Regrets. They can be an incredibly heavy anchor to the past, hindering forward movement, even when we know something is good for us.
For instance, you have a decision to make. It could be as simple as an invitation to a social event or where to vacation, or as large as whether or not to accept a new job offer. The many potential choices, “what ifs,” and pitfalls swirl around in your head.
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Instead of feeling empowered to act, you’re oddly frozen with inaction. A hollow, gnawing pit in your stomach and the same mental loop keep you from deciding. You relentlessly run through everything that could go wrong. Perhaps you’re even criticizing yourself for procrastinating or being indecisive, but the truth is that you’re experiencing decision paralysis.
While it feels like a simple case of overthinking, this mental gridlock can be a symptom of something deeper: a protective mechanism gone haywire, a neurological glitch triggered by past decisions.
Your brain in ‘stuck’ mode is often a direct consequence of old, unprocessed regrets.
The Vicious Cycle: How Regret Puts Your Brain on Lockdown
To understand why you get stuck, it's helpful to know what’s happening inside your brain.
When you recall a past mistake or a missed opportunity, it’s not just a fleeting memory. It’s a powerful emotional event that triggers a specific neurological chain reaction.
It starts in the amygdala, your brain’s emotional alarm center.
When you think about a past regret, the amygdala fires off a jolt of emotional pain, a physiological response. That signal then travels to your prefrontal cortex (PFC), the part of your brain responsible for logic, planning, and rational thought. But when the emotional charge is too strong, it overwhelms the PFC with what neuroscientists call an “amygdala hijack.”
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The Ghost of What You Didn't Do
What makes this cycle even more potent is the specific type of regret that tends to linger the longest. You might assume the mistakes you’ve made would be the most haunting, but decades of research say otherwise. A landmark meta-analysis published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that the things we regret most are the things we never did at all.
Researchers found that regrets of inaction outlast regrets of action. When you act and fail, the consequences are concrete. Your brain can learn from the outcome and gradually reduce its emotional sting. But when you fail to act—not asking someone on a date, not applying for a dream job, not speaking up to advocate for yourself—the regret is psychologically “open.”
The possibilities of what could have been are endless, and your brain can torment you with an infinite reel of idealized outcomes that never have to be tested against reality.
These regrets of inaction are the most powerful fuel for avoidance and decision paralysis. Every new opportunity gets filtered through the lens of that past inaction. The fear isn’t just of making the wrong choice; it’s the paralyzing terror of missing out on the “perfect” choice, a ghost conjured entirely by the idealized outcomes of past regrets.
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When Protection Becomes Paralysis: The Bias of Regret Aversion
This entire process is driven by a powerful cognitive bias known as regret aversion: the tendency to make choices designed to avoid future regret.
It’s your brain’s attempt at emotional insurance. By over-analyzing every possible outcome, you’re searching for the one path that is guaranteed to be regret-free.
Of course, no such path exists.
The cruel irony is that in trying to avoid the pain of future regret, you create the immediate pain of present paralysis.
You become so focused on avoiding a negative feeling that you prevent yourself from moving toward any positive outcome.
Neuroscientific research has shown that regret aversion activates the same emotional brain pathways—the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex—that process the experience of regret itself. In other words, just thinking about potential regret feels as threatening to your brain as actually experiencing it.
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Three Steps to Reboot Your Brain’s Decision-Making System
We can’t break free from this vicious cycle by vowing to live with “no regrets.” It’s vital to actively process the old ones and retrain your brain to see decisions not as threats, but as opportunities.
Here are three practical steps to get started.
Name the Regret.
The first step is to step out of the abstract regret loop in your mind. Take a piece of paper and write down the specific inaction you regret. Be specific and use precise details—no vague terms.
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What were you afraid of?
- What narrative or story did you tell yourself that justified not acting?
- What opportunity (or opportunities) do you believe you lost?
- Did you hurt or disappoint anyone through your inaction?
- Name the different versions of the label you’ve given the regret.
By externalizing it, you shift from feeling regret to observing and examining it. This simple act engages your prefrontal cortex, pulling up the memory and signaling your brain that you are no longer a victim of this feeling, but an analyst of it.
Conduct a Reality Audit.
Regrets of inaction thrive on idealized fantasy. Your next step is to gently challenge the fantasy with a dose of reality.
On the same piece of paper, list three things that might have gone wrong even if you HAD taken that action.
· What were the potential downsides?
· What challenges would you have faced?
· Did the actions you took instead provide opportunities that would not have happened otherwise?
A contrary approach creates a more balanced and realistic picture. It dismantles the “perfect” outcome your brain has been torturing you with and reduces the emotional charge of the regret. This simple exercise teaches your brain that the outcome wasn’t guaranteed, even if you had chosen that particular path. It is now just another path with its own set of problems.
Make a Low-Stakes Decision—Immediately.
After doing this reflective work, you need to take action to prove to your brain that decision-making is safe again.
The key is to start small.
Identify a minor, low-stakes decision you’ve been putting off, such as what to cook for dinner, your next book to read, or signing up for the class you’ve been procrastinating. Give yourself a one-minute timer and commit to a choice. Then, immediately take one small step to act on it.
This initiative short-circuits the paralysis loop and provides your brain with fresh, positive data: “I made a decision, and nothing terrible happened.” Repeating this process builds new neural pathways that associate decision-making with agency and forward motion rather than fear and pain.
Doing this process softens the sting of old regrets while also stripping them of their artificial power over your present.
By understanding the science of why you get stuck, and by taking deliberate steps to process the past rather than be imprisoned by decision paralysis, you can finally move forward—one clear, confident decision at a time.
For more resources on building emotional intelligence and breaking free from self-sabotaging patterns, visit the Heartmanity Blog.
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