Who hasn’t indulged by wallowing in hindsight? Or analysed the mistakes of each misstep? ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few,’ crooned Frank Sinatra back in the sixties, articulating a sentiment that many can chime with. Who among us hasn’t given themselves whiplash, craning back over our shoulders to dissect what just went wrong? All the while feeling the pull of regret and remorse that accompanies these retrospective reviews of our mistakes. And why not? Hindsight is supposed to give us 20/20 vision so if we can rake over what went wrong for long enough, surely we will learn what not to do next time around?
Sara Tate and Anna Vogt, The Rebuilders
This natural urge to examine past mistakes has some sense in it. If we suffer a set back and things don’t go quite as we had hoped, then there might be lessons to be learned. It’s true that we can learn a lot from failure, but not everything. We might gain some experience and learn some pitfalls to avoid but, and it’s a big but, it doesn’t guarantee that we won’t make another mistake. It doesn’t even guarantee we won’t make exactly the same mistake for a second time! After all, Elizabeth Taylor got married eight times including twice to the same man (Holborn, 2018). In short, looking back has some benefits but those benefits are finite. Eventually we need to stop looking backwards in order to move forwards.
Psychotherapy offers us insight into why. Imagine a scene in your life that didn’t go well. A bad break up, a disastrous meeting, a job loss, a worrying health diagnosis. You mentally revisit the scene over and over in your mind, exploring and inquiring into what led to that moment, what could you have done differently and you would change it if you could. Looking back is part of processing what has happened but too much looking back can start to hold us back and the psychotherapy term for it is ‘rumination’. Susan Kay Nolen-Hoeksema, American Professor of Psychology at Yale University, defined rumination as ‘the focused attention on the symptoms of one’s distress, and on its possible causes and consequences, as opposed to its solutions’ (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991). In layman’s terms this means too much time spent thinking about what went wrong and not enough time spent planning for things to go right.
One problem with constantly looking back is that it can lead to us feeling more miserable and worried. As we constantly relive what happened, it keeps the distress fresh in our mind. In extreme cases leading to anxiety and depression (Nolen-Hoeksema et al, 2008). The other challenge with too much ruminating is that it doesn’t actually help change our situation. Far from helping us avoid future setbacks, it keeps us stuck in the problem rather than working towards solutions. If the whole point of looking backwards is to help us avoid issues in the future, then at some point our energy is better spent on planning for that future.
Sara Tate and Anna Vogt are resilience experts and co-authors of new book The Rebuilders: Going From Setback to Comeback in Business and Beyond, published by Kogan Page on 3rd June 2022, priced at £12.99.
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