Speaking of Psychology: How to learn from regret, with Robert Leahy, PhD

Regret is painful—but it can also be productive, pushing us to make better decisions and needed changes in our lives. Robert Leahy, PhD, author of the book If Only…Finding Freedom From Regret, talks about the difference between productive and unproductive regret, why some people seem to ruminate on their regrets more than others, what to do if regret is consuming your thoughts, and whether people have more regrets than they used to.

Robert Leahy, PhD, is the founder and director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York City, and a clinical professor of psychology in the department of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He's the past president of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, the International Association of Cognitive Psychotherapy and the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. Dr. Leahy is the author or editor of 29 books for clinicians and the general public. His latest book is called If Only…Finding Freedom From Regret.

Kim Mills: All of us have regrets. A business that fails a degree we never finished, or a friendship that we let fade away. Sometimes we make choices we regret while other times we regret the choices we didn’t make or the paths we didn’t pursue. Regret can be painful. Who doesn’t know that sinking feeling that comes with saying, if only I hadn’t done that or said that? But some psychologists believe that regret can also be productive. By learning from our regrets rather than dwelling on them, we can make needed changes in our lives and set ourselves up to make better decisions in the future.

So what is the difference between productive and unproductive regret? Why do some people seem to ruminate on their regrets more than others? If regret is consuming your thoughts, what can you do about it? And in this age of social media and fear of missing out, do people have more regrets than they used to?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Robert Leahy, founder and director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York City, and a clinical professor of psychology in the department of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He’s the past president of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, the International Association of Cognitive Psychotherapy and the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. Dr. Leahy is the author or editor of 29 books for clinicians and the general public. His latest book is called If Only…Finding Freedom From Regret, and it is all about learning to understand regret and make it a tool for self-knowledge and change. 

Dr. Leahy, thank you for joining me.

Robert Leahy, PhD: Well, thank you, Kim, for having me. And I hope you don’t regret having me on the show.

Mills: I don’t think I will. Let’s talk about what we mean by regret. Is regret and emotion or a way of thinking? Or a little of both?

Leahy: Well, it’s a little bit of both. Regret is certainly a way of thinking. It’s a sense of emotion of disappointment or remorse or sadness about an action taken or not taken, or what we might anticipate we might feel if we take an action or do not take an action. So it’s both cognitive and emotional. And the thing that’s interesting about regret, Kim, is that—and in the clinical literature there really is very little on regret that I came across in my reading. There’s a lot on regret and behavioral decision making, decision processes, but it’s the second most commonly mentioned emotion in conversations that college students have—love being the first. So I would say it’s a pervasive emotion. It’s often an emotion that people ruminate about, an emotion that can linger on sometimes for decades. I mean, I’ve talked to people in their 90s who regret decisions they made when they were in their 20s. So it’s a fascinating emotion and looking forward to talking about it today.

Mills: Well, what’s the difference between productive and unproductive regret?

Leahy: Right. A lot of people, especially on social media where it’s always the positive, the power of positive thinking and all regret is, is it’s an emotion. Like all emotions evolved because they were adaptive. So how can regret be adaptive? It certainly can be maladaptive, it can lead to rumination, depression, self-criticism, resentment. But it can be adaptive if you use it in the right way.

So for example, productive regret would be an ability to learn from my mistakes or to anticipate learning from my mistakes. So for example, if you ask young people to think about what they’re going to live on when they’re in their sixties toward the end of their working career, how much money they’re going to have, that increases planned savings. Half the people, for example, who are prescribed medication for hypertension a year later don’t take the medication. But if you ask them to think about what their life would be like if they have a stroke and they’re paralyzed or unable to speak, whatever, that significantly increases the compliance with medication. So regret can be used productively if you look back and you think, gee, what did I do that in the future I might do differently? That’s like a self-correction type thing.

Unproductive regret or maladaptive regret is characterized not by self-correction, but by self-criticism. And in fact, in some cases, self-loathing. It’s unproductive regrets characterized by dwelling on it over and over and over, and not viewing it as an opportunity to learn from experience. I mean, if you think about regret as—you carried out an experiment, you did something or you chose not to do something and you’re not satisfied with the consequences. Well, we as are always carrying out experiments, but we in our ordinary lives carry out experiments. You carry out the experiments of bringing up the most provocative political statement on Thanksgiving at dinner with your family, and you find out that that experiment didn’t work very well. What did you learn from that experiment?

What’s interesting to me is there’s some people who don’t seem to learn from their mistakes or don’t anticipate their mistakes. So for example, people who abuse drugs, who overeat, who don’t take their medication, who engage in unsafe sex, who say inappropriate things, they don’t seem to anticipate the regret. They’re not using what I would call prospective regret or anticipatory regret in a useful way. People who are manic who think they can do anything, that they have all the powers in the world and they’re too sexy for their own clothes and they don’t anticipate regret, they’re a little bit too over the top with their confidence. So it’s an important thing to use regret productively.

And I think the most economical way, Kim, to use regret is to use the regrets of other people. I know when I was in my early 20s, a lot of my age peers were misusing drugs or misusing alcohol, and I thought, gee, the only thing I really have of any value—I had no money, I was on a fellowship—the only thing I have any value is my brain. I’m not going to endanger my brain or my health the way some of these people have. So it’s using the regrets of other people in a productive way by learning from their mistakes.

Mills: So there is a kind of inoculation then for certain people if you’re capable of visualizing what your future might be like if you did something or didn’t do something.

Leahy: Exactly. I like the word “inoculation,” Kim. That’s great. It’s kind of like there’s a lot of talk about living in the present moment, which sounds so comfortable, but the only creature that lives entirely in the present moment is a mosquito. So I like to think about living in all the moments of my life, thinking about what I did when I was younger, the mistakes I made, the things I did, but also thinking about my future self. So for example, one of the techniques that we use in cognitive behavioral therapy is to ask yourself, what would your future self say? I often do role plays with patients. So what would your future self say about over drinking or trying to malign your boss or spending all this money or whatever it is? What would your future self say? Not your immediate self, your future self, because your future self may be the wise self. And that’s something that I think that’s something that people often don’t recognize—that consequences will follow from actions that you take or do not take.

Mills: Is there a difference in the degree of regret between something that you’ve done and regretting something that you didn’t do, the road not taken? Is one type of regret more difficult to learn from than the other?

Leahy: Well, it’s interesting because in the short term, we tend to have more hot regret or emotional intensity of regret for actions taken. So we may be correct that if we take this action, we may immediately after have some regrets. For example, buyer’s remorse. You buy a car or you buy an apartment or a house. A very common thing is right after you think, what was I thinking? I’m putting all this money down, whatever. So this is called the action effect. We have more regrets for action taken in the short term.

But in the long term, as people look back on their lives, they tend to regret what they did not do. And this is true cross-culturally. In other cultures that have been studied, we tend to regret things we did not do. We did not pursue that course of action or that education or that relationship or that investment. So that tends to be less of an intense, passionate regret. It tends to be more of a kind of lingering unpleasant feeling, but people can ruminate about that for months, years, decades.

Mills: Well, let’s talk about ruminating for a minute because some people seem to get really stuck dwelling on their regrets and living and reliving what they did or didn’t do. Are there some personality characteristics that lead some people to experience more regret or more painful regret?

Leahy: Sure, yeah. So we know that rumination is a fundamental part of depression, and in fact, the research by the late Nolen-Hoeksema at Yale shows that people who ruminate are more likely to get depressed and stay depressed. Having said that, in terms of tying in regret with rumination, there are certain ways of looking at the world that lead to more rumination. One is to have inflexible expectations—that this is what I expected, it wasn’t what turned out, and so I’m going to just dwell on it. The other is the tendency to not accept. So in my view, I live in New York City and I know, Kim, that you lived in New York City at one time. So when you live in New York City, you’ve got to accept trade-offs. I mean, even standing for an elevator is a major negotiation.

Mills: Where’s my closet? Where’s my backyard?

Leahy: Right, exactly. When people get married, they end up getting divorced over closet space, not over arguments. But some people have a hard time accepting. They think it is kind of like there are two ways of thinking that I think contribute to rumination and regret. One is I call pure mind—that my mind should be pure. So for example, I should never be ambivalent. For example, I was talking with a young man who had been dating and actually living with this woman for several years, and he said, I don’t know how can I get married if I have mixed feelings? So he equated ambivalence with, it’s not a good decision. I said, well, first of all, the word decision in Latin means to cut away from, and it means that you have mixed feelings. That’s what a decision is. Second, one reason you have mixed feelings is that—I mean Romeo and Juliet is a wonderful fantasy story, but it would not be a great way of basing your future commitment to your life partner. Within five days there are several people dead, including Romeo and Juliet, based on a glance at a party without any conversation at the time.

So ambivalence may be a sign of reality testing rather than the idea that my mind should be absolutely pure, my emotions should always be positive. We have to recognize that life is filled with complexity and nuance, and that ambivalence is simply recognition, an honest recognition of that. It’s like Salieri, a famous composer around the time of Mozart, said “too many notes.” But Mozart had just the right of notes, the right number of notes, whatever. 

Mills: We know that now. 

Leahy: Yeah, yeah. He’s pretty good, that Mozart guy. Maybe not as great as Taylor Swift, but you can’t have everything in life.

But so ambivalence, the intolerance of ambivalence contributes to regret and rumination in any decision. People think about “what is the risk of staying?” What is the risk of changing? All decisions are risk versus risk. So some people look at life as, I’m going to try to find something where there’s no risk. Every option has a risk. So for example, if you put your money into a savings account and get close to 0% interest, the risk you take is you lose against inflation and you lose against the opportunity to make money. If you invest it or put it in bonds, invest it in equities. If you put it in equities, you run the risk that the stock market could crash. So there’s risk versus risk. If you get married, there’s a risk it won’t work out. If you don’t get married, there’s a risk you’ll be lonely or whatever. It’s comparing the risk. It’s not looking for a risk-free alternative.

The other part of what leads people, I think, to have difficulty making decisions is the degree to which—this is especially true with people who are depressed—the degree to which we tend to have a bias to predict negatives. So I was talking with somebody who is very, very smart and very successful. In fact, very wealthy, who keeps almost all his money in CDs and money markets rather than investing in the stock market. Now, that might be good on occasion, but in the long term that is probably not a good strategy. But other things in this person’s life, he was risk averse, should I leave my partner? Should I make this decision? Whatever it is, accepting reasonable risk is part of making decisions, and it’s also part of living with the consequences. So if the consequences, one of the things that makes it hard for people and leads them to regret, to having more regret and rumination, is the tendency they have to idealize the alternative and to discount what they have. So for example, people who regret, oh, if I had married this other person or pursued this other career, I would be so much happier.

I remember a few years ago thinking—I know when I was in high school, everybody thought I was going to be a lawyer, and I thought I was going to be a lawyer, but I decided to be a psychologist and I’m pretty happy with that. But I thought maybe I should have been a lawyer and all that. And then I began thinking, gee, I know a lot of lawyers and they have one of the highest rates of depression. It’s such an adversarial—I’m not maligning lawyers, but I think for me, being a psychologist has been a good choice. But we tend to idealize the alternatives and people who regret often idealize the alternatives. They have the fear of missing out. Somebody recently published an article on the joy of missing out. 

Mills: it’s another way to look at it. 

Leahy: Yeah, thank God I’m not at that, I’m not on 42nd Street at 12:00 midnight New Year’s Eve. Thank God I missed out on that.

And so there’s this sort of tendency to idealize the alternatives and then to discount what you have. One way of countering the idea, there’s several ways of countering the idea, of living with what you have, is to imagine if you had nothing. And this is I think something that in an affluent and very ambitious society, we often don’t spend enough time with gratitude. So for example, I walk to my office. I live on the Upper East Side, my office is on 58th Street. Even if I walk down Third Avenue, I’ll see people who are homeless. I saw elderly woman who was homeless pushing a cart and stuff. And two emotions that can counter regret or—one is compassion for somebody who has so little. And the other is gratitude for the fact that I’m actually able to walk down Third Avenue and go to a nice office and talk to you today.

So it’s kind of like we don’t really have the kind of culture of gratitude. And one thing that’s interesting, Kim, is that there’s a search tool called Google Ngram that you can look—type in Google Ngram, and you’ll come up with a search engine. And on the search engine you can type in a word and see how often that word is used in the printed language over the last 150 years. So if we look at regret, regret had an incredible increase in the frequency in English language, printed books and documents, between 1980 and 2019. And what happened during that time was a dramatic increase in economic inequality, a dramatic increase in perfectionism in surveys that were taken from like 1989 to 2016, and a dramatic increase I think, in the idea that I should be able to do everything.

So regret is the opportunity emotion, and we often think that opportunity is always a wonderful thing, but opportunity is also leads you to think, well, this person is so successful. Why am I not successful? Why am I not extremely wealthy or famous or whatever? So we have this, I mean, it’s a dramatic increase from 1980 on you find the same thing by the way, in Spanish literature and in Russia. So you have this dramatic increase in economic inequality, globalization, alienation, perfectionism, social media kicking in 20 years ago, where it gives you the social comparison. How many people are comparing themselves to the homeless, elderly woman on Third Avenue? They’re comparing themselves to Elon Musk, who by the way doesn’t seem to be a very happy person with his 240 billion.

Mills: But I mean, they’re even comparing themselves to their peers. But because people use social media in such a way as to always present something beautiful— this is the lovely dinner I had last night, this is the vacation I took. Whereas their life might be miserable, but you don’t know that, right?

Leahy: Exactly. Yeah. Like the humble brag, I’m so humbled, I’m so outstanding and having a wonderful time. I said, no, you’re not humble. But let me actually bring up humility. One of the concepts I describe in my book, If only…Finding Freedom from Regret, is what I call adaptive humility. And this is a concept in the literature on humility that I find very appealing. Adaptive humility is not “I’m a doormat and I deserve nothing.” And the whole—that’s not what adaptive humility is. Adaptive humility is, I’m just another human being. I’m not special. I don’t deserve any special treatment. I can make mistakes, I can be wrong, I can apologize. And what we know is that from the research on humility, that people who are viewed as having humility, people who are viewed as sincerely apologizing, are trusted more, have better relationships, have better friendships, and people want to work with them.

And I’m sure many people listening to this can think of people they know who never apologize. Adaptive humility is, I made a mistake. I said something that wasn’t fair. I really felt bad about that. I want to apologize. I hope you accept my apology. But in a sense, really you can’t say You owe me an apology. It’s kind of like simply asking for an apology is not the currency to buy an apology.

But adaptive humility allows you to live with mistakes, allows you to anticipate mistakes, allows you to use regret productively, allows you to have gratitude for what you have. I mean, I grew up very poor in a housing project. It was a tough neighborhood, but—I’m not glamorizing poverty, but I think it led me to one, to have compassion for people who have less, not to be an elitist with people who don’t have high-status positions, to treat everybody as an equal, to be able to live as a human being, not as some character above the crowd.

Mills: In your work, you talk about the “sunk cost effect” when it comes to regret. What do you mean by that and how can we overcome that cost to make better choices so that we might have fewer regrets in the future?

Leahy: So the sunk cost effect, I think we all can identify with this, and you buy something, you spend a lot of money, you buy a dress or a jacket or whatever, and you wear it once. You put it in your closet and it’s there for 5 or 10 years and you or your partner say, why don’t you throw that out? You haven’t worn that jacket, Bob, in 10 years. Oh, I paid good money for it. So it’s called a sunk cost. In other words, I’ve already put the cost in. I’ve already paid the good money, but now it’s not useful to me because I’m not using it and I’m only kidding myself. And plus it’s taking up room in the closet. Plus I could give it away to somebody else who could use it.

But we have—humans are the only living creature that gets trapped by sunk costs. I mean cats and dogs and insects and birds, monkeys, they’re not trying to justify their past decisions. They’re not saying, well, I’m going to hold onto that banana for the next 5 months because I worked hard to get that banana when it’s no longer useful. They move on to something else. But humans are self-reflective. We want to make sense of our decisions. We think that, oh, if I throw that piece of clothing out, I’m going to regret it. I’ll miss it. I’ll be wasting—I mean, one exercise I use when I give workshops is, let’s imagine I hold up a $100 bill, and I said, I’m not going to spend this on myself. I’m not going to give this to anybody, but what I’d like to do is burn it in front of people. Most people watching me burn it would be really angry with me because they don’t want to see me wasting a $100 bill.

And it’s like when your mother says to you, and you’re 10 years old, eat everything on your plate. There are people somewhere else in the world starving. It’s this human thing about wasting and regret. So what can you do with the sunk costs? For example, you can have sunk costs about a relationship or a career. Some people start out a career and they hate it after a few years and they say, oh, I can’t give it up because I put several years of training. I can’t walk away from all that. That’s the sunk cost. The question is, is the future going to be useful and is it going to be pleasurable and meaningful?

When I left academics, I wanted to pursue a clinical career. The husband of one of my colleagues said, Bob is leaving academics and research, what a waste of a good mind. And I think maybe he had a point, I should have listened to him. But it’s sort of like the idea that we have to justify our past investment. For example, people will hold onto a stock and say, well, I paid $100 for the stock. It went down to 60. It’ll come back. No, your money died and went to heaven. It’s not coming back. It’s not going to be resurrected—go to the cemetery, rest in peace. There’s your investment. But it’s something that humans do.

So what we should think about, one is what is the future utility of this? What is the cost of my keeping it? What is the benefit? Second, like with a relationship, if I stay in this bad relationship for another year, what opportunities will I miss if I stay in a bad marriage or whatever, I’ll miss the opportunity of finding a new relationship or the opportunity of being happy on my own. I’ll miss the opportunity of not having arguments with my partner. So we think about opportunity costs. We think about the error of trying to justify the past rather than trying to make the future better. So your decision should always be about the future self and future utility. But we often think, well, people will look at me and think, oh, what an idiot. He wasted or she wasted all that time.

I think when people see you getting out of a bad situation, they often think, well, it’s about time. Good for you. But if they don’t, what kind of friend is that that they want you to stay in a bad situation? The other thing is, what advice would you give to somebody else? So we’re really, really good, Kim, at telling other people, get the hell out of that relationship or change your career or change your job or whatever. We’re really good at telling people to make a change because we don’t have to justify their decision. This is like cognitive dissonance. We don’t have to justify for them why they made that decision. So yeah, the sunk cost is very powerful. And your cat or your dog or whatever pets you have or birds or whatever, they’re not sitting there ruminating about what will other birds or cats think of me? And I’ll just prove I’m a bad decision-maker. I won’t be—

Mills: As far as we know, they’re not doing that.

Leahy: I won’t be able to get into the college of my choice. Cats only have four cognitions. This feels good. This doesn’t feel good. I want that. And what’s next?

Mills: So to shift gears a little bit here, let me ask you this. How early in life does regret manifest? At what age do children begin to feel regret, and does that change as they get older?

Leahy: Yeah, so it’s interesting. The kids begin showing evidence of regret between the ages of 4 and 7, and the kids who express regret turn out to be better at making decisions because they learn from their mistakes or they anticipate mistakes. Second, they’re better at regulating their emotions because they think, well, if I act out in this way, maybe I’ll regret it. Or if I do this, my emotions will become dysregulated. As people toward the end of life, when you look at the regrets of people in hospice, people who may be dying in the next month or few months, whatever, they’re not having regrets like I wish I spent more time on social media, or I wish I got the bargains at Bloomingdale’s at the end of the Christmas season. They’re not thinking about that.

The regrets that they expressed are I wish I had been more true to my emotions. I wish I had told people I love them. I wish I had pursued things I really wanted to do, and basically living according to my values and according to the human relationships. And I think that’s an important thing to listen to people as they get toward the end of life, what they’ve learned. They have a lot of wisdom about what matters. And so if you look at the regrets of people in hospice, that’s what we see. We don’t see materialism and status and proving winning arguments. That’s not in the regret repertoire of elderly people. In fact, elderly people have a positivity bias. They may have more long-term regrets. They’ve been around for a long time. But on a day-to-day basis, they more easily distance themselves from regrets. They just kind of move on. Alright, so that didn’t work out last week. I’m going to move on, every day’s a gift.

Mills: Do men and women experience regret differently?

Leahy: So men and women, and again, I think this is going to change as gender roles become more integrated. Let’s say men have more regrets in the research about achievement and materialism, and women have more regrets about relationship and having sex too early in a relationship. Having said that, men and women have a lot of the same regrets. When we look at cultural differences, Americans have more regrets about romance, about school, about education, career. Whereas people in Asian culture, like in Taiwan or Japan, more likely to have regrets about family and about relationships and about interpersonal things. There’s a lot of overlap. It’s not like either or, but so it’s kind of thinking about what your regrets are all about what they say to you about it.

But I think going back to what you mentioned earlier, Kim, I do think that social media, that regret is often tied into social comparison. Not always, but it’s often tied into, well, look at that person. They had a patient who was doing fairly well in his career, but was not making, had not accumulated as much wealth as people he went to college with and regretting where he was or having envy and whatever. But I said, well, let’s look at what you do have. And he had a great relationship with his partner, great relationship with his kids. He’s healthy, he’s a good person. And I said, do you think there’d be people who would be envious of you? So we often don’t think that when we regret things, we don’t think, gee, a lot of people might be envious of me. So it’s a paradox. I think that’s the social comparison, I think should be geared to gratitude and compassion. I’ve never met somebody, maybe these people never go to therapy, but I’ve never met somebody who said, Dr. Leahy, you’ve really got to help me because I have too much gratitude and compassion. I don’t know. It’s getting the best of me. Yeah, we got to change that.

Mills: On the other hand, I know someone who likes to tell people that she regrets no choices that she ever made in her life, which I find really hard to believe. Do you encounter—are there really such people who say, yeah, everything I did, I was great.

Leahy: Yeah, right? Yeah. I say nonsense. You’re looking in the wrong mirror. And I think that’s part of our contemporary social meme. I have no regrets. Every decision I made was mine. I lived with the consequences.

How are you going to learn from your mistakes? Why would you ever apologize if you don’t have regrets? Right? Right. I mean, imagine you were looking for a life partner, right? You’re looking for a life partner and you meet somebody and they say, oh, I really like you. They attracted you. You’re a wonderful person, but I think you need to know something about me. I’m incapable of regret and apology, not unlike some politicians. So well, I don’t know. For a lot of people, that might be a red flag because you want people who have some regrets and some apologies. That’s how you heal relationships.

Mills: Are there any big areas in this aspect of psychology that you feel are under researched, that we still need to know answers about?

Leahy: Well, I think we really need to look at a lot of cultural issues and regret, a lot of LBGQT issues and regret. And there’s some recent research on that, like gender affirming surgery. Only 1% of patients who have that expressed regret, despite what the critics may say of transgender and gender affirming—only 1%. Whereas people who have cosmetic surgery, a significant percentage have regrets. So are you more likely to have regret about a nose job than a transgender? Yes, by many factors. So the facts can often confuse your thinking, but so I think we need to really look at a lot of the cultural and demographic differences and group differences and regret.

And then how people spontaneously deal with regret. I mean, a lot of times if you’re a therapist, you listen to a patient and you think, gee, that’s a great idea. I wish I thought of it. And then you realize, yeah, my wife has been telling me that for five years. Why am I more likely to listen to a patient than my partner? So a lot of times people come up with their spontaneous cures or strategies or techniques. Therapists don’t have a monopoly on wisdom, even if they have any wisdom, but they don’t have a monopoly on it.

So looking at how people make the best of what they have. And what I’m struck by, I’m not a religious person. I was raised Catholic, but I’m not practicing anything. But I had an Orthodox Jewish patient who said, he said, Bob, you know, the mezuzah right outside the threshold of the door you see in apartments in New York that I touch that when I leave the apartment to remind me of God’s presence throughout the day. Even though I’m not a believer, I thought, what a beautiful reminder of gratitude and humility to take throughout the day.

And I don’t think you to be like a Zen warrior to think this way, but I think there’s a lot to be said for recognizing life has trade-offs. You’re never going to get everything you want on your terms. So forget about demanding it. Be flexible about your expectations. Recognize your mind is not going to be a pure mind. It’s going to be a kaleidoscope filled with noise, and you can be ambivalent about your partner for the rest of your life and still have a good relationship, because all your friends who know you are ambivalent about you because they know you. And that to me is living in the real world.

And regret is always about a fictional world. It’s about a, what psychologists call a counterfactual world. What does “counterfactual” mean? Against the facts. It means it’s not a fact. It’s what you think could be. It’s a possibility, emotion, as opposed to living in the real world and making the best of what you have while still trying to do better. It doesn’t mean you are resigned and give up. You can always do better. You can always grow. But we often don’t recognize how fortunate we are until we talk to people living in other parts of the world who are suffering or see people who are disabled and struggling just to get down the street and to live.

Mills: Dr. Leahy, I want to thank you for chatting with me today. I found this to be very interesting and informative, and I think that our listeners will learn a great deal from it. Thank you.

Leahy: Well, Kim, thank you so much for having me. I really sincerely appreciate your having me on. Hope you have a great day.

Mills: Thank you. 

You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. 

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.