Gemma Speck

permanent emotional comfort, the harder it becomes to do or to choose anything at all because the worst case scenario, the regret-based scenarios, all those things your brain creates, like you cannot release them.

I've been there so many times.

You tell yourself you're just being careful.

You tell yourself like, hey, I'm just waiting.

I'm just waiting till I'm 93% sure when you could have made the decision when you were 51% sure and you would have still felt as conflicted as you do now.

And I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that the perfect decision doesn't exist anyways.

100% certainty only exists in hindsight.

Every real choice comes with trade-offs.

It comes with losses.

It comes with gains as well.

Trying to find the perfect option that is never going to hurt you, that is never going to give you regret, means you are going to stay in situations that you have outgrown.

What I can say though, is that even if the worst case scenario happens,

It is often never as bad as we emotionally predict it to be.

This is where effective forecasting comes in.

It is the human habit of trying to predict how we feel in the future and getting it very, very wrong.

When it comes to regret, our forecasts are usually wildly pessimistic, so we end up organizing our whole lives around an emotion we're probably not actually going to feel.

We don't necessarily even fear regret.

We fear an exaggerated imagined version of regret that is a projection of our deep fears and insecurities and everything going wrong when actually that very rarely happens.

What we also know from the research is that the easiest way, again, to avoid regret is to actually take any kind of action in any direction, even if you don't know for sure it's going to be the right one.

Take, for example, the 1997 paper on regret and self-discrepancy theory.