Ask HN: How do you stop regretting?
Hi. Sorry you're hurting.<p>A professional specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy might be especially helpful to you, in just a few sessions. You need to break the pattern of thought that leads you to fixate on your regrets, shortcomings and other negativity. With all of this taking up space in your mind, you'll have a hard time finding the attention or energy for the many exciting options open to you.<p>Put another way – with your hand full of the whip you're using to beat the hell out of yourself, it isn't free to work on real things.<p>Meanwhile, tonight, right now, take a moment and write yourself a letter. Write from the perspective of the kindest, dearest, most understanding friend you can imagine.<p>As this friend, express understanding and compassion for the hardships and missed opportunities you've endured. Offer encouragement. Catalog all the disappointments of your history if that's what you feel like doing – but do so in a way that says "Hey dude. That hurts. I totally understand why you're feeling bad. It's cool."<p>In short – give yourself a break. And repeat the exercise any time you're having a rough night like this one.<p>There's no time machine. There's nothing you can do to go back and change things. All you have is right now. Today. This moment. In any given moment, you get to decide your stance and attitude. You can't reverse your past, but you have full control over how you dispose of every single second between now, as you're reading this, and when you die.<p>It is guaranteed that your experiences are 100% unique to you. It is impossible to know what emergent qualities will arrange themselves to suit your unique success.<p>The other guarantee is that for as long as you spend time thinking of the past instead of building the future, the unique value of your experiences will remain locked up, unused.<p>The mind is an incredibly powerful yet fallible pattern matching engine. It can find anything, from any input, it seems. Just the same way you can make a face or a zoo animal from a pattern of water vapor in the sky, you're making a failure out of a pattern of events in the past. In both cases, it's illusion.<p>There's no instant fix. Patterns of thought take time and effort to change. All I can tell you as that only you can decide to change course. It'll be hard. It won't always be fun. It won't be overnight. But you can definitely do it. And anything is better than this feeling, right?<p>Here's Dave McClure's blog on his late bloom, which perhaps will give you some perspective on just how much road there still is ahead:<p><a href="http://500hats.com/late-bloomer" rel="nofollow">http://500hats.com/late-bloomer</a>