Regrets: How to Move Past Them and Avoid Them Altogether

When examining your life, it’s tempting to hit the playback button and imagine a better version of what happened — or what could have been.

Decisions both big and small can have significant impacts on relationships, career moves, whether or not you go to college or have children, if you relocate or stay in your hometown, and more. And while it can be easy to regret your choices if things didn’t turn out quite as you had imagined, obsessively replaying reels from your life and thinking “coulda, woulda, shoulda” is futile.

If you’ve been spending a lot of time ruminating over past choices, these expert tips and tales of how others overcame regret can help you move on so you can be at peace with the present — and be sure to make decisions that are right for you in the future.

“Regret happens because we’re wired to compare reality to possibility,” says Emily Lambert Robins, LCSW, a couples and sex therapist based in New York City. “The brain loves ‘what if’ scenarios — it’s part of how we learn and make sense of our choices, but it can also become a loop that keeps us stuck.”

When people come into her office carrying regret, Robins says it’s rarely about an event itself. “It’s about the meaning they’ve attached to it,” she says. “[They’ll say], ‘I should’ve known better. I should’ve been braver. I should’ve trusted myself.’ Regret becomes a kind of emotional echo chamber unless we pause and really listen to it.”

That holds true for Melissa Gonzalez, a principal at the global architecture and design firm MG2 in New York City, who regrets not listening to the quiet, persistent signals her body was giving her nearly two years ago: increasingly frequent episodes of vertigo, persistent fatigue, and longer durations between bowel movements.

“I kept pushing, convincing myself I could power through an increasingly prevalent change in well-being, until everything came crashing down in the ER,” she says. “It wasn’t that I didn’t know better; I ignored what I knew. I equated rest with weakness, and productivity with worth. Looking back, I can see all the moments my body pleaded for care and calm, and how many times I overrode those warnings. I regret not honoring my intuition sooner — before it had to shout to be heard.”

She regrets that her choices didn’t just affect her: They deeply affected her daughter, too. “I’ll never forget the look on her face when she saw me in the hospital. That moment broke me open,” she says.

Lisa Niver, a writer based in Los Angeles, has relationship regrets: Marrying and staying with a partner she says was physically and emotionally abusive. She and her ex-husband were together for five years, but she wishes she’d left him sooner. “I don’t regret walking away, but I might have regretted not finding the courage to go,” she says.

Lisa Franks, LCSW, founder of Journey to Wellness Counseling in Temecula, California, says unprocessed regret doesn’t dissipate; it becomes embedded in the body and nervous system, surfacing later as anxiety, irritability, or self-doubt.

“Unresolved regret can become a barrier to living fully. It can keep people stuck in avoidance or perfectionism, chasing a sense of control that never arrives,” she says.

Acknowledging regret, on the other hand, can be a turning point in dealing with your feelings. “When you stop avoiding [a regret] and meet it with some gentleness, you can usually see the intention behind the original choice: protecting your heart, trying to keep the peace, or wanting to feel safe or loved," says Robins. “Once you understand that, regret softens. It becomes less about self-blame and more about self-understanding.”

For Gonzalez, her regret over how she handled her health crisis became a turning point that reshaped every part of her life. “I realized I had modeled endurance over balance, achievement over well-being.” she says. “Scaring [my daughter] in that way was devastating, and it reminded me that being strong isn’t about how much you can push through — it’s about how well you can care for yourself and those who love you.”

Letting go of regrets is also important. “[It] doesn’t mean erasing the past; it means transforming it into insight,” says Franks. “When we can see regret as a teacher rather than a verdict, it becomes a source of self-awareness and resilience.”

Gonzalez took her learnings to heart. “[Regret] taught me how to transform pain into purpose, and to dismantle the myth that slowing down is failure,” she says. “It also strengthened my empathy as a leader and as a mother, and helped me build a mission around helping others recognize their own warning signs before they reach a breaking point.”

She says that writing her book, The Purpose Pivot, in which she addresses the importance of pursuing success in a healthy, holistic way rather than letting it become a constant grind, was part of her healing. Now at peace with the past, she says the book “allowed me to take one of the most frightening moments of my life and turn it into something that could serve others.”

Forgiving yourself — and sometimes others — is important when you have a regret, as is recognizing that you made the best decision you could with the information you had at the time. But it doesn’t mean erasing your past.

“Letting go doesn’t mean forgetting,” says Robins. “It means allowing yourself to move toward relationships and decisions from a place of clarity rather than fear.”

For Niver, peace came through forgiveness, which released her regret’s hold on her. Forgiving was not an acknowledgment that what happened was okay, but a choice to accentuate the positive from her experiences over the pain.

“Leaving [my ex-husband] forced me to rebuild my life from the ground up — to make the bricks, lay the path, and then walk it. It was hard and sometimes lonely, but it taught me resilience,” she says. “It changed everything.” Writing her memoir, Brave-ish: One Breakup, Six Continents, and Feeling Fearless After Fifty, also helped her make sense of her decisions.

Claudette Fette, PhD, an occupational therapist and a clinical professor at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, chose a career that helped her forgive her past choices. A teenager when her son Aaron was born, Dr. Fette watched him struggle with mental health and substance abuse problems from an early age. When he was a teen, she trusted that a certain treatment center could help him.

Instead, she says he was abused by those entrusted with his care in the program, and his condition worsened. Years later, in 2017 at age 39, he died of an opioid overdose in a homeless encampment under a highway.

“I wish I had been smarter, wish I could reach back in time and turn us around. My regret looms large,” says Dr. Fette.

Her experiences with her son inspired her to channel her pain into something productive. “I wanted to figure out how to help people live life with a mental illness. I became an occupational therapist and began to push myself into policy groups for children,” she says.

Following Aaron’s death, she used several boxes of his writings to coauthor with him No Saints Here: A Cautionary Tale of Mental Illness, Health and the Cost of Ignorance in the Lone Star State — a process that helped her fully accept her regrets and move forward.

Navigating life’s choices is no doubt tricky, but trusting your decision-making skills can help.

Dawn Ledet, a life coach and self-trust expert based in New Orleans, says the best way to avoid regret is to make decisions aligned with your values and goals. Acknowledging ahead of time that you’ll learn something valuable regardless of the result is also important.

“Celebrate your freedom to make the decision and your courage to do it in the face of uncertainty,” she says.

LeeAnn Marie Webster, the author of That’s Regrettable: Releasing the Past to Fuel Your Future and creator of the Regret Release Method, always asks herself a few key questions when faced with a difficult decision:

• What would “future me” thank me for?
• Am I choosing comfort or alignment?
• If fear wasn’t present, what would I do?
• What’s the smallest next step that feels brave?
• If this opportunity disappeared tomorrow, would I be disappointed?

If you’ve been honest with your answers and feel confident that you’ve thought through your options, chances are you’ll be happy with the decision you made, too.

• Unresolved regrets can keep you stuck and be a barrier to living fully.
• Acknowledging a regret is a turning point; you can learn from it.
• To move past regret, forgive yourself and recognize that you made the best decision you could with the information you had at the time.
• To avoid regrets, make decisions that align with your values and goals.