Taken literally, living without regret is impossible. Any life of real length collects regrets the way a shoreline collects driftwood, and the people who seem freest of them are not the ones who never made mistakes. What they have is not an empty ledger but a different relationship to it, and that relationship rests on a couple of habits that psychology has studied fairly closely. One reduces how many of the deepest regrets a person generates in the first place. The other changes what happens to the regrets that arrive anyway, so that they teach rather than fester. Neither has anything to do with being perfect, and that is precisely why they are available to anyone.
They make decisions by their values
The first habit works upstream, shaping choices before regret has a chance to form. People who carry little regret tend to decide by asking what actually matters to them rather than what is easiest or most impressive in the moment. As discussions of values-based living in acceptance and commitment therapy describe, acting in alignment with your core values tends to bring a sense of integrity and fulfillment, whereas acting against them is closely tied to guilt, anxiety, and regret, and much psychological distress arises from the gap between what a person values and how they actually behave.
This matters because the regrets that cut deepest are usually not ordinary mistakes but betrayals of oneself: the times we did what we knew was wrong for us, stayed silent when our values called for speech, or chased something we did not truly want because it was expected. Deciding by your values does not guarantee good outcomes, since plenty of principled choices still go badly, but it does prevent that particular corrosive regret, the one that says I knew better and did otherwise. A person who can look at a hard decision and honestly say it fit what they cared about is largely insulated from the worst kind of hindsight, even when the results disappoint. The habit is not grand; it is the small, repeated practice of checking a choice against your own values before making it, which quietly keeps you from accumulating the regrets that come from living against yourself.
They treat their regrets with self-compassion
The second habit works downstream, on the regrets that form despite everything. Here the decisive difference is how a person responds to their own failures, and the counterintuitive finding is that kindness works better than harshness. In research by Jia Wei Zhang and Serena Chen, people who approached their regrets with self-compassion, treating themselves with the understanding they would offer a friend rather than with self-criticism, were better able to accept the regret, and that acceptance in turn promoted genuine personal improvement, helping them learn from the experience instead of merely brooding over it.
The instinctive assumption is that being hard on yourself is what drives growth, and that self-compassion is a soft excuse. The evidence points the other way. Harsh self-criticism tends to trap people in rumination, replaying the mistake without resolving it, which is exactly how a regret becomes a permanent resident rather than a passing teacher. Self-compassion, by contrast, lowers the threat enough that a person can actually look at what went wrong, absorb the lesson, and move on. And it does not make people complacent; the same body of research finds that self-compassionate individuals are more motivated to make amends and to change, not less. That is the mechanism behind the light regret load. These people are not suppressing their regrets or pretending the mistakes did not happen. They are processing them cleanly, extracting the lesson, and setting the weight down, rather than carrying every old failure as a stone in the pocket.
What this does and does not promise
Put the two habits together and the picture is coherent: fewer of the deepest regrets are generated, because choices are checked against values, and the regrets that do occur are metabolized rather than hoarded, because they are met with compassion instead of contempt. Living without regret turns out to mean carrying regret lightly, which is a far more achievable and honest goal.
It is worth being clear about the limits, because both habits are easily misread. Neither is a license for self-indulgence. Values-based living requires ruthless honesty about the times you have strayed, and self-compassion, properly understood, includes accountability and the effort to repair, not a comfortable pass on your own behavior. Nor can any habit deliver a life with nothing to regret; genuine loss, hard trade-offs, and choices that could only be judged in hindsight are simply part of being alive, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of denial. The honest promise is narrower and better. Decide by what you value and the number of self-betrayals shrinks. Meet your failures with kindness and the ones that remain become lessons rather than wounds. Do both, and you will still have regrets, but they will sit lightly, teach what they have to teach, and leave you largely at peace with a life that was, like every life, imperfectly lived.