Guilt is a feeling of blame or responsibility for having done something wrong. In its healthiest form, guilt is a moral compass that helps guide us and keeps us from repeating behavior that we consider wrong or can hurt ourselves or others. 

Guilt, which is closely related to shame, doesn’t feel good: mentally replaying what happened, wishing you could go back and change what happened, you experience an upset stomach, clamped throat, tight chest, and loss of appetite. 

Guilt prompts you to apologize when you’ve hurt someone’s feelings because you want to make things right.

In its healthiest form, guilt is a moral compass that guides us.

Regret is there to invite us to view past events through different perspectives than the ones we had at the time, in the action of the moment. It is this creative perspective taking that grows our emotional intelligence and gives us greater maturity.

• Regret can be constructive if you parlay it into a sense of purpose, which hints at the driving forces behind the Great Resignation.

“The only people without regrets are people who have brain damage, people who are sociopaths, and people who have neurodegenerative diseases,” declares best-selling author Daniel Pink. “The rest of us have regrets. And when we reckon with them properly, they can point the way forward.” 

It was this underappreciated aspect of regret that prompted Pink to embark on a multi-year study on the subject, culminating in his latest book, “The Power of Regret.”

“The science of regret shows that looking backward can move you forward,” he says. “In many ways, though, and in the U.S. in particular, we are gripped by the philosophy of no regrets. We don’t talk about regrets. We think we should never have regrets. And that’s just nonsense.” 

Regret is an emotion. It’s an emotion that has a lot of cognition behind it, and it’s that kinda stomach-churning feeling when you realize that the decision you made, the choices that you took, and the path you decided to pursue resulted in a suboptimal outcome.

Now, disappointment doesn’t involve agents in the way that regret does. That’s a big difference. With regret, you have agency. With disappointment, you don’t have agency.