How to Age Well
The importance of letting regrets go
By Christopher Berger
The poem “Maud Muller” by John Greenleaf Whittier aptly ends with the line, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” What if you had gone for the risky investment that you later found out made someone else rich, or if you had had the guts to ask that certain someone to marry you? Certainly, we’ve all had instances in our lives where hindsight makes us regret not sticking our neck out a bit more.
But new research suggests that when we are older these kinds of ‘if only!’ thoughts about the choices we made may not be so good for our mental health. One of the most important determinants of our emotional well being in our golden years might be whether we learn to stop worrying about what might have been.
In a new paper published in Science, researchers from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany, report evidence from two experiments which suggest that one key to aging well might involve learning to let go of regrets about missed opportunities. Stafanie Brassen and her colleagues looked at how healthy young participants (mean age: 25.4 years), healthy older participants (65.8 years), and older participants who had developed depression for the first time later in life (65.6 years) dealt with regret, and found that the young and older depressed patients seemed to hold on to regrets about missed opportunities while the healthy older participants seemed to let them go.
To measure regret over missed opportunities, the researchers adapted anestablished risk taking task into a clever game in which the participants looked at eight wooden boxes lined up in a row on a computer screen and could choose to reveal the contents of the boxes one at a time, from left to right. Seven of the boxes had gold in them, which the participants would earn if they chose to open them. One box, however, had a devil in it. What happens if they open the box with the devil in it? They lose that round and any gold they earned so far with it.
Importantly, the participants could choose to cash out early and keep any gold they earned up to that point. Doing this would reveal the location of the devil and coincidently all of the gold they missed out on. Sometimes this wouldn’t be a big deal, because the devil would be in the next box. No harm, no foul. But sometimes the devil might be several boxes away. In this case, you might have missed out on a lot of potential earnings, and this had the potential to induce feelings of regret.
To read the full article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-age-well-letting-regrets-go
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