The Weight of Regret
You know that feeling—the one that visits at 3 AM or during quiet moments when your mind wanders. The relationship you ended. The words you said. The opportunity you missed. The person you hurt.
Regret is one of the heaviest emotions we carry. It combines the pain of the original mistake with the ongoing torture of reliving it. And unlike other painful emotions, there's no possible resolution: you can't change what happened.
The ancient philosophers understood this trap. Marcus Aurelius watched soldiers die because of his decisions. The Buddha had left his family to pursue awakening—imagine the complexity of that regret. They knew the weight.
But they also found a way through. Not to forget, not to pretend mistakes didn't matter, but to release the ongoing suffering while keeping the wisdom.
Why Regret Gets Stuck
To let go of regret, you first need to understand why it persists.
The illusion of control: Regret assumes you could have done differently. But could you? At that moment, with that information, with those emotions, with that stage of development—could you really have chosen otherwise?
The Stoics would say no. You acted according to your understanding at the time. Regretting it is regretting that you were who you were then, instead of who you are now.
The fantasy of revision: Regret keeps alive a fantasy that you could somehow change the past. Your mind replays the scenario with different choices, as if that mental exercise accomplishes something.
It doesn't. The past is gone. No amount of rumination retrieves it.
Incomplete processing: Sometimes regret persists because we haven't fully felt it. We push away the guilt, shame, or grief, and it keeps resurfacing, demanding attention.
Buddhist psychology suggests that emotions need to be fully experienced to pass through. Avoided emotions get stuck.
The Buddhist Approach: Compassion for Your Past Self
Buddhism offers a radical reframe: your past self did not have your current wisdom.
You made that choice as a different version of yourself—younger, less experienced, carrying wounds you hadn't healed, operating under beliefs you've since revised. Judging that person by your current standards is unfair.
The practice is to offer compassion to your past self:
"May I forgive myself for the times I acted from confusion."
"May I accept that I did the best I could with what I knew."
"May I release the burden of needing the past to be different."
This isn't making excuses. You can acknowledge harm while also acknowledging that you weren't capable of better at the time.
Meditation for self-forgiveness:
Sit quietly. Bring to mind the regret—the choice, the consequences.
Now bring to mind yourself at that time. Visualize that younger, more confused version of you. What were you carrying then? What didn't you know? What wounds were unhealed?
Offer compassion to that person: "I see that you were struggling. I see that you didn't have the tools. I forgive you."
This often brings tears. Let them come. That's the emotion finally moving through.
The Stoic Approach: Accept What Cannot Change
The Stoics were blunt about the past: it's gone. Completely and permanently. No amount of wishing changes it.
Seneca wrote: "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality." With regret, we suffer entirely in imagination—the past itself no longer exists except in memory.
The Stoic practice is active acceptance:
- Acknowledge what happened. Don't minimize or deny. Face the full reality of what you did and its consequences.
- Extract the lesson. Every mistake contains information. What did this teach you? How has it changed who you are? The Stoics saw hardship as training, not punishment.
- Release what's beyond control. You cannot change the past. You cannot undo harm. These are not in your control. Continuing to struggle against this truth is irrational and causes unnecessary suffering.
- Focus forward. What is in your control is present action. How can you act differently now? How can you live in alignment with the wisdom the mistake taught you?
Marcus Aurelius practiced this after difficult decisions:
"Never value anything as profitable that compels you to break your promise, lose your self-respect, hate any man, suspect, curse, act the hypocrite."
Notice: he's focused on future conduct, informed by past mistakes. The past is teaching material, not a prison.
When You've Hurt Someone
Regret about harming others carries extra weight. It's not just your pain—you know you caused someone else's.
The path here involves action when possible:
Make amends if you can. Not to relieve your guilt—that's self-focused—but because repair is genuinely good when possible. Apologize. Make it right. Ask what they need.
Accept when you can't. Sometimes the person is gone, the relationship is severed, the damage is permanent. You cannot force forgiveness or fix what's broken.
In these cases, the practice is harder: you must hold the complexity. You caused harm. You can't repair it. You've grown since then. All of this is true simultaneously.
The Buddhist approach helps here: suffering over your guilt doesn't help the person you hurt. Punishing yourself doesn't reduce their pain. The most ethical response is to become someone who won't cause that harm again.
The Trap of "Learning Your Lesson"
There's a subtle trap in using regret for growth: you can convince yourself you need to keep suffering to prove you've learned.
This is a lie. You don't need ongoing pain to retain wisdom. A burn teaches you that fire is hot; you don't need to keep burning yourself to remember.
Once you've extracted the lesson, the suffering has done its job. Continuing to suffer is not virtuous—it's just suffering.
Ask yourself: "Is this regret teaching me anything new, or am I just replaying the same tape?" If it's replay, the suffering is no longer useful.
Regret vs. Remorse
It helps to distinguish between regret and remorse:
Regret is self-focused: "I wish I hadn't done that." It's often tied to wanting a different life for yourself.
Remorse is other-focused: "I'm sorry for the harm I caused." It's about the impact on others.
Regret can spiral into self-pity. Remorse can motivate repair. When you feel stuck in regret, check if it's actually about you rather than the people affected.
If it is, that's okay—just recognize it. Self-focus isn't evil, but it won't resolve through more self-focus. It resolves through releasing the need for your past to be different.
A Process for Letting Go
Here's a practice that combines Buddhist and Stoic elements:
- Name it specifically. Write down exactly what you regret. Get specific—the choice, the consequences, who was affected.
- Feel it fully. Allow the emotion without acting on it. Where is it in your body? Stay present with the sensation.
- Examine your past self. What were you carrying then? What didn't you know? What were you trying to accomplish (even if misguided)?
- Offer forgiveness. Not approval—forgiveness. You can acknowledge something was wrong while also releasing the need to keep punishing yourself for it.
- Extract the learning. What do you know now that you didn't then? How has this shaped who you've become?
- Commit to present action. Based on this learning, what will you do differently? Make it concrete.
- Release the past. Mentally place the regret down. It happened. It taught you. It's not happening now. Let it go.
You may need to do this multiple times for deep regrets. That's okay. Each time loosens the grip a little more.
The Paradox of Regret
Here's something the philosophers understood: sometimes the things we most regret are the things that most shaped us.
Not that the harm was good—it wasn't. But the wisdom that emerged from it is real. The compassion you developed because you know what it's like to cause pain. The integrity you've built because you know what it costs to lose it.
The Buddhist concept of "composting" applies: just as garbage becomes fertilizer, difficult experiences become the soil for growth.
This isn't spiritual bypassing. The harm was real. The pain was real. And the growth is also real. Life is complex enough to hold all of this.
Moving Forward
You cannot change the past. But you can change your relationship to it.
The goal isn't to feel nothing about what happened. It's to feel what's there, learn what it teaches, and stop adding unnecessary suffering on top.
The philosophers weren't perfect. They made mistakes they regretted. But they found ways to live with their histories without being imprisoned by them.
You can too. Start today. Face one regret. Feel it. Learn from it. Then, gently, set it down.
It may pick itself back up. That's okay. Set it down again.
This is the practice. Not perfection—just repeated release. Over time, the grip loosens. You find yourself thinking about it less. The weight lifts.
The past is gone. The present is here. The future is available.
Choose where to put your energy.