Let It Go: Regret Could Harm Your Mental Health, Experts Say

Regret is a very common emotion that is experienced by almost all the people worldwide. A man could regret about forgetting his family while focussing on his career. Or a young woman might feel bad about ignoring her parents to spend more time with her friends.

However, regret can be incredibly damaging to a person’s mental health after a certain point of time. It can also be exhausting as it drains out all the fulfillment and joy from one’s life. It even leaves an individual stuck at one place.

According to psychoanalyst David Morgan from the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London, when an individual is plagued by regret, he feels it difficult to live life to the fullest, states The Guardian.

He said it is natural for a person to seek medical advice when he finds it hard to move forward. Morgan revealed that many of his patients seek his advice when they feel “terrible” and “dreadful." They don’t find happiness in their career choices, affairs or even relationships.

“Remorse involves insight into what one has done to others. That is the beginning of becoming aware of how one behaves and wanting to do something differently. It is a real breakthrough in therapy when people can begin to experience genuine remorse for what they’ve done. Something authentic starts to happen,” Morgan told The Guardian.

Meanwhile, a popular cognitive behavior therapist Windy Dryden said regret could become toxic in a long run. According to him, people fail to see the wider context of their behavior when they get trapped in a cycle of regret that is characterized by inflexibility.

The therapist also said that there is nothing wrong in regretting about something. “People who say ‘I regret nothing’ are either saints or stupid, in my view. Regret based on flexible attitudes is the hallmark of mental health. It is a sign that you are engaged with life,” he explained.

But the most important thing in life is to understand the reason for such behavior, overcome the regret and move forward in life.

“There is a tendency with regret to see the pathway you didn’t take as inevitably better than the pathway you did,” he said, adding, “Take the psychological equivalent of cod liver oil, which doesn’t taste nice but will do you good: accept the point, difficult to swallow though it may be, that yes, it would have been nice if you had made a different choice, but you could only have acted as you did at that time in those circumstances.”