Gemma Speck

Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Speck and welcome back to The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast.

It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we break down the psychology of our 20s.

Today's episode is cutting right to the heart of so much of our fear and our doubt in our 20s.

What if I regret the decisions I'm making right now?

Or what if I regret the decisions I'm not making?

But at the heart of, I think, every DM I get, every discussion I have with you guys, the listeners, but with my friends on dating, on jobs, on money, moving, health, whatever it is, at the center of all that is a deep fear of regret.

There is like this vision we sometimes have in our mind of us looking back in 30 years, looking back at this moment and thinking, here it is.

Like, this is the moment.

This is the decision I can pinpoint for me for when it all went wrong.

no doubt about it this fear of like is this the moment that I realized like I messed up in the future that fear is so amplified in our 20s almost counterintuitively because we actually often have so many opportunities and so many doors open and so little room for regret at this point and so much future ahead of ourselves but it's it's

Ironic, but it creates this constant pressure to not mess it all up despite just being at the start.

So in this episode, I want to do a psychological deep dive into what actually drives regret, what people regret the most, how to manage it when it does show up, and why I actually think regret is...

one of the most motivating emotions we can actually access as we plan for our futures.

So without further ado, let's get into the psychology of regret.

When we talk about regret, what are we actually talking about?

That's really important for us to understand.

Regret is sadness, it's disappointment, embarrassment, it's a sad mix of all those things.

But I think it's mostly rooted in grief, to be honest.

Grief over a life path we could have lived and the stories we