How to Avoid Dying With Regrets
Learning how to live a life I want to live by reading The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware
You can skim through as follows:
- What made me read this book?
- What are the top five regrets?
- What caused the top five regrets?
- How did the book impact me?
1/4 What made me read this book?
How can you live without regrets?
Your time is on Earth is more fragile and finite than you think.
A palliative care nurse would know this truth very well.
So what regrets did she hear the most?
And how can you avoid them?
2/4 What are the top five regrets?
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
3/4 What caused these regrets?
Your environment
Who do you hang out with?
Where do you hang out?
If the people around you:
- chase job promotions
- live for the weekend
- drink to numb themselves
- make their career the number one priority
- have defeatist attitudes
That’s what you’ll pick up too.
Be in an environment that encourages you to become who you want to be.
Your mindset
If you keep telling yourself:
I can’t do this.
I’m not going to try because I don’t want to fail.
It’s too late to make a change.
You’ll be stuck here for the rest of your life.
So instead, tell yourself
I can.
Playing the victim
It’s so unfair.
Why does this always happen to me?
Nobody understands me.
Why bother?
Playing the victim prevents you from making the most of life.
Face your challenges head on, so you can claim a better life for yourself.
Putting too much emphasis on money & status
Work cannot be the only thing in your life.
If you allow your job to define you, you keep chasing for more.
You end up tying your self-worth to your achievements and belongings.
You care too much what others think of you.
And you lose sight of what matters:
- Time with those you love.
- Time doing things you love.
You need balance.
Being unable to see how people were trying to love you
Sometimes, when people do things with kind intentions, it accidentally hurts you instead.
The resulting pain causes you to push them away.
Separate the person from their actions and words.
This makes it easier for you to love them, forgive them, and be kind to yourself.
Our pride, apathy, fear of reprisal, guilt and/or humiliation
What stops you from expressing your feelings?
Maybe you’re afraid of how others will receive them.
But you stop others from knowing who you truly are if you don’t express your feelings.
You never know when it’ll be too late.
So tell people you love them & appreciate them now.
Don’t wait until you or someone you love is about to die.
You deserve peace and closure, regardless of how your honesty is received.
Not having enough courage
It takes courage to express your feelings honestly, especially if:
- you’re not feeling ok
- you need help with something
- you’ve never expressed honest feelings to someone before
- you don’t know how it will be received
Expressing your feelings is already courageous in itself.
Never regret trying.
Even if the recipent doesn’t respond as you hoped.
Their reaction is their choice, just as you’re responsible for your own reactions only.
Fear of being vulnerable
What stops you from asking for help?
I don’t want to bother my friends.
I don’t want to make things awkward.
They’re too busy for me and can’t help me.
Healthy relationships need honesty and balance.
Yes, expressing feelings might cause relationships to change or dissolve.
But the relationships that remain will be honest and of true quality.
You also can’t assume that others know how you feel.
Honesty is always rewarded with self-respect, a life free of guilt, richer relationships, and the pruning of toxic relationships.
Not taking time for yourself
Spending time with friends your age reminds you who you are outside of being a parent, sibling, or employee.
Different relationships have different lifespans.
Some friends are in your life for just long enough for the two of you to teach each other something important.
Some will stay with you and support you until the end.
That’s why it’s especially important for you to value your friends while they’re here.
It’s not just about staying in touch with your friends.
It is about giving yourself the gift of their company.
Being afraid to be happy
Are you so attached to your misery that you’re afraid to let go of it?
Or maybe you feel like you don’t deserve to be happy.
Or you’re so used to being unhappy that you find that identity comfortable.
This holds you back from living a better life, and fools you into believing this is all you can be.
Happiness is a choice.
Choose to smile.
Even if you don’t feel like it.
Try to find the blessings in each day.
Appreciate the moment you’re in, as much as you can.
You don’t need to feel guilty for being happy.
You deserve to know happiness.
Forgetting to be grateful for what you already have
You’ll always want more from life.
But when it will be enough?
Every day in itself is a gift and a blessing.
The current moment is all you ever have.
Appreciating what you already have allows you to be happy regardless of where you are in your life.
Rejecting feelings, whether they are yours or others
Do you ever feel like you need to psych yourself into being strong and happy for someone else?
Or you feel like you can’t deal with someone’s feelings on top of your own?
But you don’t have to carry it.
Just let them express themselves honestly, and accept their feelings as-is.
This way, no one will be blocked by carrying things they don’t need to.
Not enjoying yourself along the way to discovering your purpose in life
While you search for your life purpose, enjoy yourself along the way.
It’s easy to become too focused on the results and neglect your present.
Don’t depend on the end result for your happiness.
Enjoy happiness now.
4/4 How the Book Impacted Me
Of the five regrets, these three caught me off-guard:
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
(The other two were ones I was already working on).
How can I be true to myself?
What’s stopping me from being honest about how I was feeling to someone?
And what’s stopping me from being happy?
I answered those questions by noting which clients moved me:
- Anthony, who felt he deserved his accident due to the harm he had done to others in the past. He couldn’t forgive himself or be bothered to create a better life with his remaining time.
- Jozsef, who was too scared to let his feelings show.
- Rosemary, who wanted to be happy, but didn’t feel she deserved to be happy.
Their stories helped me see what was still holding me back:
Myself.
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
The pain I had accepted from others had been [their] suffering projected onto me.
When I was younger, I learned to bottle all my emotions up.
I felt like I would burden people if I didn’t.
As I grew up, I took on the identity of the calm, grounding (yet somewhat sarcastic) therapist friend in my circles.
Always knew what to do.
Always knew how to help.
Never ever cracked under pressure.
I felt like I was responsible for supporting everyone around me.
People were relying on me to keep myself together.
I got so used to fulfilling people’s expectations of me that I hadn’t stopped to ask myself what I wanted from me.
Was I content with who I was?
No.
Was this all who God wanted me to be?
Also no.
So I decided to do things that made me feel like me again:
Talking to people.
Learning new skills.
Writing.
This helped me feel happier with myself while I learned more about who God wanted me to become.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
[The] walls we create…[stop] others from knowing who we truly are.
I had to allow my feelings out. If not, they would always block me from reaching the potential of who I was truly here to be.
When I finished reading this section, I realized…
I never told anyone I loved them.
For some reason, it feels scary to say it out loud.
But what was even more scary?
The possibility that my friends didn’t really know how much I loved them.
So I decided whenever I got the opportunity to express my love to my friends, I would.
Taking time to have meals with them.
Acts of service.
Sending them messages when I thought of them.
Buying them gifts.
Offering hugs.
When my friends realized I was serious when I told them how much they meant to me, they seemed…relieved.
That’s when I learned how sad my friends felt when they felt like they couldn’t show love to me as much as they wanted to.
For me to heal, I had to freely give and receive love.
Not block myself off.
Understanding this moved me to show love to them more often.
Sure, some of them wouldn’t be able to reciprocate to the same level.
But that was ok with me.
Because at least I knew my friends knew I loved them.
And I’m happier for it.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
I don’t think I ever felt I deserved to be happy, you know…[how] do I be happy?
You allow yourself to be. You are a beautiful person and you deserve to know happiness. Allow yourself. Choose to be.
As silly as it might sound, what made me scared of being happy?
- I thought I didn’t deserve to be happy, because of my past mistakes.
- The universe was going to figure out I was happy, and then it would be swiftly replaced with sadness to restore the balance.
- I had grown comfortable with being sad.
This was also what made it challenging for me to tell people I loved them.
I felt like I was setting myself up for more pain later on.
But as a kind friend once pointed out to me…
There will always be bad times.
That’s exactly why you should always take the opportunity to celebrate whenever good things happen.
When they said that, I finally understood how much potential happiness I lost out on because I was still clinging to my negativity.
You can’t change the past.
Learn from it and let it go.
The future also doesn’t exist yet.
You don’t even know if it will exist.
Even more reason to choose to be happy now, while you can.
So please…be kind to yourself.
Choose to be happy, now.
