Real Life Regrets We Have As Adults That We Should Recognize

Regret is, in it's own right, a very big word. We regret accidentally clicking 'Send' on that email that wasn't ready to be sent. We regret letting our anger get the better of us when we're in a heated argument with Mom about why you're still living at home at the age of 30. (Not my truth but hey, still very real..) And sometimes, we even regret the food that we put in our bellies; yes four-cheese pizza, I'm talking to you. But we all know a few regrets we have that could have made our lives only that much easier, and it's that Gandhi-level advice that we really should have listened to all along. Fixing these now will help you save some of that time you spent all your energy wasting.

Constantly Worrying About What Other People Thought

It is so incredibly easy to get absorbed in analyzing how the people around you see you as a person. You itch to know if they like your new haircut, or if they think less of you because you smiled at them with spinach in between your teeth. The frank reality is that what people think of you now won't matter in the long run, but we as human beings continue to succumb to trying to please other people. For example: I always get frustrated when I am undermined. I can provide a dozen solutions to your problem, but if you don't choose even one of the options I give you, I will over-analyze why, and what it is about me that made you decide otherwise. But what I've learned by paying attention to how this emotion is triggered is that it was really less about the other person and more about how I saw myself. Once I figured that part out, it was easier to let go of the why and to focus instead on how I looked to myself. Had I known how to make this change earlier, I would have saved myself a lot of my valuable youth.

Not Asking for Help More Often

You've heard the story more than once: you're asked to do something that you aren't too sure how to do. You sit and stare at it for hours, wondering if you'll ever figure it out on your own to do a good enough job. Then, someone miraculously comes over and offers their help. You ask the questions that have been gnawing at you for the last few hours and suddenly, the task is not as difficult as you thought. Finally, you think to yourself: why hadn't I just asked for help in the first place? Perhaps we should ask ourselves more often: how much more time are we willing to waste by not asking for help when we need it? You might feel stupid for a moment for not knowing how to solve the problem. But I have often found myself wondering just how much time I've wasted over the years simply by not asking for help. How much further ahead I could be in this moment.And if that wasn't justification enough, try thinking of it this way: if you are not consistently asking for help, you are probably not challenging yourself enough. Not only is it humbling, but it connects you to another human being who is able to keep you accountable and help monitor your growth. Try to avoid keeping yourself from moving forward simply because you're too proud or scared to ask.

Overthinking Past Mistakes

To start: learning from and overthinking mistakes are two separate things. When we dwell on our mistakes long enough instead of learning from them, we tend to keep ourselves from moving forward and in time, it stunts our confidence in ourselves. We become more susceptible to making the same mistakes, and before you know it, you've taken one step forward and two steps back. Think about it: when you consider the mistakes that you've made in the past, you're automatically going to feel sorry for yourself. You've demoted your self-worth, and to you, it's not worth trying again because you've already told yourself that you suck. So, what we should be doing instead is focusing on what we can take away from this failure, learn from it, then throw it out. By not allowing it to negatively affect you, we change 'overthinking' to 'learning.'One of my biggest regrets to this day is not allowing myself space to fail in fear that I would still fail anyways. For many years, friends and family encouraged me to try modeling. At 5'6", I was pretty tall (or as tall as an Asian gal could be) but I never pursued modeling because I didn't think I was pretty enough to be a model. I wasn't skinny, and as much as I was interested in fashion and walking on a runway, my fear that I wasn't good enough kept me from trying. It was easier to focus on other aspects of my life that were easier and more realistic, like school and my career. But eventually I hit a revolutionary rock-bottom and in that moment I decided that I wanted to give it a shot. I started searching for artists to work with and even though it's safe to say that through it all I've had to crawl out of my comfort zone, as well as make a few mistakes here and there, modeling is an aspect of my life I have come to really enjoy. The biggest (and perhaps only real) mistake here was not trying it sooner.

Forcing Bad Relationships to Work

Relationships, both romantic and non-romantic ones, take a lot of work. But the amount of energy to support a great relationship is infinitely less exhausting than the energy it takes to force a bad one that doesn't make any real sense. Emotions may make it difficult to tell when to invest in someone, and occasionally this can make you feel more inclined to support a toxic relationship. Sometimes we even convince ourselves that we have more in common with that person than we actually do, or we stay in a relationship if only to avoid losing that person for good. The bad reasons for keeping bad relationships is that it clouds your overall judgment, keeping you from making decisions that truly make you happy and essentially preventing your life from taking it's natural course. But the good reason that you may have endured a bad relationship is in order to learn a valuable life lesson, or perhaps to learn something about yourself in order to help you grow. One of the most defining moments in my life has come from a toxic relationship that both of us chose to force for three and a half years. We were at each others' throats on a daily, and we weren't the only ones who could see how unhealthy this was. When we finally decided that enough was enough, I eventually came to realize just how much time we had wasted both emotionally and physically in how we really needed to be spending our time. As usual: the sooner you can learn these lessons, the more time you will ultimately save yourself.