4.37 How do I stop beating myself up in hindsight

It’s so easy to look back and beat yourself up about things you feel you “should” have done earlier, differently or not at all. That can lead to a spiral of self-criticism that’s not only unfair to past us, but that also makes it really difficult to move forward for fear of experiencing the same regret in the future. In this episode, I discuss a philosophical model I came across called the Justied Decision Perspective and in what ways it could help us stop beating ourselves up in hindsight and instead move forward with more learning. 

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on why we should all be more compassionate and curious (one of the Be Your Own Best Boss series).

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. Now, I have to confess, I have had to practice what I preach this morning, because I had decided on the topic for today's podcast quite a while ago. It actually came up as a question in the membership, where students can submit questions about stuff they're struggling with at the moment, and I record a short voice note.

So I recorded a short voice note about this ages ago, but also somewhere in my head thought, "Ooh, that would make a good full podcast at some point." And in my new spirit of organization, I actually wrote that down on a list called podcast planning, so that was quite exciting. Anyway, so I knew I was gonna be talking about this particular topic today.

I'll tell you what the topic is in a sec. And I sat down this morning with a approximate plan of what I was going to say, and then Vikki's brain decided to say, "I bet there's research about this." This is the problem of having been an academic my entire life. The joy and the problem, being an academic my whole life, is that my brain says, "I bet someone else has studied this.

I bet there's theory about this. I bet there's evidence about this. What would that look like?" And so I have just spent the last hour that I was meant to be recording this podcast, or that I had intended to record this podcast, diving into the literature around hindsight and regret. Because the question was, "How do I stop beating myself up in hindsight?"

So this student would often look back and wish they'd made a different decision, telling themselves that things would've been so much easier if they'd picked X or Y at the time instead of picking Z, and then beating themselves up for that. And so I gave some, I think, quite helpful advice in that original voice note, but I thought it would be fun to dig in and it was super fun. I found myself... Okay, so I thought I was gonna be in psychology, okay? That, and that's a comfort zone for me. I know you guys know that I was a sports scientist, but I predominantly looked at the intersections between psychology and physiology, so reading psych literature is, like, my comfort zone. Happy days. All good. And I did find some bits, but I then got rather taken- By a paper that I found that was more in the philosophy end of things, which is not my world.

So if any of you are philosophers out there and you have opinions about the stuff I talk about today, I would love to hear it, 'cause I am very much a beginner, but I thought it was fascinating. So today I'm gonna be talking about why we beat ourselves up in hindsight, what we even mean by that, and I'm gonna be sharing some of the research that I found, one paper in particular that I thought was fascinating, and then a few critiques of it that I found too, so that we can better understand what we mean by regret and what we can do when we are feeling regret, and to what extent we may or may not want to reduce our feelings of regret.

The reason I say I've been practicing what I preach is because I could have kept reading, people. I was enjoying myself. I was having a lovely time. I was also telling myself, "You don't know enough about philosophy. You need to read some more critiques first before you talk about this stuff."

And I nearly did. I nearly kept going. But I said to myself, "No, no. You know enough. You're doing a 25-minute podcast, something like that. This is enough to go on. If the philosophers out there have got opinions, they can tell you. They can come on the show and talk about it." That would be fun. How exciting.

I do want to do that, actually. Tangent alert. If any of you are doing research that you think is even tangentially related to the PhD or academic experience, so if you're researching any of the major emotions that people experience, if you're researching inequalities, you're researching how behaviors impact academic performance, if you're researching how we change behavior, if you're researching motivation, any of these things, and you wanna come on the podcast to talk about your research and how it could potentially apply, even if you don't do it in your research, how it could potentially apply to PhD and academic life, get in contact.

Reply to my newsletter or contact me through my website. I think we should do that. That would be fun. So today we're talking about regret, hindsight, and beating ourselves up. Let's go. 

So before I start telling you the particular articles that sort of inspired me today, let's think about hindsight more generally, how it kind of applies in our world. What I see a lot with my members and with other listeners is this sort of looking back and wishing you'd done things differently.

Wishing that you had started work on the presentation earlier. Wishing that you had chosen a narrower scope of project or a different project, or something where the stuff was easier to measure or where the archives were easier to find or whatever it could be. Or wishing you hadn't spent so much time going down a rabbit hole of articles, for example. And it's that looking back and really strongly wishing that you had done it differently, and importantly, beating yourself up for the fact that you didn't. Telling yourself that you should have done. I think there is actually a big difference between the sort of regret that comes with wishing you'd done something differently than the sort of regret that comes from telling yourself you should have done something differently.

One, for me, is a more general kind of existential, "I wish it wasn't like this. I wish I hadn't got that disease. I wish I hadn't had that accident," whatever it was, versus a self-recriminatory version of regret. And actually, that distinction that I kind of had in my head does actually come out in the literature when you read some of the stuff that I've read this morning. That difference does come out in the literature. And really, the bit I wanna focus on today is the sort of regret that comes when you tell yourself, not only do you wish you'd done it differently, that you should have done it differently, and you're feeling angry or frustrated or disappointed in the past version of you that made the choice they made.

Now, I see this happen a lot, where either there was a key decision-making moment where you picked a route forward, or where there was a key either behavior or absence of behavior. And to be honest, I see it more with absence of behavior. "I wish I'd started doing this sooner. I wish I had got on with this instead of not doing it."

I sometimes see it in terms of regretting actions that you have taken, but again, this is supported in the literature, that we tend to regret inaction more. And I certainly see that amongst the people I work with. The, "I should've started on this sooner. I should've got going faster. I shouldn't have got distracted," da, da, da. That kind of inaction is often what we beat ourselves up for the most.

And I think the reasons we do it are fascinating, because we often think of it as being a very negative thing, that not only did we make the wrong, quote unquote, decision back then, we also are now wasting, quote unquote, time now worrying about it. And what we rarely recognize is that the beating ourselves up because of hindsight happens when we've learned.

It happens literally because- We know more now than we did then. We recognize more now. We understand more now than we did then. And it's very, very rare, in my experience, for us to celebrate that hindsight, celebrate the fact that we now get it better than we used to, that we now have insights that we didn't have then. We have nuanced understanding that we didn't have then. And I think that's a real shame because I think that's what drives all this, is the fact that we know more now, and it's really hard to remember that you didn't know it then. It's the same as, if any of you are my sort of age, I'm like late 40s, you look at teenagers and you're like, "Why would you do that? Why can't you just see the blah, blah, blah, blah?" We didn't. We didn't get it. And we look back, "Oh, but we were at least polite and..." Right, we weren't. We were dicks, too. All teenagers are idiots. But we look back with our fully frame ... our fully formed frontal cortexes and think, "Oh, yeah, I've always been like this," you know?

"Yeah, I was naughty sometimes, but I always understood..." No, you didn't. You're an idiot as well. I was an idiot. We're all idiots.

And that's what drives hindsight, is this inability to separate ourselves from what we know now, and so when we look back, we think we must have or should have known that then, too, and therefore, it was a stupid decision. It was the wrong decision, and we should have known better.

There can also be some positive consequences to regret. It can help shape our future behavior, right? If we regret having done X in the past, it might-- and I'm gonna say might, 'cause I've got some counterarguments to this, it might help us change in the future because we say, "You know what? I regretted it last time. I'm not gonna regret it this time. I'm gonna change my ways."

And I see that happen with coaching. I'm gonna tell you in a minute why I'm not 100% convinced on that one, though. But let's think first about the impact of this hindsight, the impact particularly of beating ourselves up in hindsight, telling ourselves that we should have realized, that we're bad people that we didn't, or stupid people, or lazy people, or whatever, that we didn't make a different decision.

And the consequences that I see for that is that we often then don't make the right decision now. So when we're telling ourselves we should have made a different decision in the past, and we're feeling regret, we're feeling guilt and things like that, those emotions feel rubbish. And often, when emotions feel rubbish, we try and avoid them.

We try and avoid actually experiencing those emotions. We try and avoid acting in a different way to those emotions. And what often then ends up happening is we kind of regret that we didn't get started on the presentation earlier or whatever, and we tell ourselves it was because we were lazy and useless, and we feel guilty about that.

And then because we feel guilty, we procrastinate more now and we don't get on with the next thing we need to do. I wish, and some of the literature suggests that people assume, that when we regret something, we then don't do it again. In my experience, and I haven't found this bit of the literature yet, if you guys know it, let me know, but in my experience, what happens more often is that this story reinforces an identity narrative about ourselves, that we are somebody who makes poor choices.

We are somebody who puts things off. We are somebody who wastes time and gets distracted. And then from there, we feel awful, and we've generalized it to our whole sense of being, and so we're actually more likely to create it in the future, even though we regret it. And I think that's fascinating, 'cause there is a school of thought that we should allow ourselves to feel regret because it shapes our future behavior.

And certainly, I don't know, I come from a kind of ADHD sort of a place. I don't know whether this is specific to my particular version of ADHD or people with ADHD in general, or whether it's a more human condition. I actually find that regret often doesn't result in behavior change, but we think it will, and it should, and so we kind of allow it to be because it means I'll be better next time.

But often, because it reinforces that identity narrative, because it makes us feel awful in there therefore we procrastinate, in my experience, it often doesn't.

So what was this- philosophy hole that I fell into. I found an article, and it was just the article. Apparently he's written a book. Didn't find the book. Looked up the book. Book's very expensive, but I read the article, so happy days.

I found an article by a philosopher called Paddy McQueen, which is called When Should We Regret? And what he proposes is a notion called the justified decision perspective. And this actually maps very well onto the decision-making, tool, the decision-making process that I taught way back in one of the early episodes of the podcast. So apparently we're on a similar wavelength. Who knew I was a philosopher? How exciting. Anyway, he called it the justified decision perspective, and he's thinking about it much more rather than as a prospective thing looking forwards where, how can I make decisions?

Although he does talk about that. He's thinking about it more in terms of how you evaluate past decisions. And his argument is, ask yourself, could I reasonably have known information that would've made me make a different decision at the time? And was I a person who could have taken on that information?

And he uses much fancier philosophical words than me to describe that, but those were the essential points. Was there information available that could have led you to make the decision that you now consider to be the right one? And were you in a position maturity-wise, emotionally, in terms of your worldview, all that other stuff, were you in a position that you could have taken that on?

And I think this is a really, really interesting question to ask yourself, because often when we're regretting something now, it's because we know how it turned out. We're regretting taking on the big scope project because we know that it was an unreasonable amount of work, or it wasn't a plausible amount of work for us to get done in the time we had to do it Was that clear? Did we know the extent of the scope when we decided the project? Did we understand how long a project of that scope takes? Did we understand the, um, the, like, little roadblocks that we might come up against while trying to pursue that ver- version? In most cases, no, we didn't. In most cases, we didn't know how exactly how big this was and what that meant.

We didn't know what roadblocks were gonna come up. We didn't know how long things were going to take. And even if people said, "Ooh, maybe this is a bit big scope," and we went with it anyway, we probably weren't in a place of kind of maturity and understanding and judgment where we could take that stuff on board.

And so his argument is that if you made the decision at a time when at least some of the information wasn't available to you, or where you weren't a person who could take on that information at that time, then we shouldn't regret that decision, because we made the best decision we could make at the time.

And I mostly agree with that. I'm gonna talk about a couple of caveats. Like I say, I've read a few critiques around this as well. I mostly agree with that. I think it is a very useful rule of thumb. I want you to think about something that you're currently regretting having done or not done, and think back to what you knew at the time, what you could have known, and whether you were in a position to take it on.

Now, one of the critiques that I've read, and that I agree with, is that that's actually really hard to do, 'cause it's really easy to be like, "Oh, my supervisor did say that it was kind of big scope, and so, yeah, maybe I should have listened." But when we're at the time, if we don't have the maturity to listen to that, or we are convinced that doing more is better, or that we have to do more in order to be enough, or whatever it is, whatever other narrative meant that we ignored that advice and decided we needed to do the big project anyway, for example, it's really hard to cast your mind back and think, "What was I actually in a position to understand or know at the time?"

But I think it's a useful practice regardless. I think just because something's difficult doesn't mean it's not useful, and we just have to remember that it's quite difficult to do. And so the question then is, well, what do we do with this? So let's say we look back and we say, "You know what? I didn't have the information I have now. I didn't have the perspective, the understanding, the worldview that I have now, but I'm still feeling the emotion of regret."

In Paddy McQueen's article, he would argue that you shouldn't. Now, to be fair to him, he put a footnote in saying essentially, "I'm aware that it's not quite as easy as that just to say don't regret it, but this is the principle." And I agree with both bits of that. That this is a very sensible principle, but it's also easier said than done. 

He has received critique for taking a very rational approach that doesn't quite, recognize the sort of complexity of experiencing emotions. Now, I think he does recognize it, I just think it was outside the scope of the article he was writing. There were hints in there where he's going, "I know it's complicated, but it's outside scope," which I think is actually fine.

But other people have critiqued it. But I think we can think what we do then. So it's like, okay, I cognitively understand, I've run it through the justified decision perspective, and I cognitively understand I couldn't have known what I know now, or that I wasn't in a position to take it on. I'm still feeling these feelings of regret though.

So what do we do? Well, first of all, I think we build a compassionate practice towards the past us that did make those decisions. We've talked before about being a good boss to yourself. Being a good boss to yourself doesn't only mean being a good boss to current you, it means being a good boss to past you as well.

It means having compassion and understanding for why they made the decisions that they made. So we can still feel regret potentially, you know, we can try and argue our way out of it, but even if we're experiencing that emotion of regret, we can still be kind to ourselves about the fact that, okay, I still regret it, I still wish I'd done something different. Maybe we frame that as disappointment or sadness rather than regret, 'cause I'm not blaming myself, but I still feel those emotions. Okay, I can feel those emotions and be kind to current me, and be kind about past me at the same time. I don't have to tell myself that past me was stupid and should've done it better in order to feel better.

In fact, that won't make me feel better. I can tell myself, "Okay, yeah, it wasn't my greatest decision ever, but I was really trying and it was the best I could do under the circumstances."

We can also use it as an opportunity to recognize how far we've come, 'cause if we can see it now- That means that we are more developed, more mature, more experienced than we were then, and we can celebrate that. Instead of beating ourselves up for how rubbish we were back then, we can instead celebrate how we are now.

Now, we have to be a little bit careful about that because the joy of hindsight is that it's hindsight, literally. And if we get too, like, "Oh, but now I'm wiser about it," we may overestimate our ability to predict what's gonna happen in the future, when in reality there's lots we still don't know. So we have to be a little careful about it, but we can use this as an opportunity to recognize how far we've come.

We can also use it as an opportunity to draw out learning. This is one of the things I talk about in the membership quite a lot is separating out self-blame, self-reproach from recognition of learning. You are very well able, and it is very positive to be able to go, "Oh, okay, next time I embark on a project I wanna get much clearer on A, B, and C before I commit to the scope." So rather than, "I should never have done this," going, "Okay, well, what should I have done? I should have done this, this, and this. I can do that going forwards." And that's not about knowing, but it's about a method for finding out. So we can pull out learning even if we've decided that we can't regret it because we couldn't have known the information.

 Now, you might say, "I kinda could have had access to that information, but I didn't ask, I ignored it, I didn't stop to think." And that I think, Paddy McQueen didn't really talk about that version, but I think that sits in between the no, I don't regret it 'cause I couldn't have known, and the yes, I do regret it because I could have known, in this sort of halfway place of yeah, I maybe could've, but I didn't. And I think that's when we have to remind ourselves that that means we weren't able to take it on. So those of you who s- have regrets around not getting going on work earlier, you may be going, "Yeah, I, I know," you know? "Yes, I didn't know exactly how long it would take. Yes, I didn't know how much I'd regret it later, but I knew I should have got going on it sooner, kinda.

I should have known." Then we get to remind ourselves, you didn't have the skills to do it. Whatever it was that was making you procrastinate, and this is what I'm working on the membership for this whole quarter, is understanding what makes you procrastinate and developing the skills to manage it, you didn't recognize what was making you procrastinate and you didn't have the skills to change it.

So you can say, "I should have known." So you're saying yes to that first question that Dr. McQueen said. That first question of, did you have the information? Yeah, maybe you did, but you're saying no. And you might not recognize it, but you're saying no to the second part, that you weren't in a position to act on that information.

You didn't have the skills to know how to stop yourself procrastinating and get yourself working in a healthy way. So you're still in the category of no regrets because you weren't in a position then to be able to act on, even if you had the information you needed. 

But what about those situations where you were? Where you knew the consequences, or you could highly predict the consequences, people had told you, you were perfectly capable of getting on with it, and you didn't. Well, in the justified decision perspective model, that would suggest, yes, okay, let's regret.

But he then went on to put another kind of level on top of that, which I really like, which is, okay, we can regret it, but what does that actually look like? Does that look like wallowing in it? Does that look like beating yourself up over and over again, generalizing this to mean something awful about yourself?

No. We can regret it in a way that is very specific to that action, and which facilitates us drawing learning from it.

Now, when we keep it really focused, when instead of saying, "I regret not starting earlier. I'm so lazy, I'm so stupid, I'll never get anything done ever again in my life," that's the sort of generalized version. If we can stay specific and say, "I actually really regret not starting on this task earlier."

Specific, full stop. Not meaning anything about me as a person, doesn't mean anything wider than that, I just regret that bit. Then we can ask ourselves two things. Firstly, is there anything I can do right now to resolve that thing? And when we wallow in regret, we often don't do this bit. When we wallow, say, think about when you've regretted saying some thing to somebody, right?

You've said something that you regret. When we're wallowing in regret, telling ourselves we're awful, telling ourselves they hate us, we don't do anything to fix it. Because we're just too embarrassed, too much shame, don't wanna approach them, don't wanna make it worse, da, da, da. Whereas when we can keep it specific, "I regret how I spoke. I don't think I'm an awful person. I don't think they hate me, but I do regret what I said because it wasn't helpful." Then it's much easier to say, "Okay-" Is there anything I can do right now to correct that action or to sort of reduce the impacts of what I said or what I did? And we often don't ask ourselves that.

It's the same when we're like, "Oh, I wish I'd started this sooner." Yeah, I wish I'd started lots of things sooner, but what can I do right now that will move it forward in a way that I didn't? Okay? And then the second thing is the more generalized learning, is now instead of generalizing, "Oh, okay, that means I'm awful, lazy, terrible, thoughtless," blah, blah, blah, generalizing in terms of, okay, if I regret that specific incident, what generalized learning do I wanna take from that?

What do I wanna try and do in future? And importantly, how can I support myself to do that? Because this is another one of those moments where I'm gonna ban the word just, because when we wallow in regret, we tend to put all our energy and emotions into that regret and telling stories about ourselves based on that regret, and then we say, "I just need to make better decisions in future.

I just need to think about it more. I just need to get started earlier." And that just implies it's easy, and that's why I ban it. It's not easy. But if we can say, "You know what? Not gonna spend all my time beating myself up about this, but I am gonna spend my time deciding much more specifically how I'm gonna avoid this in future."

I'm not just doing anything. If I think I need to start on something earlier, how am I gonna make that happen? Because you've told yourself to just get going earlier 100,000 times. I know you have, if you're anything like me. But instead we say, "Okay, I find it hard to get going on things earlier. I wonder why.

What is it I find hard? How can I support myself differently to do these things? How can I make it more likely that I will do these in future?" And from there, even if it is something that we're feeling justified regret according to the Paddy McQueen definition, we can still, instead of it just being a negative spiral of awful emotions beating yourself up, we can still draw out learning from it.

If you're listening to this and you're thinking, "Yeah, that's really interesting. Really like that distinction," but still really feeling the emotions and it feels a lot like regret, that's totally normal, and it is something that people have beaten up on Paddy McQueen for. But- I don't think it is actually contrary to what he said.

He and some of the people who respond to him talk about first and second order emotions. And regret can rapidly become a second order emotion where it's not the original emotion you're feeling, it's all the stories you're telling yourself about it. So if you are still feeling the emotion, you've gone through this just the way you decided, is it justified?

Is it not? Da, da, da. You're still feeling big feelings of regret. That's okay. Let's just keep them super specific so it's only regret about that specific thing. We're not connecting it to all the other times we've been useless.

We're not making it mean loads of things about our future. We're just feeling regret about that one specific thing. And then we get to look after ourselves while we're experiencing those emotions. We get to think what helps me when I'm feeling these emotions. Sometimes being with other people, sometimes not being with other people, sometimes a little bit of physical activity, fresh air, glass of water, sometimes wrapping yourself up in a blanket and doing something cozy, warm drinks, kind thoughts.

We don't have to make emotions go away. We don't want to make emotions go away. They're really important signals. They tell us really important stuff. They focus our attention in a really useful way. But when we can keep it towards the first order emotions instead of all the kind of spin-off emotions we get from telling stories based on these regrets, then we can stay much closer to being compassionate to ourselves, much closer to being able to learn from, and importantly, act on that learning, and through that learn how to be a better boss to past us, current us, and then in turn, future us as well.

I hope that's helpful. Anybody who knows stuff about philosophy, let me know how I did. Do you know other philosophical papers that argue differently about this? Tell me things. And like I said, if you want to be on the podcast talking about how your specific research applies to PhD students or academia in that kind of general way, get in contact.

I would love for that to happen. I want some new rabbit holes to dive into. Let me know what you think. Thank you all so much for listening, and I will see you next week.