you go back, gets deeper and has the conversation you wanted to have the first time. The problem is that when you screw up, you feel ashamed and bad and you don’t want to go back. You want to hide. So the key is pushing yourself forward even when you don’t feel like it, to try that second conversation in a very kind of delicate way. Laine Perfas: What can happen if we don’t push forward to try again, if we just sit with that regret and allow it to linger and don’t deal with it in a healthy way? Block: It makes you feel bad. It’s corrosive internally. And I think it also in some way affects that relationship where you felt that you didn’t do what you wanted to, you weren’t able to form the kind of connection that you wanted to. Phelps: One of the things when something happens and it doesn’t go as you like, right — one of the things that I think I took away from all of my research on emotion in the brain is how much control we have over our emotional reactions. This is, of course, something you learn in therapy. At some level, it’s not automatic and it takes practice and things like that, but we can choose to interpret things in the best possible light. When you were saying you went ahead and you did it and you had the bad outcome, there’s a level at which you have to realize that may not always be the case. That you took a chance, and if you never took chances in life … There’s ways you can interpret things that will reduce your negative emotional response and then help you think about it as a growth opportunity. We don’t often appreciate this, I think, the fact that our emotions are really a creation of both the circumstances but also our interpretation of the circumstances. And the interpretation of the circumstances is something that we have some control over, obviously. We can use that every single day for every single circumstance, including those that induce regret. And to the extent that you get good at that, then I think you can allow yourself the opportunity to then take advantage of those circumstances as a growth opportunity for yourself. Laine Perfas: As we think about making decisions that we worry we might come to regret later, what are helpful questions that we can ask ourselves to gain clarity? John: In the realm of what to reveal and what not to reveal, I have found that two by two has been really helpful to me when I’m making a hard decision: Do I share this or not? I know I’m going to gravitate toward the risk, but then forcing myself to think through the possible benefits of revealing is one thing. But I also think having more self-compassion and realizing that we can’t avoid regret, and that when we do experience it, let’s recognize it, let’s learn from it, and let’s grow. Let’s make it a … I wrote that down: an AFGO moment. Block: I think for me, and this is just speaking personally, I told myself that if in doubt, just say yes. I learned that after my husband died and I was thinking about how am I going to manage to live by my— to live without him and make a life for myself. There were all these things I was scared of doing, going out to have a meal by myself or doing just all sorts of things. And then I thought about it and I thought, I have to figure out how to get myself there. And if I’m thinking about doing it, I just need to use that as my mantra. Unless there’s a really super good reason that I can convince myself of to say no. The corollary to that, that I also learned during this period of saying yes, is give yourself an out to quit or get out of it. It makes it easier to take the risk. “Regret has more to do with your own inner experience and it’s about making amends with yourself. Remorse, I think of as having the potential to lead to making amends to another person.” John: That’s so universal. In the sense that I — with my children, they’re like, “I don’t want to go to swim lessons.” I say, “Do it for one minute.” First I say five minutes, and then they negotiate me down to a minute. And then they never want to stop it. But if they did, it would be OK. That’s such a great example. Phelps: I always tell my kid, and this gets back to the Tom Gilovich study that Leslie talked about earlier: You tend to regret the things you didn’t do more than the things you did. So I echo that thought, right? That unless there’s a really good reason, chances are if I’m thinking about, “Should I go to that party? I’m a little tired,” or whatever, chances are I’ll regret not going more than I’ll regret going. I use that as a little background when I think about, “Oh, should we go on a fishing trip? But it’s really a pain in the ass today to go do that. I have to get in the car and drive all the way there and pay the guy for the fishing boat and stuff like that.” But, almost always, I’m really glad I did it. The science suggests that, in the long term, it’s going to be the things you didn’t do relative to the things you did do that you regret the most. I keep that in the back of my mind. Laine Perfas: This is my last question. If I’m currently living with regret, as in, it’s taking away from my ability to enjoy my life because it’s just really stuck with me, what can I do to begin to make peace with that situation? Block: Leslie said it early on, and it’s really an important piece that underlies all of this, and that’s self-reflection. There are many ways to self-reflect, and that self-reflection kind of allows you to get perspective on what it is that you’re regretting. When I was thinking I was a bad sister, I felt much better after I realized my parents put me in an impossible position as a 4-year-old in taking care of my 2-year-old sister. And so when I understood that, that made me understand my behavior a little bit more, and it made me more able to act, and to figure out what I could do in that situation. Phelps: This gets back a little bit to this notion that we have some agency in how we create our emotions. We can interpret things in different ways. We can reframe things that happen to us or feelings that we have to try to make them more useful for us. If you’re wallowing in regret, you have to start to think about: “What is it I got from that situation that might be helpful? And what kinds of things can I use that for to help me in the future? And how do I think about it differently in such a way that it will actually take me out of this stuck situation to one where I can think about growing in the future?” Our emotions are really a combination of the actual events and our interpretation of the events, and the interpretation part is somewhat under our control. That’s the thing you can shift. But it’s not easy. It’s not always easy to do that. I think that journaling helps. Talking to somebody helps. There are people and techniques you can use to help with that process. But when the emotions are causing a problem, you have to start to think about them differently. Laine Perfas: Thank you all for this really great conversation. John: Thank you for the great questions. Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. To find a transcript of this episode and to listen to all of our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. And if you like this episode, rate and review us on Apple and Spotify. Every review helps others find us. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Paul Makishima, Max Larkin, and Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound design by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2026. Recommended reading “ It’s time to get more comfortable with talking about dying ” by The Harvard Gazette “ Did I say too much? ” by The Harvard Gazette “ Forgiving what you can’t forget ” by The Harvard Gazette

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