​​​​How To Let Go Of Regret & Be Thankful

Regret and depression go hand in hand, because if you spend your time regretting your life and the choices you’ve made, you naturally feel down and miserable, rather than happier and upbeat.

For this reason, it’s important that you learn how to stop regretting your life, and start being thankful for your life instead. As you’re about to learn, by replacing regret with thankfulness, you naturally feel better about yourself and your life, which helps you become and remain depression-free faster and easier.

How to not regret your life & eliminate depression faster

When you regret things, you focus on things of negative value to you, as well as missed opportunities, and you don’t see any positive value at all that you can feel good and thankful for.

This is like viewing your past in a glass-half-empty, pessimistic way, which naturally leaves you feeling miserable, rather than seeing your past in a more positive, glass-half-full way, which naturally makes you feel better.

Earlier, you learned how to be optimistic rather than pessimistic, by appreciating that it’s perfectly valid to be either pessimistic or optimistic, just like it’s perfectly valid to see a glass as half empty or half full.

The difference is that being more optimistic makes you feel better, and helps you achieve things you want to achieve, so it’s simply a better, smarter choice, given that you have a choice in how you think about things.

Right now, you can apply that very same lesson to feelings of regret, by thinking of regret as being a form of reverse pessimism. After all, when you regret things, you’re looking back on your life in a negative, pessimistic way, and not seeing anything of positive value to enjoy.

Even though it’s perfectly valid to do this, and to make yourself miserable and depressed doing so, it’s just as valid to focus on positive things in your past, or how you’ve learned, gained, and benefited from your past in some way, which naturally makes you feel better and happier.

The difference is that this positive approach helps you be thankful for your life, and for everything you’ve gained, and this helps you improve your life, feel better, and also helps you become and remain depression-free. And this makes it a smarter choice every way you look at it.

How to get over something you regret by being thankful

You have a choice. You can regret your life and be sorry about it, or you can be thankful for everything you’ve learned, gained, and benefited from in your life.

For example, let’s say that you betray a friend’s trust, and you lose that friend as a result. You can regret what you did for the rest of your life, and focus on your loss, or you can be thankful for what you learned and gained as a result of this experience, expensive as it might be.

In this case, you could be thankful that you learned about the importance of trust and friendship, and that you know you’ll never betray a friend’s trust like that again in the future. This is a constructive way to view your past, which makes you feel better, and also helps you improve your life and future.

Similarly, let’s say that you spend time regretting missed opportunities, like not asking someone out on a date. You could regret this for the rest of your life, or you can be thankful for what you learned and gained instead.

For example, you can be thankful that you learned about the importance of being more pro-active, and doing more to pursue people and things that you’re interested in. In this way, you can be thankful that this lesson has helped you improve your life in so many ways since then, which means that the missed opportunity wasn’t as much of a “loss” as you might originally think.

Indeed, you can also appreciate that you might not have gone out on the date with that person, but you did go on to have other experiences in your life that you’re thankful for. And who knows? By not going out on the date, it might have ultimately set you up for something even better down the road, that you didn’t expect.

The overall lesson is that instead of regretting things in your life, you can always just as easily focus on positive things you’ve experienced, learned, gained, and benefited from instead.

And by adopting this positive approach, you naturally become thankful for your life, rather than regretting it, which is better for you in every way.

How to get rid of regret by seeing little or no value in it

The first and most important step for letting go of regret is to see little or no value in feeling regret, and to see lots of positive value, instead, in being thankful for your life, and learning and gaining from everything you’ve ever done in some way.

By making this clear choice, you naturally make it very easy to stop feeling regret, and to feel better and happier, instead. This is because instead of focusing on how to cope with regret and having to live with it forever, you’re focused on how to stop feeling regret and how to feel thankful, instead.

This is a very smart thing to do, because as you’ve just learned, it’s perfectly valid to either regret your life or be thankful for it. The difference is that being thankful makes your life better, while continuing to feel regret makes your life worse.

Indeed, the only value that regret provides is that it alerts you that there are opportunities for improvement in your life. Specifically, regret alerts you that there are valuable lessons for you to learn, which will help you live a better, more enjoyable, more meaningful life in the future.

By learning these lessons in a constructive way, and by seeing what you’ve learned and gained from anything you’ve ever done, you naturally eliminate feelings of regret and feel more thankful, instead, about everything you’ve learned and gained.

And, as you can clearly see, this is of tremendous value to you and your life. So once you appreciate this, it makes complete sense to appreciate that there is lots of value in being thankful for you life, and little or no value in continuing to regret it.

How to get rid of guilt and regret

Although guilt and regret are different, there is a strong connection between them, because when you regret things, you often focus on things you did that you consider bad or wrong in some way.

Earlier, when you learned how to get rid of guilt, you learned to question whether you really did something bad or wrong.

That same lesson applies here for overcoming regret. If you regret something, be sure to challenge whether you really did anything bad or wrong, and if you come to the conclusion that you did, appreciate that you can accept and handle it constructively.

As you’ve just learned, a powerful way to handle whatever you did constructively is to see what you’ve learned and gained from your past, so that you can help improve your life and other people’s lives with the knowledge you’ve acquired.

By doing this, you naturally eliminate guilt and regret in one fell swoop, as you feel more thankful for everything you’ve learned and gained, and as you look forward to a better and brighter future with the lessons you’ve learned.

How to overcome regret & be thankful: 5 steps

You’ve just learned how regret alerts you to opportunities for improvement in your life, like valuable lessons to be learned so that you can improve your future, but other than this, regret is of no value.

Instead, what’s valuable is learning those valuable lessons, and focusing on the positive things you’ve learned and gained, which make your life better. By doing this, you feel thankful for your life, rather than regretting it, which is better and smarter for you in every way.

So if you find yourself struggling with regret, these 5 steps are how to deal with regret and get rid of it as quickly as possible:

  1. See little or no value in continuing to feel regret, and see lots of positive value in feeling thankful for what you’ve learned, gained, and benefited from in your life.
  2. If you think you did something bad or wrong that you wish you hadn’t done, challenge whether what you did was really bad or wrong, and see if it might be ok or even good the more you think about it.
  3. Even if you think you did something bad or wrong, know that you can accept and handle what you did constructively, and then make sure to learn, gain, and benefit from whatever you did in a constructive way, which will naturally make your life and future better.
  4. Insead of focusing on missed opportunities to do things, focus on gained experiences, and everything you’ve learned and gained instead.
  5. Once you have done all this, focus on all the positive value that you have learned, gained, and benefited from, and be thankful for all this, rather than regretting what you did or what might have been.

Following these 5 steps is how to move past regret and replace it with thankfulness in a peaceful, constructive manner. By doing so, you also naturally become and remain depression-free faster and easier.

To continue practice doing this, you can also use the Daily Happiness Tool, which helps you be thankful for 3 things every day. If you’re dealing with regret, enter something that you’re thankful you’ve learned or gained from your experiences, to help transform regret into thankfulness.

This is how to handle regret in an intelligent, constructive, beneficial way, so that you enjoy being thankful for your life rather than regretting it.


Next: How To Deal With Failure & Feel More Successful →


You are here:

Section 9 Lessons:

  1. How to let go of regret & be thankful
  2. How to deal with failure & feel more successful
  3. How to overcome lack of self confidence fast
  4. How to overcome low self esteem and depression
  5. How to have high self esteem fast
  6. How to stop hating yourself

Next Section In The Depression-Free Course:

Section 10


About the author

Hi, I'm Dave Fonvielle, the founder of Always Greater. On this website I teach you step by step how to be happier and more successful achieving your goals, whether it's completing a small personal to do task, like doing the dishes, or a large business goal, like launching a new product. Get my free 3 Tiny Habits for Being Happier & More Successful training for all of this right here.