It’s perfectly natural to experience regret in varying degrees, and as such, regret is one of those emotions we shouldn’t fear.

Here are some tips for handling it:

Avoid the “I Won’t Do That Again” Mindset

When we regret something, that feeling of regret often doesn’t stem from the initial mistake we made. Quite the opposite—more often than not, we feel greater regret because we’ve fallen into our usual patterns of self-sabotage. For example, you might regret staying up late watching YouTube until midnight because you felt exhausted at work the next day, wishing you’d gone to bed at 10 p.m. instead. Or perhaps you regret letting yourself get overly hungry or tired, which led to eating two-thirds of a big bag of potato chips!
If you’ve fallen into certain traps dozens of times before, chances are you’ll do it again. Instead of vowing never to repeat the same mistake, acknowledge that you need strategies to gradually improve your habits or minimize the negative consequences when you fail to control yourself.

Acknowledge and Accept What You Feel

People love to say, “I’ve never regretted anything,” but that’s not very realistic and perhaps not even true. Like any negative emotion, regret is a common experience we’re psychologically equipped to handle.
When you acknowledge your feelings instead of denying them, it helps you think of strategies to reduce the pain of future experiences with those emotions. Labeling what you feel specifically—saying “I feel regret” instead of “I feel bad”—is part of that acknowledgment and makes dealing with those emotions more manageable too.
When you regret something big, like working long hours when your kids were young, staying in a bad relationship too long, or starting to invest for retirement late, try to keep in mind that regret is a universal human emotion, no matter what some people might claim about themselves. We’re all imperfect, so you don’t need to spin positives or even excuses for every situation. Sometimes regret is just regret—it needs to be faced and dealt with.

Believe in Your Ability to Grow

Regret can make us overly hesitant or avoidant. Regretting a failed relationship might lead you to avoid getting into a new one or even starting one. Regretting a bad financial decision might make you categorize investing as “too hard,” encouraging you to avoid it entirely. Making poorly thought-out decisions sometimes doesn’t mean you’re destined to fail forever in that area.

Look for New, Creative Ways of Thinking to Help with Your Patterns

Changing your mindset can often prevent you from repeating the same mistakes. Writer Gretchen Rubin offers great advice: “If you regret staying up late, try thinking of going to bed early as a reward.” It’s common to see staying up late and enjoying some personal time as a treat, but consider “lying in bed and savoring all those incredibly comfortable sensations!”
Will this kind of thinking—different from your usual approach—stop you from staying up late watching TV or wasting time on your computer with little benefit? Maybe not, but it might shift your behavior sometimes. Plus, it’s much easier to find simple solutions to improve your behavior than to try eliminating bad habits entirely. If your regret is tied to how you prioritize, try focusing on what’s important, not just what’s urgent.

Give Yourself Enough Time to Process Your Feelings

Effectively dealing with regret requires a balanced, skillful approach. Neither ruminating nor shoving your feelings aside is helpful.
Try this: For a small regret, like leaving the house without checking for your discount card and driving all the way to the store without it, give yourself a few minutes to process it. If you feel frustrated or self-critical, those feelings will naturally dissipate quickly on their own.
For a bigger regret, like painting your house a trendy color you didn’t actually like, it might take weeks or months for those feelings to fade, and they may ebb and flow, resurfacing periodically.
In both cases, the more you give your feelings their own space—without suppressing or ignoring them—the better. This is helpful even if regret pops up and bothers you intermittently; you can handle it.
I discussed a point in my book The Healthy Mind Toolkit: human emotions are a signaling system. A traffic light isn’t useful if it’s always red or always green—it’s only a helpful signal if it changes to give you information. Emotions are like that too: they’re designed to come and go. When we struggle to handle our emotions, it’s often because we’re feeding them somehow—through rumination, harsh self-criticism, or avoidance. If you let your emotions run their natural course, it’s usually more efficient and effective than trying to do something to make them disappear, which can backfire.

Going through an unsuccessful experience doesn’t mean failure is your permanent fate. Every experience, no matter what it is, carries lessons and insights within it.