Find Freedom from Regret || Roberty Leahy

keynote speaker throughout the world. He has authored twenty seven books about CBT, depression, worry, anxiety, and emotion regulation, which have been translated in twenty languages. His latest book is called If Only Finding Freedom from Regrets. In this episode, I talked to doctor Leehey about finding freedom from regret. Regret is an un pleasant emotion that can motivate us to learn and grow, but there are times when it

can keep us frozen in place. According to doctor Alihi, this is why it's important to make a distinction between productive and unproductive rumination. He shares the cognitive biases we have about loss and opportunity, as well as strategies on how to let go of regret when it no longer

serves us. I really enjoyed chatting with Robert. He and I go way back, actually, and he's been on the podcast before, and his work has really influenced me even before I met him, and really deeply helped me overcome a lot of anxiety I was experiencing many years ago. So I find his work really impactful. And I found this discussion, which is an extension of his prior work to the realm of regret, really quite profound, and it had a really deep existential psychology flavor, which you all

know I like. So I think you'll really enjoy this podcast as well, and I hope you find it useful for your own life and finding a life without living it with regret. So, without further ado, I bring you doctor Robert Lee. Hey, Robert, thanks so much for being on the Psychology Podcast.

I like writing books that are going to make me learn about things that I think are relevant to everyday life. So that's kind of where I came from.

not always pleased with the outcome. And so it's it's you know, some some people say, oh, I don't have any regrets because I figure I made the decision myself. That's the very nature of regret. You made the decision. And if you don't have any regrets, how are you going to learn from your experience? You know, I view I view regrets as part of the trial and error learning of everyday life which we all go through.

Your work on anxiety has been very important and I see seeds, not seeds of it, I see threads of it in this book, you've applied some of those cognitive behavioral therapy ways of thinking into the realm of regrets. So that's unique.

you have to ask why any emotion evolved. I mean, why is jealousy a pretty universal emotion, or envy or resentment or the desire for revenge and regret is a universal emotion. It's like you're not going to find any culture that regret is not part of the experience. It's the second most commonly mentioned emotion, love being the first.

So you have this ubiquitous emotion that people get hijacked by, and then you know, you need to understand what the logic is of regret, that there's a reason why people regret. They in fact, in one survey. They actually found that regret of the unpleasant emotions was rated the most valuable because people felt like, I can learn from it, I can make myself a better person. It's a way of

being responsible. So it's kind of like it's you know, to say that I never regret, I'm kind of well, don't you learn from experience or don't you ever apologize to people for things that you've said? So it's part of I think, the wide range of sometimes unpleasant emotions that make sense and maybe adaptive if used in the right way. But then some people get hijacked by the regret and they just ruminate and become self critical and become frozen in their paths.

kind of prioritizing what's important. You know, is it important to have, you know, expensive clothes, or drive an expensive car, or climb the corporate ladder, or you know, press people, or is it important to stay alive and to appreciate kind of simple things in life and be flexible. And one of the things that I find with with with regret is that is that regret is often tied to

these inflexible expectations about what my life must be. If you were flexible about the outcome of your decisions, and you you can look at outcomes in terms of what I call relative preferences, like you would you know, you would like one hundred percent, but you're willing to accept ninety percent seventy percent, You're going to be able to have a lot more satisfaction in life. And one of the things that we see with decision making and regret

is that some people are what's called maximizers. They they want the absolute best. I have to have absolute best. That's me is that you, Scott, the absolute best?

I won't have regrets. I'll be satisfied. And what the research shows is that the maximizers take longer to make decisions, and they're less satisfied with the outcome. And they're even less satisfied with the outcome even if the outcome is objectively better than an outcome that somebody who's a satisfier might might have chosen. So it's kind of like, you know, trying for the best leads often to more dissatisfaction and more regret and more procrastination.

always true. There are always trade offs right between staying and leaving. So people anticipating regretting their decision, there's kind of an inhibition of making a change because it's often viewed as a loss frame. And what we know from the research, and there's a lot of cross cultural research that people have done on this, that people anticipate making a change will lead to more regret in the short term, there is more regret that a person experience is making

a change in the short term. In the long term, as people look back on their lives, people are more likely to regret what they did not do. They did not make the change, they did not pursue the other job, they do not break off the relationship or whatever. They regret what they did not do. And this is true

in all cultures so that have been studied. So it's it's an interesting asymmetry, you know, because because we often we like we often think that if I make that change, I'll get stuck, and I think, I think this is where a lot of the interesting work and emotional theory that you're familiar with the affect of forecasting work that you know, people predicting their emotion like if I do this, like Dan Gilbert's work, if I do this, I'll I'll have regrets, and what they with Gilbert and Wilson and

others have found that, you know, people anticipate far more regrets than they actually have. But we also tend to over predict how extreme our emotion will be, how happy will be, how unhappy will be. So if we get that new house, we're going to be really really happy forever, like a durability illusion. I'll be happy forever. If I move to Santa Monica, California, you know I'll be I'll be unhappy forever if I lose money in the market,

or if I go through this breakup. And so when people make a decision really anticipate regret, they're often over predicting their emotions and they often over predict the impact, how serious and how durable, how extreme that emotion is going to be. And they don't consider the different ways

that I can cope. So when I'm talking to somebody thinking about, you know, divorcing, you know, he talks about missing his children, which is understandable and kind of a good value, but doesn't give as much value to the idea of having fever conflicts with his partner and having new opportunities moving forward. So, you know, and you can imagine that if somebody stays and unhappy relationship for ten, fifteen, twenty years, they're beginning to build up a savings account

of more regrets. So we often have to think about we have to think about ways that we can cope with making change, And I think this is where the work on resilience comes in. We often underestimate how resilient we are. You know, the work of George Bonano at Colombia. Oh yeah, and George's work indicates remarkably that it's like eighty eighty five percent of people going through what we might consider a major negative life event a year after or back to their pre event psychological will being so

regret about anticipating regret. We often underestimate our resilience, and you know, it's kind of like a hedonic treadmill. We generally will eventually get used to what we have, whether it's good or bad.

You would think, why would you continue criticizing yourself because that's not rewarding, or why would you continue avoiding things because you're not getting rewards. So it seemed like a paradox. I mean, it seem like the opposite of the law of effect. But what depressive avoidance is about is avoiding

further loss. And it's kind of like, if you've gone from eighty percent positive to twenty percent positive, you're going to be hesitant to take the risk and make a change because if you lose that twenty positive that you have left, you're going to think that life is not worth living. So there's kind of a depressive you know. You know, depressed people are more prone to regret. They criticize themselves actually part of the bag depression inventory. They

criticize themselves to anticipate more regret. They don't think that they can handle difficulties, they don't think that they're going to enjoy positives, and they think that they're going to suffer their losses more than enjoy their gains. So there's a logic to depressive avoidance and passivity.

to make a change. You know, people are anxious, are afraid of surprise, they're afraid of delta, you know, they're afraid of Oh, don't get my hopes up too much, because then things don't work out, I'll be really traumatized by the surprise. And that's what they would regret.

It's kind of existing so like the Holy Grail myth, you know, you know, chasing after one of your guests recently talked about toxic positivity, which I love that concept, And you can see this existential perfectionism as part of regret. Oh, you know, my partner is not perfect my job is not perfect. I'm not perfect and all that. What I would love you to do is to go out and survey people you know well and find out which of

them have perfect lives. And even if you want to go out and ask Bill Gates, is his life perfect? You know, going through a divorce and dealing with his kids and you know, so we kind of idealized celebrities and things on social media. You know. I had a patient a number of years ago who divorced guy about in his late fifties, and he was thinking, he was thinking about the woman he was dating, you know, their positive and negatives. He said, what's the key to a

good relationship? And I said, you know, I used to do a lot of windsurfing, and I was down in Saint John and the Virgin Islands. I wanted to learn a by the windsurfing heavy waves and heavy heavy wind So I went to the other side of the island, Coral Bay, and this this guy, Mike, who is the windsurf hot dog on the island. So I said, Mike, what's the key to windsurfing and strong winds and heavy waves. He said, Bob, it's rock and roll and commit to

the action. And I thought, and I said to this guy, I said, that's the key to a good relationship, rock and roll and commit to an action. So they put on the screensaver or a picture of a guy windsurfing and heavy winds. But it's kind of like, you know, you say, when you get married, you know, happily ever after, it should be for ups and downs ever after.

with I can't make a decision if I'm ambivalent. And of course the word decision in Latin actually means to cut away from something. So if you're making decision, by definition, you had ambivalence at the moment you made the decision. So decisions are all about decisions are all about trade offs. You know that looking for the perfect partner, he could spend an next thirty years, you know, and if he found somebody who thought was really good, he could then say, well,

maybe there's somebody better. This kind of receding reference point, like these guys you know have an the fourth or fifth marriages or whatever, as opposed to thinking about the trade offs, the pros and cons. And I said, the reason that you're ambivalent is that you know each other. We often think about Romeo and Juliet as, oh, that's the kind of way you should feel if you make

a lifelong commitment. Romeo and Julia is about a thirteen year old and a fifteen year old who see each other from the distance at a party with opposing families and fall in love based on absolutely nothing, and then within four or five days, several people were killed, including Romeo and Juliet, and some people during shakespeare time actually thought the point that he was trying to make was

to make fun of this idealized romantic confatuation. Why not wait six months and get to know each other before you end up killing yourself. So it's the idea that there's a free lunch, there's no trade offs, the holy grail, the receding reference point, there's always somebody better. Now, there are like five or six billion people in the world. What's the likelihood that you have found the absolute best person in the world? Right? Zero?

I mean. One of the examples of this is the sunk cost effect, which I discussed in the book, which is that everybody knows what this is. You buy a jacket or a dress or whatever, and you take it, pay a lot of money, and take it home. Try it. I say, oh no, I'm not going to not meve today. That's not for me. I'll do it some other time. You put it in your closet and you have it in your closet for five years and then your partner says, why don't you get rid of that? And you haven't

worn it five years. Oh no, I can't get rid of it. I paid good money for it. What you're doing is you're holding on to something because you had a prior investment in it. And you see people doing this with careers, with relationships with their you know, PCs or whatever it would be. I can't make a change because I put all this time in it. And I think part of it is the enaction inertia that you've kind of gotten used to staying. You have a loss frame. You think that change is going to be a loss.

You have a fear of wasting. I mean one example I think of, like if I had one hundred dollars bill and I said, you know, Scott, I'd like burning money in front of people, and so I'm going to burn this one hundred dollars bill. I'll bet you would be You would probably think I'm a little crazy, and you'd be correct, but you might be a little bit angry with me. We don't like the idea of people burning money. You're not going to be worse off, and no one else would be worse off. But there's this

kind of intrinsic fear of wasting that people have. And so if I get rid of something, if I put five years in a relationship or five years in a job or career or whatever or course of study and think, oh I wasted it. So it's very hard to walk away from a prior commitment.

Now they didn't. They lost trillions of dollars. So hindsight bias is that we reconstruct our knowledge about yesterday from what we know now and of course I'm really great at predicting what I had for dinner last night, right, but I'm not going to be good at predicting what the weather is going to be like next week. So hindsight bias is part of regret, is that, oh, I should have known that my partner was going to be an alcoholic, or I should have known that that investment

would have failed. When you made the decision in the past, you made a decision based under conditions of uncertainty, with the information that was available, trying to make the best outcome. And there were other people made that decision.

as you've seen today. Another one is I've wondered if you've thought about looking at to Kristin Neff's self compassion work at all, because what advice do you have for people who, let's say they did something genuinely terrible yeah, when they're younger, how can they still see themselves as a positive self concept in the present when they keep ruminating over the past. Can they is there hopefully? Yeah.

would call, you know, adaptive humility. Adaptive humility is that I'm just a human being. I'm no better than other people. I'm gonna make mistakes. I can learn from things I need to forgive others if I'm going to forgive myself all of this. You know some research on humility that shows that people who have this adaptive humility, I don't mean people who have low self esteem or don't asserta themselves and people have this adaptive humility kind of a

humanizing universal compassion. These people have better marriages and better friendships. And it stays the reason I mean, if you're like, Okay, yeah, I'm a fallen angel just like my partner or my friend, and I can direct compassion towards myself. And compassion doesn't mean I get a free ride. Forgiveness doesn't mean I get a free ride. It means that, Okay, I realized I said something that was unfair or mean spirited or

just plain long. But I want to become a better person, and this is an opportunity for me to learn from that. It's an opportunity for me to correct myself rather than criticize myself. The world's not going to be a better place if I hate myself, but it could be a better place if I practice compassion towards myself and others. Thinking about forgiveness as a strength that you have in life, you know, you know, you know. I'll give you an example of my own life. We were staying at a

hotel recently, and the internet was not working. Was expensive place, and I was kind of irritated, and I was talking with the woman downstairs in charge. In my view, I was very rude to her. I mean not terribly, but I was. I was rude. And I came back to the room and I was talking with my wife and I was justifying myself, you know, well, you know, paying a lot of money. And then I thought, you know, if I were watching myself, I would have thought that

guy's acting like a jerk. And I said, I don't want to be the kind of person that when I'm thinking about my behavior toward somebody who was innocent trying to do her job, you know, is being treated like in some kind of like some guy, you know, with a power assertion type thing. So I immediately called downstairs and I asked to speak with her, and I apologized, and she was actually quite gracious in accepting my apology, and I'm grateful for that. But the ability to kind

of recognize it, you know, it was a really bad thing. Ideal. You shouldn't treat anybody that way. I would never want to be treated that way. This is adaptive humility. I'm not a saint, but it was an opportunity for me to to sort of say, yeah, that's a regret that I need to do something about that. I need to ask her to forgive me.

feeling of watching your worry go away. It doesn't definitely work like that, but it gives you this sort of like fluidity and imagery. And I bet you do a lot of visual imagery like when you when you think of recollect something. When I listen to music, I have visual imagery of things that occur.

to go on forever. But today you hardly ever think of them and be asked, why do you no longer think about what you were worried about when you were at Cambridge University or living in London or whatever. Because you move past it, you put it in perspective, you pursued other positive goals. You're no longer held on to it. What are the goals in life? This is a technique

that I've used with people, is the indifference technique. What would be the advantage of being indifferent to your regrets right as opposed to actually caring a lot about them and having to, you know, having to have a dialogue with your regrets and you know, having this voice in your head about what an idiot you are from making those mistakes. Become indifferent about the mistakes that I made, or things that happened in the past, or people treating

me unfairly. You often think about indifference as like, you know, surrendering or being defeated, as opposed to rising above. And if you think about the image, because you're an imagery person, Scott, you think about the image just like one technique that I've used as thinking about yourself as you know, you're you're up in a in a balloon, a lighter than your balloon. You're up about you know, four thousand feet

and you're looking down at these events. You know, you're up in the balcony looking down, and you know you're up in space looking down at the Earth. And so you get this sort of this sort of emotional distance, this perspective of letting go, and you've let go of almost everything because you let it go. You don't even realize you let it go.

white noise. And people are often when I introduce the boredom technique, whether it's for worry or jealousy or envy or regret, whatever or resentment, they initially think, oh my god, that's going to make everything worse. You're asking me to really repeat my negative thoughts. But if I ask you to get on the elevator two hundred times, you might initially be anxious. But after the tenth time, you say, Bob, I think I got this. I think I understand that

I know what exposure is. I don't need the extra one hundred and eighty exposure.

it's kind of my narcissism. Everybody should like me. No matter how likable you are, They're going to be a group of people somewhere in California or New York. You're going to hate your guts. So Danny said to me something that was really profound in my mind. He said, no matter what you do, they're going to be people who don't like you. And so one way of kind

of an acceptance piece. No matter what you say, what you write, what lecture you give, or workshop you do, there are going to be some people who don't like it. It just comes with the territory. And the question is do you need everybody to like it?

among a lot of racists. You know, you might get a lot of approval by making racist comments, but you're not acting according to your values.

about that. Like it sounds like, on the one hand, you're saying like, well, actually, regret can be quite powerful in our lives, you know, can serve a useful function when it's productive, and the other hand, you're saying kind of let it go, like, don't even worry about regrets. So this is my little nuanced question.

guilt and shame are emotions that maintain social cohesion. They maintain the tribe, they maintained the group, they maintain trust, and so absolutely people who are in Like if you were looking for a life partner and somebody said, you know, gee, I really like you, Scott, but I have to tell you I have no capacity for regret, shame or guilt, so can we pursue a lifelong relationship? You would want to run the other way?

to make an effort to right the wrong. So I think the way thinking about regret is to have regret about the right things to the right degree in the right way, and very much like Aristotle's view of virtue. If we think about guilt, what we know is that people who are good at expressing the sincere apology are more likely to be trusted in the future, and people who other people in the work environment know are capable of guilt are viewed as more trustworthy in the work environment.

So productive guilt is looking at your view and saying, is this the kind of person I want to be? What I feel okay if somebody treated me this way, and then trying to learn from that experience and make a change. In other words, this is the guilt is the first step, and the next step is self correction and growth and coming to terms with making yourself a better person if possible, making amends, making apologies if you can, and then ultimately forgiving yourself. That's not an example. That

would not be an example of the balloon. That would be an example of bringing the balloon down and talking to the balloon and saying, you know something, I have to make an apology here.

the maximizers that take themselves too seriously. Maybe this satisfizers have a little bit more of a sense of humor about the sort of inevitable and inevitable imperfections of being human.

said he would come and visit me. In Philadelphia, and he sat right in that chair right there, and uh and then and then Tim said, well, and his people said, the Dalai lama has a has requests about the what he wants. And it was like an extensive list of foods that he wanted, you know, soup and so in course, dessert and all that. And I said, well, he sounds

like a very hungry lama, doesn't it. He does have a great sense of you know, this is kind of a gratitude thing about, you know, looking back on your life and having access to memories of people who may be gone that we learned from and we loved. And I think that's that's part of that's the kind of part and that some people say live in the present moment. I think, try to live in all the moments in

your life. Try to try to gain from. I grew up very poor, and I never want to forget growing up poor because it allows me to appreciate what I have. It allows me to understand other people are struggling. So it's it's good to be connected to people who gave you a lot who are no longer here.