One of the most harmful habits that can poison any well of life is the constant regret that once something could be done wrong or, at all, just do nothing.
What is regret?
I've made up a collection of different replicas and definitions. This is a negative cognitive state, colored with the feeling of loss or even grief, during which a person accuses himself of irreversible negative outcome, which could not have occurred in the other behavior in the past. Translated into human language, it's the experience of not fixing things and not fixing them now.
Sorry is not a pathology in itself. They perform several functions:
1) Define the meaning of the past and present, and their interrelation (what happened then was not what it looked like and did not affect the future as expected)
2) Develop a strategy to avoid trouble in the future.
3) Assess the emotional consequences in the future (if I do so again, I will regret it)
Which people regret:
1. the education received (went to the wrong place to study, studied in the wrong profession)
2. About the career.
3. on love affairs and elections made in this field.
4. on raising children.
5. About yourself
6. About resting.
If we take regrets as part of the constructive assessment and development of experience, they are very useful. But, as Democritus said, if you cross the line, the most pleasant thing will be the most unpleasant. Regrets become a big problem if they turn into rumination, when a person begins to chew this very experience in a circle.
Comprehension turns into chewing, most often because people attach pathological guilt to it. To a certain extent, it is normal to feel guilt during regrets. I have done something wrong, I have felt that it is not good. But if earlier experience suggests that in order for everything to be good you need to find your guilt and you will be happy. You will get a portion of dopamine in your pleasure centers. For this reason, regret can be an inexhaustible source of pleasure. The main thing is not to stop and actively reveal the theme "could, but did not" in his head.
Many go further. If something bad has happened in the past, but without any active or passive participation of a particular person, he still finds his guilt. If you feel bad, it's your fault. It remains to apply some creativity in order to find the cause of your guilt. Sometimes regrets begin to acquire a hint of megalomania and globalism. Could have stopped time and pierced space, turned the sun on the sky, turned a big explosion... but lazy, scoundrel, did not do. The hamster died. And so go to hell.
Usually regrets, especially in its pathological form, include 3 stages:
1. Denial (there can be no way I did this or for it to happen)
2. Disgust (how could I)
3. punishment (who has enough imagination to punish themselves: you can saw it, or you can kill yourself)
And the main feature of pathological regrets is that if a person has survived the stage of punishment, he immediately returns to the first point, and so on to infinity.
Eternal regret, though it brings dopamine, but nevertheless a person experiences a certain amount of mental pain and suffering. These are two factors that prevent people from doing anything cardinal with their lives. "I am so sorry that I work at this работе\состою in this country, браке\ I live in this country. I am so ashamed! Well, do something about it. "What about dopamine? What if I do something and regret it again? What about my perfectionism, where I should have foreseen everything in this space-time continuum?
I'll tell you something about that. It has been established that, after a short period of time, people regret what they have done, and when decades pass, they are more sorry for what they have not done. At first, people are sorry that they got married to someone inappropriate, and then they repent that they have not divorced. First, that they chose the wrong university, and then that they did not leave and went to another one.
So it is better to try.
Yes, there will be mistakes, it is inevitable. The thing is that:
1. A person makes the right decisions when he has enough information to weigh everything up for and against. But this is not always enough.
2) The outcome is obvious when time has passed and you see the immediate result and you want to exclaim "I knew it would".
3. When a person thinks that he is the only one to blame, and only because of his decision everything happened, in the vast majority of cases it is a certain exaggeration.
Dare :)