When I think of all the boneheaded decisions and regrettable actions I’ve taken over the years, I find myself grateful for the way time tends to either smooth their jagged consequences or suppress my memory of the trauma they once caused.
There was that time, for instance, when I agreed to tag along with my best pal as he ferried two slightly notorious high school acquaintances and a girl we’d never met to the Iowa border. That bit of charity landed us in a county jail later that day on a specious (for me and my friend, at least) drug charge. Mom and Dad were not pleased upon my return home the next day, but I recall it now as a kind of coming-of-age adventure.
Similarly, I can now look back at my three years, nine months, and six days of military service during the Vietnam War with some grudging self-respect rather than regret my precipitous decision to enlist. I might even call it a growth opportunity.
And then there’s the financial disaster I visited upon my family more than 20 years ago by quitting a well-paying magazine job and launching a weekly newspaper. In the bankruptcy proceedings that ensued after two years of business struggles, we lost our home, our car, and any sense of financial security. Now, though, I tend to think of that episode as a learning experience.
We all carry some level of regret into our senior years, but I was struck the other day by the results of a recent study suggesting that aging may lighten its emotional burden.
“Regrets are incredibly common. Almost all of us experience big regrets in our personal and professional lives — from marrying the wrong person to never finishing college,” notes lead study author Julia Nolte, PhD, an assistant professor of economic psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. “The good news is that, for many of us, the experience of regret seems to become less negative with age.”
Recruiting 90 U.S. adults, ranging in age from 21 to 89, Nolte and her team set out to determine whether age would affect responses to and regulation of regrets over time. Researchers asked participants to list as many as five long-term regretful situations and a similar number of regretful experiences occurring during the past year. Participants were then asked to rate the significance of these remorseful incidents based on the emotions they evoked and the degree to which they felt they could control the outcome. Finally, they were asked to describe their coping strategies.
The results, published earlier this month in the journal Emotion, suggest that my lack of regrets over those long-ago decisions is not that uncommon. Neither the older nor the younger study participants seemed to be too uncomfortable with past episodes that may have once seemed regretful. Time, it seems, minimizes our errors — or at least our recollection of them — regardless of our age.
But researchers found that seniors also reported fewer — and less emotionally intense — regrets than their younger counterparts in the past year. “Indeed, we observed that older age was associated with reporting fewer commission-based regrets and less intense ‘hot’ emotions such as anger or frustration,” Nolte writes. “In addition, we found that older participants were more likely to have no recent regrets and experience fewer recent interpersonal regrets.”
She doesn’t explain exactly why that may be, but I suspect that decades of experience have taught seniors that the results of even the most boneheaded decisions eventually lose their sting. That allows us to make our choices with less chance of regret.
“It is assumed that regret helps us make better choices moving forward,” Nolte says. “But older adults may derive other benefits from regret, such as a chance to reflect or look for meaning.”
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