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Of True Regrets
By Mona Lease
Hi, all!! I found the following most interesting.
The Biggest Regret in Life Most People Have
Everyone has regrets, but you always imagine that those regrets revolve
around the mistakes that you think you made. Maybe you regret calling
off your wedding. Maybe you wish you hadn't married the man you chose.
Maybe you want to quit your job and move to Bali, but you're worried
it's the wrong choice.
We focus so much on the decisions we make in the moment, but a new
study published in the journal "Emotion" indicates that the old adage
still rings true, it's not the things you do in life that you regret,
it's the things you don't do.
In a paper entitled "The Ideal Road Not Taken," Cornell psychologists
identified three elements that make up a person's sense of self. Your
actual self consists of qualities that you believe you possess. Your
ideal self is made up of the qualities you want to have. Your ought
self is the person you feel you should have been, according to your
obligations and responsibilities.
In surveying the responses of hundreds of participants in six studies,
the researchers found that, when asked to name their single biggest
regret in life, 76 percent of the participants sais it was not
fulfilling their ideal self.
This indicates that we might have a flawed attitude toward how to avoid
regret. We live in a world in which we are told that we will have a
great life if we follow the rules. So you figure that if you do all of
the things that society expects of you - act like a good citizen, get
married at the appropriate time, make enough money to pay the bills -
that you'll feel happy and fulfilled with your life. But these are all
qualities associated with your ought self, which the study found people
have limited regrets about (in part because they actually act on
decisions associated with it). But when it comes to your dreams and
aspirations, people are more likely to let them just drift by
unrealized, and that's what really stings later in life.
People are quicker to take steps to cope with failures to live up to
their duties and responsibilities (ought related regret) than their
failure to live up to their goals and aspiration (ideal related
regrets), the study reads.
When we evaluate our lives, we think about whether we're heading toward
our ideal selves, becoming the person we'd like to be. Those are the
regrets that are going to stick with you, because they are what you
look at through the windshield of life. Tom Gilovich, the Irene Blecker
Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell and lead author of the
paper said, "The ought regrets are potholes on the road: those were
problems, but now they're behind you. To be sure, there are certain
failures to live up to our ought selves that are extremely painful and
can haunt a person forever, so many great works of fiction draw upon
that fact. But for most people, these types of regret are few and far
outnumbered by the ways in which they fall short of their ideal selves."
The results of the study indicate that it's not enough to encourage
people to "do the right thing:" We need to establish that it's vital
for people to act on their hopes and dreams, and that it isn't normal
to just keep putting them off indefinitely.
In the short term, people regret their actions more than their
inactions, Gilovich said. But in the long term, the inaction regrets
stick around longer.
It also implies that we need to stop making excuses for our own
inaction. So learn that language you've always wanted to study. Take
that backpacking trip through Asia you've been talking about for ages.
Write that book that's been tinkering around in your head for years.
Don't leave it for tomorrow. There's only today. - Diana Bruk
Remember the kiddies and our service people. Take good care of the
furry and feathered ones out there. Be safe and healthy. See ya next
time. Ever Toodles!! MONA
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