What If I Had Done Things Differently? Understanding Regrets

Have you ever found yourself thinking, what if I had done things differently? What if you had taken the job, ended the relationship sooner, spoken up, moved away, gone back to school, or never started drinking in the first place?

In this episode of The Pink Cloud Frequency, we're exploring one of the most universal and often misunderstood human emotions: regret.

We'll unpack what regret actually is, why we tend to romanticize the roads not taken, and how our minds create alternate versions of reality that we can never truly verify. And we'll challenge the assumption that the life we didn't live would have automatically been better, and explore the growth, resilience, self-awareness, and wisdom that can emerge from even our most difficult experiences.

If you've been carrying regret about your drinking, your relationships, your parenting, your career, or any chapter of your life, this conversation will remind you that your past does not define you. The lessons matter. The growth matters. And the future is still being written.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Pink Cloud Frequency. I am your host, Brianna Wynne. Thank you for tuning in today. This episode is all about regret because regret is one of the most uncomfortable emotions we experience. It's the feeling that something should have gone differently: a relationship, a decision, a missed opportunity. Many women are carrying around regrets. They're replaying conversations, revisiting past mistakes, and imagining alternate versions of their lives. And when those thoughts become repetitive, regret stops being a feeling and it starts becoming a place that they live. But I want to remind you that regret is not a permanent state. Regret is simply an emotion. Emotions are meant to be felt, understood, and released, not carried forever. Regret is the gap between what did happen and what you wish had happened. The problem is that you're comparing real life to a fantasy. The alternate outcome exists only in your mind because you never get to see how that other path would have unfolded. Yet you assume it would have been better. Think about some common regrets. You wish you'd taken that job. Maybe you moved across the country and ended up isolated and unhappy. Maybe that relationship you never started would have become deeply unhealthy. Maybe the thing that you think you wanted would have led to a completely different set of problems. For many people in the alcohol-free community, one of the biggest regrets is that you wish you never drank. Of course, you wish you could get back the money, the lost time, and the opportunities. But again, what if you're only calculating one side of the equation? When you regret drinking, you're assuming that the alternate version of yourself would have automatically been happier, healthier, wealthier, more successful. You imagine a version of your life where everything good remains exactly the same, except the one bad thing is removed. But you don't know the outcome. You have no idea who you would have become. Maybe you would have been healthier. Maybe you would have accomplished certain goals sooner. Maybe you would have more money. But what if there were lessons you never would have learned? What if you never developed the level of self-awareness that you have today? What if you never learned how to sit with difficult emotions? What if you never discovered your own resilience? For the mothers listening, I know this can be an especially painful topic because many women carry regret about who they were while drinking around their children, the missed moments, the times you were distracted, the mornings you were not fully present, the patience you didn't have. Those feelings are very real. But you also have to acknowledge that you cannot know the outcome of the life that you didn't live. Who's to say that your children didn't learn something valuable from watching your journey? Maybe your children learned people can and do change at any age. Maybe they learned that it's never too late to make a different choice. Maybe they learned what accountability looks like. Maybe they learned what courage looks like. We tend to assume that every consequence of drinking was negative, and every consequence of never drinking would have been positive. But of course, life is not that simple because the version of you that never drank would have had struggles as well. Different struggles, perhaps, but struggles nonetheless. I personally don't glorify my drinking years. I don't shame my drinking years. I don't regret my drinking years. Because I know that they had a role in shaping the person that I am today. Think about who you are, your qualities. Maybe you're compassionate, maybe you're humble, you're grateful, maybe you're open-minded about the world. Everything you are and everything you are not is shaped by your experiences. Maybe, sure, some you didn't need to have, but experiences that still taught you something nonetheless. And this is why regret can be so misleading. Because it asks you to compare your real life to an imaginary life. A life where everything somehow would have worked out perfectly. A life where every decision led to the best possible outcome. That's fiction. All of those thoughts, you wish you had started the business sooner, you wish you'd gone back to school, you wish you had repaired that relationship with a family member. You wish, you wish, you wish. Because most of our regrets are things we didn't do, not things we did do. All of those wishes, those are just an unwritten chapter in a book that never existed. The problem is when you carry regret in silence, you don't tell anyone, you distract yourself from those feelings, you try to numb them. But emotions that aren't expressed, they intensify. On the other hand, when you talk about your regrets openly, they lose some of their power. Oftentimes, what you're carrying isn't just regret alone. It's the shame, the judgment, the embarrassment, the belief that you should have known better or that you should have somehow been different. But you are making decisions in the moment. And this is so important because if you're a 42-year-old woman looking at what you should have done differently when you were 26, you're judging your younger self with your 42-year-old wisdom. Of course, you would make different decisions today. You've lived another 16 years. You've experienced more, you've failed more, you've learned more, you've grown more. You know things now that your younger self couldn't possibly have known. But that's the trap. You expect your past self to have access to information that you didn't have. And that's how regret keeps you trapped in the past. You spend so much energy analyzing yesterday, the last 20 years, that you stop creating tomorrow. You're hyper-focused on what you should have done. Meanwhile, the present moment is passing by, which is the greatest cost of regret. It's not what happened 16 years ago. It's what those regrets are preventing you from doing today. The more time you spend staring in the rearview mirror, the harder it becomes to drive forward. You don't want those regrets to keep you looking backward. You want to see what's important when you move ahead. Because regrets can be a form of guidance. Because regrets reveal your true values. Let's say you regret not spending enough time with your children, then that should tell you that family matters a lot to you. Maybe you regret staying silent, not speaking up. Maybe authenticity matters to you. If you regret years that you spent drinking alcohol, maybe health matters more to you than you realize. Maybe connection matters a lot to you. The point is that regret guides you toward your own value system. It highlights the direction that you want to move. So really, regret can become a compass if you allow it to. The challenge is learning to take the lesson without carrying the burdens. At some point, healing requires acceptance of what you did do, of what you didn't do, and the fact that you can't change it one way or the other. But you can choose what happens next. Because every experience, good, bad, indifferent, contributed to who you are today. Every decision taught you something. Every mistake revealed something. Every detour made way for a new path. So if you're carrying around regrets today, I want you to remember that you are not the worst thing you've done. You are not the opportunities you may have missed. You are not the years you wish you could get back. Regret is not your identity. It's a feeling. And feelings are temporary. So listen to what those regrets may be trying to teach you. Extract the lesson, take the wisdom, then give yourself permission to return to the present moment. Because your future isn't created by replaying the past. It's created by what you choose to do next. So for your reflection today, ask yourself: what is one regret you've been carrying? And what might it be trying to teach you about what matters most to you today? As always, thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated, please share it with a friend. Yes, you, the amazing woman on the other end, please share this episode with someone you think may need to hear it. I will talk to you all next Wednesday.