#65: How to Deal With Regret - Practical Tools To Let Go of the Past

Struggling to move on from past mistakes? 

Caught in a loop of “what ifs” and self-blame? 

You’re not alone - and there is a way forward. In this powerful solo episode, I explore how to deal with regret using practical, evidence-based toolsfrom psychology and therapy.

You’ll learn why regret is a normal and even useful human emotion, and how to stop it from spiraling into shame or rumination. From reframing your perspective to repairing what you can and practicing self-compassion, this episode guides you through actionable steps to finally let go of the past and move forward with clarity.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✅ Why regret is a universal emotion—and how it can be a growth tool
✅ The impact of chronic regret on mental health and how to interrupt the cycle
✅ Techniques for processing regret in a healthy, healing way
✅ How to shift from rumination to reflection
✅ Steps to repair, reframe, and release past mistakes
✅ How self-compassion unlocks emotional freedom and forward momentum

Who This Episode Is For:

This episode is especially helpful if you:

• Struggle with lingering regret or guilt
• Replay past decisions and feel stuck
• Want to forgive yourself and move forward
• Are working on healing, self-compassion, or emotional resilience

Highlights include:

(01:06) Understanding Regret and Why It Can Be Helpful
(03:24) The Consequences of Excessive Regret and Getting Stuck in “What If” Thinking
(05:13) Shifting Mindset: Embracing Mistakes and Changing Your Beliefs About Regret
(08:00) Repair, Remorse, and Making Amends
(10:13) Self-Compassion and Moving Forward After Regret

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The Hello Therapy podcast and the information provided by Dr Liz White (DClinPsy, CPsychol, AFBPsS, CSci, HCPC reg.), is solely intended for informational and educational purposes and does not constitute personalised advice. Please reach out to your GP or a mental health professional if you need support. 

Transcript

Understanding Regret and Why It Can Be Helpful

The Consequences of Excessive Regret

Speaker 1 0:02

If you're looking to improve your mental health and well-being, then keep listening. I'm Dr Liz White, a consultant clinical psychologist with over 20 years of experience. Whether you're a frazzled parent, a stressed out professional or finding your way through the challenges of midlife, you're in the right place. Through a mix of solo episodes and insightful conversations with expert psychologists and therapists, I'm bringing you evidence-based tools and strategies to help you navigate life's ups and downs with confidence, clarity and compassion. With confidence, clarity and compassion this is your space to feel seen, supported and empowered. Welcome to Hello Therapy. Do you have any regrets in your life? This question can weigh very heavy for many people and bring with it lots of difficult emotions. But what happens when we get stuck in regret? How do we process it and move forward in our lives? Today, I'm going to answer those very questions. So if you are someone that is struggling with regret, you're finding it hard to let go of the past, then keep listening. So let's dive in. Before I take you through my tips for dealing with regret, let's take a look at what regret actually is. So, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, regret is a feeling of sadness about something sad or wrong or a mistake that has been made and a wish that it could have been different or better. So we can regret mistakes that we've made in our lives, like messing up an exam, or actions that have caused suffering to others, like cheating on a partner or putting nasty comments on someone's social media. Or we can regret things that we didn't do, so opportunities lost, like Brian, who often says to himself I wish I'd taken that job abroad, my life would have been so much better. Or Jasmine, who often really beats herself up about the fact that she didn't support her friend when she was ill. Now, research shows that we tend to experience this type of regret around opportunities lost or things that we didn't do, much more intensely than regret around things that we did do. Now, the thing to note here is that regret is a normal human emotion and it can be a really useful tool for understanding yourself and changing what you do, and it can help us make better decisions in our lives. But research shows that excessive feelings of regret are linked to lower levels of subjective well-being, lower levels of life satisfaction and linked to symptoms of depression. So it is important to deal with regret if it's something that is getting in the way of you leading a happy and content life. But what are the potential consequences of excessive regret? Let's look at that now.

Speaker 1 3:24

Now I remember when I finished my clinical psychology training in my 20s, I was very much bought into the idea that you should live a life free from regret. But then I started a job in a mental health team for older adults. Now I was in that job for many years and spent a lot of those years listening to stories of regret, stories like I've been married for 50 years but I chose the wrong partner, I have been unhappy all of that time, or I wish I'd traveled more, and now it's too late. Now many of these people repeated those stories of regret over and over and over. Some were stuck in replaying an imagined reality in their minds, the life that they could or should have had, and it was really heartbreaking to see these people very stuck in shame, guilt, sadness, hopelessness, bitterness, resentment. And this is the thing about regret. It's a bit like a cancer it can start really small, but it grows, and it grows over time, causing more and more problems. So how do we prevent that from happening?

Embracing Mistakes and Changing Your Beliefs About Regret

Speaker 1 4:45

Now I'm going to take you through my tips for dealing with regret. So my first tip is identify your beliefs about regret. So think about this for a moment. Do you have any beliefs about regret that might cause you to get stuck in unhealthy regret? For example, were you like me back in the day where I thought, you know, live a life with no regrets was the way to go? Do you expect yourself to never make mistakes? And this can especially show up if you're a bit of a perfectionist. But let's get real here. Can you really live a life, a full life, with no regrets? Surely, life is about trying things, having lots of different experiences, failing, making mistakes, learning from that and trying again. So here's my tip if you have this type of mindset, can you shift it to something a little more flexible, acknowledging that it's unrealistic to live a full life without any regrets and allowing yourself to be open to the possibility of making mistakes and not getting things quite right. Sometimes you might choose the wrong path in life, and being open to that possibility, being flexible in your thinking in that way, is going to help you not get stuck in unhealthy regret.

Repair, Remorse, and Making Amends

Speaker 1 6:16

Now, my second tip is to see regret as an opportunity. Now, one way to manage regret is to ask yourself this key question what is this feeling of regret telling me about what's important to me? So, for example, let's think about Dave. Dave's girlfriend caught him messaging some other girl on his phone and Dave is feeling really, really awful about it. He's really regretting his actions. Now Dave can use this as an opportunity to really dig deep and think about what is this regret telling me about what's important? That, in fact, he really loves his partner and he made a huge mistake, and he may even reflect that actually, this regret is telling him that he wants to be a partner who is trustworthy, loving and committed, and that his actions are completely misaligned with those values. Now, once you have identified what this regret is telling you about what's important, the values you hold deep down, and what it's telling you about the kind of person that you want to be, you can use regret as a catalyst for change and identify the changes needed that are going to help you align with those values. So Dave might be reflecting on well, what actions can I do that to help me move towards being a committed and trustworthy partner? Now, for Dave, it might be that he actually needs to do some repair before he can do that, which takes me to my next tip. So tip number three repair what you can.

Speaker 1 8:03

Sometimes in life, our actions have a negative impact on other people, don't? They Cue regret, and what can lead on from regret is remorse, and remorse is about having genuine insight into what you have done and the impact that it's had on the other person and wanting to do something different. So, although remorse is a very uncomfortable and difficult feeling to experience, it can be instrumental in helping us repair the damage that we've done, to take accountability for our actions and to make amends. Now, don't get me wrong. Repairing is not easy and in a lot of situations you may not be able to fully make amends with someone. So, rather than seeing repair as a goal or a destination, see it more as a journey, in that it's something that you're moving towards. So what does repairing involve? So, firstly, apologising for your actions, asking the person what can I do to make this right? Taking time to listen and understand the consequences of your actions on the other person, the damage or pain that it's caused, and even just acknowledging that to the other person can be very powerful. And finally, it's about learning from that experience and identifying what needs to change. So that might include a bit of a reflection on, maybe the skills or the resources that you need to do something differently next time and to prevent it from happening again.

Tip 4: Be Open to Emotions

Self-Compassion and Moving Forward After Regret

Speaker 1 9:42

So, moving on to our next tip be open to all the emotions. Often a mistake that I see people making with difficult emotions is to just push them away as soon as they feel them, but this only tends to amplify them. You never really experience the feeling of regret in isolation, do you Like? It can be just the tip of the iceberg. There is usually sadness, guilt, maybe shame and resentment as well. So an important part of dealing with the emotion of regret is to acknowledge the pain of it. So label the emotions that you're feeling and try and be open to fully experiencing them rather than pushing them away. Now, if you want a bit of guidance on how you can actually do that, I have a video that is called how to deal with difficult feelings that might be really helpful for you, and I'll put the link in the show notes.

Speaker 1 10:43

So my final tip on dealing with regret is to use self-compassion. Now, we can often fall into the self-blame trap when it comes to regret. We end up fearing that we're going to make the same mistakes again, and this in turn can lead us to avoid certain things that we might regret later, and if we're doing that, we might disengage from things. We don't take up opportunities when they're offered to us, and if we're doing that, it actually increases the likelihood of experiencing regret later. So try and use self-compassion to help you deal with feelings of regret situation that you were in when you made that decision or when you took those actions. You were using the information that you had at the time. Self-compassion is essentially about acknowledging and leaning into the difficult feelings and having a compassionate understanding of yourself and using that to help identify what needs to change in the future. Now, if this resonated with you today and you struggle with regret and to make decisions, then my upcoming life decision course might be for you. It's a self-paced course to help you move from stuck to self-aligned without spiraling into self-doubt, and to really help you make decisions without that fear of regret.

Speaker 1 12:06

Now, if you're interested in finding out more and you want to get an exclusive discount when it does launch, pop your email in the link in the show notes. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Hello Therapy. We'd love for you to join our growing community over on Substack. You can sign up for free or become a paid subscriber for access to exclusive perks like never before seen video interviews and downloadable guides designed to support your mental health. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe so you never miss a new release. And if you got value from this episode, it would mean the world if you left a five star review. As always, check the show notes for my full disclaimer. Thanks again for listening.