Fasting Space

Good morning everybody. Welcome. So nice to have you here today.
Today I'm going to be diving in and talking about regret.
Can be a difficult thing to talk about.
Like trauma. Something that can we can harbor deep inside of us.
I wanted to play this music. I say as we're starting out. Let this music and the soak in hear that melody working its way in.
Moonlight from Beethoven. Can it find it? You know, sometimes we bury something so deep we're trying to keep the lid on it. You know, it's like a pressure cooker tightening it on there.
Are these notes the type of thing that can dig down and find it?
The music, you know, the minor chords. It's kind of bringing in a little bit of that, that melancholy mood that so often a regret can leave us in, but also.
There's optimism in it too. And so this is going to set the tone, set the tone for what we're trying to do. I'm trying to run away or look away from dark or difficult things, or trying to move toward them with grace and encouragement.
It's kind of a cliche phrase live without regrets, right?
What does that really mean? I mean, as you go through life, it's like nobody's perfect. And we all encounter situations and things that either we did that we wish we didn't or that we didn't do that we wish we did.
And these, as much as anything, are things that can keep us stuck in a season or a situation so easy to ignore and to just move beyond. Pretend they don't matter. Good morning. Pat is here. Hello. So nice to have you with us today.
It's Wednesday. Hump day? Yeah. The week is going quick. Just like December already. We're off to a racing start.
It'll be over before we know it. That's why we have to be so thoughtful and intentional every day. A step toward our goal of health. That's what we're doing here together. Center ourselves today. And moving forward. Letting go of any regrets that are holding us down. We're going to look into a couple ways to do that. A couple different perspectives.
Here I took this picture yesterday. I got out cross-country skiing right at sunset and, snapped this picture on my phone of the sunset going down.
Just sending this golden light through the snowy trees is, It's really beautiful.
So here's a couple, quotes to start our, discussion and, framing.
Regret is the natural twin of wisdom. To me. I found this quote, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it.
This is a way to take regret. So if you have an interpretation of it, regret, the natural twin of wisdom is a way to take regret and learn from it. Say this is the cousin of wisdom here, the natural twin. They're they're tightly connected.
If anything good comes out of bad situations is that we can learn from it. Either to help ourselves to move forward, or to help other people from it.
Isn't that what wisdom is, at least in some measure, the ability to more skillfully navigate situations in the future, or to be more helpful in the face of uncertainty?
Probably hard to become wise without also encountering regret.
Maybe that's not always true. Probably not always true. Can learn things without regrets. But. It's definitely the type of thing that happens. So if you're struggling with regrets as we're trying to move toward it, seeking wisdom out of it, to ask the question, what can I learn from this? To me is striking as a as a thoughtful way to move toward it.
Sometimes you say, well, in a situation, some tragedy that happened, you say, well, I have regret about this thing that happened.
Maybe the way that we can grow only is in our compassion. Or kindness. But there's no deeper lesson to something that happened other than we have to learn how to love and accept and grow despite it.
All right. And then our other quote or compare it with.
You can't start the next chapter of your life if you keep rereading the last one from Michael McMillan.
This is taking us into the space that I said of the title, Letting Go of Regret.
A big place that I want to go on this channel for all of us moving forward. Powerful steps toward health and well-being.
We want to get rid of the anchors. Remember, we had that, the boat anchor that we're dragging across the lake, keeping our sailboat from sailing. Maybe regret as one of those anchors.
We're talking about creating a new experience. We've we've had a way of being in the world. We've had issues and things that we have struggled with. Obstacles, barriers that we have.
We think about creating a new health experience.
Think about writing a book that tells the story of our life.
Think of being the author of those pages. The decisions we make is like writing the next page, the next chapter can't start the next chapter of our life. If we keep rereading the last one.
Last chapter has been written. Now we're moving in a new direction.
Regret is the type of thing that can't be changed. It is the type of thing that can be learned from.
That's what we're seeing between these, things. Use it to learn and grow as something we can step forward on, perhaps with greater wisdom, perhaps with greater kindness and compassion.
To regret can do a few things that keeps us from moving toward our goal. The first is like this. If we're rereading. It can keep us looking backwards. We want our eyes on the horizon here. We're cross-country skiing. We're heading forward. We're getting to a new place. We're having new experiences, new ways of being.
If we're stuck in regret, we're looking backwards. It's going to be very hard to get to a different place when we're looking backwards.
And then secondly, it's taking up mental energy. We have been discussing, in our beautiful series Thinking Fast and Slow. We have a limited bandwidth, in our mental and emotional framework.
Only so many things we can hang onto and the things that we're hanging on to our bodies kind of natural system is it weaves those things into a story that just will automatically shape the way we interpret normal. And so if a big thing that we're loading into our system, our regrets, some numbers say we have ten slots.
If three of them are full of regret, it is like only seven slots left for every other thing we have in life. To move toward health in the midst of an unhealthy society where where so much message is so much peer pressure and culture, the whole thing is, you know, a lot of cards stacked against, health in the modern world.
We want to open up every slot that we have, every mental and emotional state that we have to move toward health. We want to open all of that up.
This is why a fasting practice can become such a powerful tool in that fasting itself is openness.
We can practice openness in one area of our life, helping to open up space, in other areas. So letting go of regret. Freeing up mental and emotional space so that we can bring the full force of our intention and the goal that we're trying to accomplish. -5 pounds in December. That would be the goal that, that I set.
And of course, you can choose your own goal, trying to create a counterforce to the pressure of this season that is pushing patterns of consumption that are not taking us on our goal. We're creating some pressure going the other way, maybe part of that process. What are some things that we need to let go of that are weighing us down, that are keeping us, from pressing forward?
And then the third thought that I had, reflection from these quotes.
Is that regret can be one of the primary things that makes us fearful.
We've we've been hurt. We have done things that have been damaging or we did not do something that we wish we had. When we come to decisions and when we come to change. And we're going to get into this, I'm going to read you a passage from, this book again, thinking fast and slow and regret. It's going to get into it.
About our default ways of decision making. The default way of decision making is not to change, because we feel more regret often is what he is suggesting from his research and things that we do, then things that we don't on average, which creates this is another way that we get to complacency. We've seen a lot of thinking bias against change.
We have more regret for things that we do that end up in a bad outcome than things that we don't do that we, you know, miss out on something better. And this creates a bias in our life to avoid change so that we are not hurt as much, and so that we don't have as many regrets about things that we do, leads us to be change resistant.
Other times, we might have had an experience. We might have had an experience. We we stepped out. We tried something. It didn't work. We were hurt by it. And any domain a and those are the things that stick in our mind. We don't. The decisions were okay. We stepped out. We tried to thing it worked out. Everything just flowed.
Those, you know, there might be six of those, but it's the one where we were really hurt that sticks with us, and then we regret it. And then that can become resistance for us.
So seeking out that regret is a big part of letting it go. And we will move toward it.
Find the connection. Letting go. Letting go of regret. This is the process. In December we're trying to let go of some weight 5 pounds. We want to let it go.
What do you think? Is regret something that has been a challenge for you? Do you have it?
Listen to what Daniel Kahneman has to say about regret. Even this first sentence here of this said, this is a subsection in the chapter on keeping score, which I think is really, interesting just in and of itself to think about regret are do we treat our life as like a scoreboard and we're, we're just checking off whether we're meeting, you know, the grade or not.
And then every time we don't regret.
And how arbitrary is this scorekeeping? Listen to this first sentence. Regret is an emotion, and it is also a punishment that we administer to ourselves.
I think we could just sit with that for quite a long time. Right? Do you punish yourself with regret? I think when we think about regret, we think of it being like real, like the regret. It just feels like, okay, this is a real thing. But many times we're just it's part of the story that we are telling ourselves.
And we look at this as a punishment that we're giving to ourselves. And if we keep giving it, if we don't let go of it, we are continuing to punish ourselves.
Something I would suggest we try not to do. And, you know, this is a personal session for me. As much as I have regrets, like we said, when we started, you know, live without regrets.
A great motto. But then what does it mean when you have them? Because everyone has regrets. And so the the cliche phrase live without regrets, I think can end up becoming a bad thing because I think it gets interpreted, or at least I think I have, personally interpreted it in the past.
As like, just pretend that you don't, you know, pretend that you don't think like we have all these regrets. We say, well, we're supposed to live without regrets. So we say, well, they're just gone. Like, I just don't. You just declare it. And. But if they're if they're really still there, like, how do you get a regret out?
You can't get a regret out by pretending that it doesn't exist or that it didn't happened or it's okay. We got into that in that session on forgiveness and trauma.
That says, regrets can be tiny and wearing us down every day. The second piece of buying can cause us to give up. That's Steve thank you for sharing that.
Fear of regret is a factor in many of the decisions we make.
Each of these first couple sentences I just really love this is what I was saying about fear.
The two biggest decision makers. Right. In in life people say fear and greed, fear and greed driving most human behavior. What is that famous quote? Nothing to fear but fear itself, right? Fear is our big adversary and regret is one of the main tools that fear uses to keep us paralyzed. So we want to overcome fear. We often have to overcome regret first.
Don't do this. You'll regret it. It's a common warning, and it's kind of like the internal warning. That's part of the bias. Don't do this. You might regret it.
The actual experience of regret is familiar. The emotional state has been well described by many psychologists, who note that regret is accompanied by feelings that one should have known better, more judgment coming in. And it's how we judge ourselves.
Hindsight is 2020, right? Once you know everything, then it should be obvious you should have done it. We bring so much judgment on ourselves.
We get a sinking feeling, thoughts about a mistake that we've made, opportunities lost. We have a tendency to kick ourselves, try to retrospectively correct one's mistake by wanting to undo the event, to get a second chance.
Intense regret is what you experience when you can most easily imagine yourself doing something other than what you did, and then that can start the cycle.
Decision makers know they are prone to regret, and the anticipation of that painful emotion plays a part in many, decisions. Intuitions about regret are remarkably uniform and compelling. And then he tells a story about it.
I paraphrase two people are buying stocks. One person, buys a company. And then he considered switching to B, but he didn't. And then B exploded in value and he would have made a lot of money. The other person owned company B, but then he sold it to buy A, and then he learned that he would have made so much money by keeping the other stock.
Who feels the greater regret? The results are clear.
Everybody else said since the second person, because they're the one that took action and they moved away from it and missed it, their action did it. Whereas the inaction of the person who almost brought in is a little easier to take.
He says this is curious because the situations of the two investors are objectively identical. They both now own the same stock, and both would have been better off if they had owned to be. The only difference is that George got to where he is by acting, whereas Paul got to the same place by failing to act the short example illustrates a broad story.
People expect to have stronger emotional regret to an outcome that is produced by their action than to the same outcome produced by inaction. Isn't that interesting? One of the big things that keeps us as a barrier from action, a barrier to change, to step out, to do something different.
The key is not the difference between commission and omission, but the distinction between default actions and actions that deviate from the default. So this is really getting into a space. You know, that is where we're at. We have default ways of living in this society. You try to make a decision to default from the standard way of living.
That's putting you right into this space.
When you deviate from the default, you can easily imagine the norm. And if the default is associated with bad consequences, the discrepancy between the two can be a source of painful emotions. The default option when you own a stock is not to sell it. The default option when you meet your colleague in the morning is to greet them.
Selling a stock. Failing to greet your coworker are departures from the default options and natural candidates, or regret or blame?
In a compelling demonstration of the power of default options, participants played computer simulation blackjack. Some players were asked, do you wish to hit? While others were asked, do you wish to stand? Regardless of the question, saying yes was associated with more regret than saying no. When the outcome was bad. The question suggests the default response I don't have a strong wish to do it.
It is the departure from the default that produces the most regret.
Regret only has the power we give it. Accept it, accept it as part of life, and minimize it to learn from it and be the best you can be and try again. Not trying is the real failure. I completely agree.
But therein is the difficulty. And that's why it is so good to bring awareness to it so that we can do that so that we can realize, okay, we have regrets. They have powerful emotional biases that they create here. And the path forward is is not in burying regrets, pretending they don't exist or forgetting about them, accepting them and moving through it, learning from it.
The asymmetry in the risk of regret favors conventional and risk averse choices. This bias appears in many contexts consumers who are reminded that they may feel regret as a result of their choices, show an increased preference for conventional options favoring brand names over generics. The behavior of managers of financial funds as year end approaches shows an effect of anticipated evaluation.
They tend to clean up their portfolios of unconventional or questionable investments. Even end of life or life or death decisions can be affected. Imagine a physician with a gravely ill patient. One treatment fits the normal standard of care. Another is unusual. The physician has reason to believe that the unconventional treatment improves the patient's chances, but the evidence is inconclusive.
Efficient. The physician who prescribes the unusual treatment faces a substantial risk of regret, because they're deviating from the normal, and blame because people say, why wouldn't you do the normal thing? Perhaps they're exposed to litigation. Yeah, no doubt.
In hindsight, it will be easier to imagine a doctor making the normal choice. The abnormal choice will be easy to undo in the mind. Sure, a good outcome will contribute to the reputation of the physician who dared, but the potential benefit is smaller emotionally than the potential cost, because success is more of a normal outcome than is failure.
And so. So think about how this would affect a physician's judgment. I can relate to that. So many avenues of pressure that our society has created that would keep a physician from doing the thing that they really thought in their heart was the best thing to do. This happens all the time. Unfortunately.
We spend much of our day anticipating and trying to avoid the emotional pains we inflict on ourselves.
I read that sentence, I say, let's stop doing that. Let us not inflict emotional pain on ourselves. How seriously should we take the intangible outcomes, the self-administered punishments that we experience as we score our lives?
He has a term in this book he calls econs, which, econ is like the the completely rational human being that is described in most economic textbooks, which doesn't actually exist in reality. Most economics books saying people are rational. But he's showing in this book we're not really rational. We're intuitive and emotional.
Icons are not supposed to have these experiences. They are costly to us. They lead to actions that are detrimental to the wealth and health of individuals, to the soundness of policy, and to the welfare of society. But the emotions of regret are real, and the fact that any can does not have it is not relevant. Is it reasonable, in particular, to let your choices be influenced by the anticipation of regret?
I would say no. That would say no to the real failure would be to do that. Susceptibility to regret, like susceptibility to fainting spells, is a fact of life to which we must adjust.
If you happen to be wealthy, you may be able to afford the luxury of a financial portfolio that minimizes the expectation of regret, even if it doesn't maximize.
Accrual of wealth. Not most people, though.
You can take precautions that will inoculate you against regret. So he starts to in the chapter here, perhaps the most useful is to be explicit about the anticipation of regret. This is something we don't often do, right? Just like we pretend that we don't have regrets and we bury them. We pretend, or we envision that everything is going to go swimmingly in the future, and we'll never regret anything again in the future.
When when we know we're reading, I think, a real accurate assessment of the human condition, which is that we're all susceptible to regret and we don't even like we we think we do. We don't make rational decisions. And even if we do make a rational decision, there's no guarantees on how anything turns out. And a big part of our path is overcoming our fear of regret and moving forward.
Despite this. If you can remember when things go badly that you considered the possibility of regret carefully before deciding, you are likely to experience less of it.
I double underlined that in the book because.
That advice, I think, is really good. This is a process of bringing awareness and thoughtfulness to everything that we are doing.
To recognize the difficulty of making good decisions, and to see all of the cards stacked against us, making good decisions to see the inherent uncertainty in everything that happens so that when we have difficulty, when things do not turn out the way that we want be so much easier to have grace and compassion with ourselves. So, hey, I was very thoughtful.
I did the very best that I could with the information that I, I had do what you can with what you have, like in this present moment. To paraphrase, basically, like when you're moving through the world that way, that's what we're trying to create our way of being, navigating all these things with the greatest awareness, thoughtfulness, gentleness, compassion with ourselves so that we're not doing what regret wants to do, which is put us in this cycle of punishing ourselves all the time, always looking backward and stuck with big things weighing us down.
At first I was thinking, well, this is a metaphor of weighing us down. And I was saying, is it a metaphor? Like we're trying to we're in a weight loss space. We're trying to use a fasting process to move toward health. Is it a metaphor? But then I was thinking, it's even more than a metaphor. I mean, I think it's just accurately describing what's happening.
Like just like in the body. It's just a mental construct that we split out our physical being from our mental state. I think it's also a construct in some fashion. It's the things that are weighing us down. We say, well, we want to physically lose weight. Like these things just connected. Our emotional state and our physical being are the same in many regards.
And so a process we're trying to create this flow between these two. This is where a fasting space just gets in the mix in the middle of it. Fasting a physical open space in the body. We're trying to create a mental and emotional space of openness in the body without, you know, in the being without regret. One of these things can feed into the other.
And in both ways, we start opening up a fasting space, like we said in that other space. And I was thinking last night I was sitting there thinking or saying like fasting, actually very profound. We had, you know, the observation like, okay, you can you can say what fasting is in one sentence, but then and so it's simple enough that that you can convey it basically to anybody in open space without food to allow the body access to stored energy.
And you say, say some version of that.
The deeper level, then you could talk about it for a long time, because then it's touching into these deep, spaces, an open physical space in the body. Creating openness without food is the type of emotional space. Then that can allow access, toward this regret space. If we're trying to let go.
Give the regret some space. That's where I wanted to really take it. Give the regret some space. So the big thing is, we don't want pretending there isn't regret burying it down. The things that we do want, we want acceptance of it. Coming to peace with it, letting go of it, and this connection where I will tie it together to creating openness, the opposite of burying our regret is giving it openness, validating, accepting it that it is real, come into peace with it.
And from that sort of space is how you can let it go in an open space. I think of like letting it float away. Not the type of thing that you can really force out. Just like we don't try to force anything physically in the body.
Give our regret space.
To flow out just like we're trying to do with a fasting process. Physically give space for the body to use the energy that is within it so that we can release it. I don't like this excess energy that I have here.
We aren't clutching on to it. We aren't hanging on to it. We are just slowly, gently, thoughtfully.
Increasing our strength and our ability to give the body the space to release it.
And how connected are those two things? Is it a metaphor? Are they more intrinsically connected them than we believe? Can we maybe one of those paths flows better than the other? So the regret I am hanging on to too deep. Can't quite get it at it right now. Use a fasting space more space for contemplation. It's a great weight loss space as that process is happening.
Maybe it helps you. Just like we say, we got the music.
Beautiful tones trying to soak their way in to that emotional center. Someone else says, hey, I'm struggling with this physical process of fasting. Hard to do. Okay, validated. And we see, just like the river flowing, do some emotional work here. Where is regret? Just like we flowed into that space on trauma. Trauma can be a source of regret in and of itself and the regret creating openness they're letting go.
Releasing can flow back around, help the physical side. If we enjoyed our success as much as we dwell on our failure, we might diminish the power of regret. I think that is absolutely true. That to me is saying like that session we did looking toward the light. Why we want to turn from regret. Regret is keeping us looking backwards.
We want to turn our gaze, look forward, look to the sun. Look to the light. Celebrate the success. Celebrate the small wins.
Living in the present. That is a big part of it. Most of the time the default. And like we said in this, book today, the default.
Is where we're most comfortable. The default in many ways, living in the past. That's regret. Living in the future, that's anxiety. We're worried about what is coming. We regret certain things in the past when we are not focused on the success. Living in the present is letting go both of regret and anxiety. It's centering ourselves in the present moment, realizing we don't have to do every other thing.
Like if we just took our goal 5 pounds by January 1st. We don't have to do all of that today. We have only our one beautiful step today and that is enough. Center ourselves in this present moment. Everything that has gone before us is that natural twin. So of wisdom.
Regret is the natural twin of wisdom. Everything that we have now are stones that we can step on. That will get us toward where we're going. And then in this day, it is enough.
Focus on the success. Look toward the light. Find joy on the journey. Find joy, peace, contentment. In this day, if our blueprint day, that's what we're trying to do. Our blueprint day.
That we know. Oh, this is the pattern. This is what we're practicing.
Fasting a practice just like we practice any type of skill. Passing a skill like so many other things.
Anytime you've tried to get, a skill mastered many mistakes along the way, we learn from all of it. And that is how we develop the skill to do what we want to do. The skill of fasting is the skill of being able to use energy within the body. When we want to use it, it's there for us.
It is a resource. It is us. Fasting is like a control switch. See, sometimes you say, but wouldn't it be nice if there is like a control panel? Something in here, like an android? We could open it up and reprogram the closest we can get to something like that. Fasting is a big part of that. Our fasting choices a huge impact on the metabolism, changing the hormonal structure of the body.
So that we can gain access to the energy that we want to let go out. And then, of course, we put that in the context of every other good thing, our wonderful movement practice, that is so good for the body, the healthy food choices, getting good nutrition and nourishment, hopefully in the eating window that works for you.
That's what puts everything into balance. Fasting, the process of bringing things into balance, both physically and emotionally. Great to have you here for the discussion today. As always. So, grateful for you. Thanks for being here with me. I hope you all have a great day, and I will look forward to chatting with you again tomorrow.