When facing a major decision, most people organise their thinking around one central fear: what if I regret this?
What psychological research shows, and what I see consistently in my practice, is that this fear carries a paradox: it may itself become the greatest regret of all.
Across all the clients I have worked with, this fear is the number one barrier to navigating major life transitions and decisions. I have fallen for this myself. For a long time, I stayed in a career that no longer satisfied me, held back by the fear of a point of no return. Leaving an academic career felt like closing a door that does not reopen. I chose the safety of current dissatisfaction over the potential risk of future regret.
Regret is more common than you think. According to research, regret is the second most frequently cited emotion in daily life, after love and before fear. Psychologist Pär Bjälkebring and colleagues, who sampled thousands of experiences across multiple days, found that people regretted 30% of their past decisions and anticipated regret in 70% of future ones, with the gap widening for more complex decisions.
With regret this present in daily life, and even more so in anticipation, it is worth asking why we fear it as intensely as we do.
Why do we fear regret so much?
A major life transition means leaving the familiar for the unfamiliar, often with no guaranteed way back. If you are considering one right now, the chances are that you would have already made the move if someone could promise you it would work out.
Part of what makes regret so threatening is that it carries self-blame in a way that simple disappointment does not. When you regret a decision, you are not just unhappy with the outcome, you are holding yourself responsible for it, and living with the internal narrative of ‘I should have done this differently.’ Neuroscientific research supports this, showing that regret, more than other negative states like disappointment, uniquely activates the insula, a brain region central to processing visceral emotional states and self-blame.
Regret also activates the orbitofrontal cortex, a region so central to processing regret that patients with damage to this area lose the ability to experience it altogether. They cannot report regret, cannot use it to guide future behaviour, and cannot anticipate the negative consequences of their choices. Regret, in other words, is not a peripheral emotion. It is deeply embedded in how we evaluate ourselves and our decisions, which is exactly why the prospect of it carries such weight.
Why inaction regrets are more powerful than action regrets
When people are asked about their biggest regrets in life, they tend to focus on things they failed to do rather than things they have actually done. This is especially true in the long term. Psychological research suggests that actions produce greater regret in the short term, but inactions generate more regret in the long run. The unrealised ambition, the unfulfilled intention, can carry a grief that intensifies when one looks back across a whole life.
Regrets of inaction are more psychologically open than regrets of action. If you regret not taking a job opportunity, your mind has an entire blank canvas of possibilities to fill in for what might have been, creating a powerful nostalgia for a life you have not lived. Instead, if you regret accepting a job offer, the facts of what actually happened constrain your imagination considerably. It is also generally easier to understand why you acted than why you failed to act, which means inaction regrets tend to feel more unresolved and harder to make sense of.
The Zeigarnik effect adds another layer. Originally observed in relation to memory for incomplete tasks, the principle helps explain why inaction regrets persist: because they are never factually closed, they are rehearsed more frequently, recalled more easily, and experienced as unfinished business. In a study by Savitsky and colleagues, participants were asked to list their three biggest regrets of action and three biggest regrets of inaction. When contacted again three weeks later and asked to recall their six biggest regrets, they were almost twice as likely to recall the inaction than the action regrets.
What are the consequences of the fear of regret?
The research on inaction regrets, the unfinished business, the grief of the unlived possibility, describes exactly what accumulates when fear of regret becomes the reason not to act.
The consequences can be significant: you may stay in a career or a relationship that makes you unhappy for years, not because you have weighed the options and chosen to stay, but because the fear of regretting a change has made the decision feel too dangerous to take.
This is where a paradox becomes evident. We avoid action because we fear regret, but it is precisely that avoidance that will generate the deepest and most lasting regret later on.
The stronger regret you could ever experience may be having feared regret in the first place.
What you can do if you fear regret
The first thing worth accepting is that removing all risk of regret is not possible. No amount of analysis, preparation, or reassurance will eliminate it entirely, and waiting for that certainty is, as we have seen, its own form of risk.
What you can control is the quality of your decision-making process: whether your decision was made with honesty, self-awareness, and a genuine understanding of your own motivations and values.
And when the process has been honest and thorough, whatever the outcome, you will have far less reason to blame yourself. That is the closest thing to protection against regret that actually exists.
This idea is at the heart of my work with clients, and the reason I developed the 5D Framework, a methodology that evaluates complex decisions across distinct dimensions to ensure that when you make your move, you have genuinely considered it as a whole.
Finding yourself stuck in a circle of overthinking?
Let’s discuss how working together could help you. Contact me or arrange a complimentary 60-minute consultation call.
About the author
Dr Giulia Galli. An accredited coach, chartered psychologist, and academic neuroscientist with twenty years of experience in understanding people’s thinking, decisions and behaviour. You can read more about my story and my approach to coaching here.
