“Is it reasonable, in particular, to let your choices be influenced by the anticipation fo regret? Susceptibility to regret, like susceptibility to fainting spells, is a fact of life to which one must adjust. If you are an investor, sufficiently rich and cautious at heart, you may be able to afford the luxury of a portfolio that minimizes the expectation of regret even if it does not maximize the accrual of wealth.

You can also take precautions that wil inoculate you against regret. Perhaps the most useful is to be explicit about the anticipation of regret. 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. You should also know that regret and hindsight bias will come together, so anything you can do to preclude hindsight is likely to be helpful. My personal hindsight-avoiding policy is to be either very thorough or completely casual when making a decision with long-term consequences. Hindsight is worse when you think a little, just enough to tell yourself later, “I almost made a better choice.”

— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow