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Regrets, we’ve had a few. Maybe you’ve second-guessed the specialty you chose. Or wish you could go back in time and make a different treatment decision.

Ideally, you deal with regret better than you once did. As people age, they tend to experience regret less negatively, research suggests. A study in the journal Emotion found that as people got older, they reported fewer new regrets and calmer emotional responses to years-old regrets. While healthcare professionals weren’t specifically recruited for the study, “there is no reason to think that our results would not also speak to the experience of mid-career or late-career physicians,” said study author Julia Nolte, PhD, an assistant professor of economic psychology at Tilburg University in Tilburg, Netherlands.

Yet in medicine, the stakes are higher — and regret, all too common. A 2025 study from the Journal of Critical Care found that ICU physicians and nurses experienced a median of three regrets in a month. Regret is associated with burnout, lower job satisfaction, and “defensive medicine” — when physicians either undertreat out of fear or overtreat to compensate for a poor past outcome, as detailed in an AMA Journal of Ethics article.

If our view of regret changes with age, that means it also evolves over the course of a medical career. Here’s what the research says about regret and how to cope with it, whether you’re a few years or a few decades into your practice.

Your Perspective Changes Over Time

Older adults had fewer regrets within the last year and experienced fewer “hot” emotions about their regrets, such as anger and frustration, than younger adults. That’s a conclusion of Nolte’s research, completed during her studies at Cornell University. Older people also used fewer strategies to quash feelings, such as wistfulness or despair, arising from years-old regrets.

Aging itself is part of the explanation. “Changes in our memory and cognitive ability seem to lead older adults to process regrets differently and may reduce our reliance on active coping strategies to address regrets,” said Nolte. “That older adults seem to ‘mellow’ with age and are less emotionally affected by regrets is linked to older adults’ relatively better mental health.”

Time can ease regrets, too. “The longer ago a mistake or decision was made, the less it feels like we can still do something actively about it,” said Nolte. Yet older adults felt just as compelled as the younger crowd to fix more recent regrets, her study found. “So that seems to be a genuine time-related effect rather than a psychological one.”

Omission and Commission

Longstanding regret psychology tells us that our most lasting regrets are not the things we’ve done (commissions) but rather those we did not do (omissions). Short term, we tend to regret actions — a surgical error or sharp word to a colleague. With time, we’re more likely to regret inactions — the tests you did not run, hunches you did not follow up on, or diagnoses you missed, Nolte said. Her findings reinforce this: Compared with younger adults, older adults worried more about missed opportunities than mistakes made.

However, when it comes to medicine, doctors’ experiences might go in the opposite direction.

“I have no empiric data on this, but it seems that more junior physicians tend to have more regret around omission and what they feel they should have done,” said Timothy Pawlik, MD, PhD, a surgical oncologist at The Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus, Ohio, who has studied regrets in physicians and patients. “When you get a little bit more senior, you’ve seen more and understand that things don’t always work out. Sometimes an intervention doesn’t help, and the patient got all downsides and no upsides, so you might have a bit more regret about what you did as you get more seasoned.”

In the Journal of Critical Care study, 43% of doctors and nurses stated their main source of regret was the “futility of care” — initiating or continuing treatments they felt were not beneficial to the patient. Other research shows that regrets associated with “mistakes made” tend to feel worse than those from missed opportunities, Nolte said. An especially bad mistake that led to significant patient harm could leave a lasting imprint.

Of course, results can vary. In the exact same scenario, no two physicians will come away with the same regrets. “Everyone has a different barometer of regret,” said Pawlik.

What Physicians Regret Most

Research on physician regret points to a few key triggers.

Impossibly hard decisions: A study of 221 US physicians found that the difficulty of decisions was the strongest predictor of regret. When you face more tough choices, you have more chances to do something you’ll question later. Objectivism was a negative predictor of regret, suggesting that using empirical data in decision-making, a keystone of evidence-based medicine, may lead to less regret.

Diagnostic errors: A small explorative study of German physicians who made a diagnosis that differed from the patient’s final diagnosis found that 93% of doctors felt deep regret, even though only one third of the cases involved preventable patient harm. The doctors felt strong emotions of guilt and shame, perhaps because they were holding themselves to an unrealistic standard of perfection, the researchers say.

Their career path altogether: Join the crowd. “Career-related regrets are among the most common regrets, so it is likely that mid- and late-career physicians might wonder whether they chose the right career,” Nolte said. “They may think about the ‘what if’ of having chosen a different medical concentration or a different career track altogether.” A recent study of 615 doctors in China found that 9.4% faced high levels of regret about their chosen subspecialty, especially if they were dealing with burnout.

If You’re Regretting…

A mistake: Remember all the people you helped. “What really sticks with people is this one thing we did not do perfectly, and it has such huge repercussions in the health realm,” said Nolte. “Thinking of the overall good you’ve done, and the people you’ve helped, could help to affirm that while this specific decision was not an ideal one, your overall life path has been good.”

Your career path: Thinking about the people you’ve helped can tame this kind of regret, too. Or you can take control by making a change. Take another lesson from older people — they’re better at ignoring the sunk-cost fallacy that can hold you back. Don’t overemphasize the time and effort you’ve invested. Consider whether other health systems or organizations might offer opportunities that suit you better, or whether you want to start something new.

A tough decision or result: Practice mindfulness. It can help to reduce the rumination and worry that commonly underlie regrets. Pawlik is actively studying the effect of brief mindfulness interventions to optimize well-being in surgeons. “Meditation and mindfulness can help you try to find meaning, find the good, and understand how you’ve learned a lesson that can benefit future patients,” he said.

Practicing mindfulness can decrease emotional exhaustion and improve mood, stress responses, and strength of mind in physicians, according to a review of 31 studies published in Frontiers in Psychology. Many hospitals and health systems offer mindfulness-based stress reduction courses. Try one out.

If you need help coping: Connect with peer support, suggested Pawlik. It works: “Finding people who will support you through curiosity and understanding and validation and empathy has been shown over and over again, empirically, to be one of the most powerful interventions to help people cope with regret,” he said.

Many health systems now offer formal peer support programs. Check the professional societies you belong to — many of them are adopting peer support programs, too.

“It’s important that young people know that they shouldn’t try to go it alone,” said Pawlik. “We need to have a culture that facilitates psychological safety, where people can feel that they will not be judged, because people will feel pain, guilt, and humiliation sometimes from adverse outcomes, and that can lead to moral injury and the ‘second victim syndrome.’”

The experts cited in this article reported having no relevant conflicts of interest.