The Top Regrets of the Dying, and What Research Says About Them

Picture a quiet room at the end of a corridor. A woman in her eighties is propped up on pillows, a cup of tea going cold beside her. A carer sits with her in the afternoons. Some days they talk about nothing. Other days, without much warning, the conversation turns to the things she wishes she had done differently.

Scenes like this happen in homes, hospices and hospitals all over the world, every single day. Around 170,000 people die each day, roughly two every second, which you can see on the live counter. Most of those deaths now come late in life, after a period of illness, as we explored in what is the most common age to die. That gives many people something earlier generations often did not have: time, near the end, to look back.

What do people see when they look back? One account became famous around the world, and research since has added a great deal to it.

Bronnie Ware's five regrets

Bronnie Ware is an Australian writer who spent several years working as a carer for people in the last weeks of their lives. In 2009 she wrote a blog post about the regrets she heard most often, which spread widely and later became the book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

It is important to be clear about what this is. It is one carer's honest account of the conversations she had, not a scientific study. But it has resonated with millions of people because it puts into words something many recognise.

#	The regret, as Ware described it
1	I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
2	I wish I hadn't worked so hard
3	I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings
4	I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
5	I wish that I had let myself be happier

Ware said the first was the most common of all. Many people, she wrote, realised near the end how many of their dreams had gone unfulfilled, often because of choices they had made, or not made.

Notice what is missing from the list. Nobody, in her account, wished they had bought a bigger house, earned a higher salary or spent more time on their phone.

What researchers have found about regret

Regret has been studied seriously by psychologists for decades, and the research backs up much of what Ware described, with some useful detail.

We regret what we did not do

In a well-known 1995 paper, psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec found a striking pattern. In the short term, people tend to regret actions: the thing they said, the purchase they made. But looking back over a whole life, people far more often regret inactions: the chances they did not take, the things they never tried, the words they never said.

Time frame	What people tend to regret most
Days and weeks	Things they did (mistakes, embarrassments)
Years and decades	Things they did not do (missed chances, unsaid words)

The explanation they offered is that we tend to deal with the consequences of our actions. We apologise, repair, learn the lesson and move on. But inaction leaves an open question that never closes: what would have happened if...?

We regret not becoming who we hoped to be

Later work by Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich, published in 2018, looked at two kinds of regret. "Ought" regrets are about failing in our duties and responsibilities. "Ideal" regrets are about failing to become the person we hoped to be: the book never written, the instrument never learned, the move never made.

Across their studies, people listed ideal-self regrets far more often when asked about their biggest regrets in life, with roughly three in four people naming one as their single biggest regret. That lines up closely with Ware's first and most common regret.

The World Regret Survey

Author Daniel Pink collected regrets from more than 16,000 people across over 100 countries for his 2022 book The Power of Regret. He found that most regrets fall into four core categories:

Type of regret	What it sounds like
Foundation regrets	"If only I'd saved more, studied harder, looked after my health"
Boldness regrets	"If only I'd taken the chance"
Moral regrets	"If only I'd done the right thing"
Connection regrets	"If only I'd reached out"

Connection regrets, about relationships that faded or were never repaired, came up again and again. They map almost exactly onto Ware's fourth regret about staying in touch with friends.

Regrets and the science of a long life

It is one thing to say relationships matter. It is another to see how strongly they show up in the data on health and survival.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began in 1938 and has followed participants and their families for decades, is one of the longest studies of adult life ever run. Its directors have repeatedly said that the strongest predictor of who stays healthy and happy into old age is not wealth, fame or cholesterol at middle age, but the quality of people's close relationships.

That fits with what we found when looking at the link between loneliness and early death and how marriage affects your lifespan. Social connection is not just a nice extra. It is tied to how long people live.

Ware's regret	What longevity research suggests
Not living true to myself	Sense of purpose is linked to lower mortality in several large studies
Working too hard	Long-term chronic stress harms the heart and immune system
Not expressing feelings	Suppressed emotion and isolation are linked to poorer health
Losing touch with friends	Loneliness and social isolation are linked to higher risk of early death
Not letting myself be happier	Optimism is associated with longer life in large cohort studies

You can read more about that last row in our piece asking do optimists live longer, and about the toll of chronic pressure in how stress kills.

Why regrets surface at the end

People near the end of life often describe a kind of clarity. Several things seem to contribute.

What changes near the end	Why it brings regrets into focus
Time runs out	The "one day" we were saving things for is gone
Roles fall away	Job titles and status stop mattering
Visitors arrive, or do not	The shape of a person's relationships becomes very visible
There is time to reflect	Long illnesses can give space to look back

Ware also described something hopeful. Many of the people she cared for came to a kind of peace with their regrets before they died. Regret, it seems, is often a step on the way to acceptance rather than the final word.

Longer lives, more time to act

There is one more reason these regrets matter more now than they did a century ago: most of us have far more time to act on them. Average life expectancy worldwide has risen from around 32 years in 1900 to over 70 today, and in countries like the UK, Japan and Australia it is now over 80. You can compare countries on our life expectancy page.

	A century ago	Today
Global life expectancy at birth	Around 32	Over 70
Share of deaths after age 70	A small minority	More than half
Typical length of retirement in rich countries	A few years, if any	Often 15 to 20 years or more
Common way of dying	Suddenly, often from infection	Gradually, from chronic illness

Longer lives bring a mixed blessing. On one hand, there is more time to repair a friendship, change direction, or finally do the thing you always meant to. On the other, it is easier than ever to assume there will always be time later. Many of the people in Ware's account were not short of years. They were short of the moment when they decided to use them differently.

It is also worth remembering that not every life gets the long run-up. Around 170,000 people die each day, as the deaths today counter shows, and a meaningful share of them die young, suddenly, or without warning. The regrets of the dying are, in that sense, advice for everyone: the long-lived and the unlucky alike.

Turning regrets into a plan

The real value of the regrets of the dying is not in feeling sad about them. It is in using them as a checklist while there is still plenty of time.

Regret	One small thing to do this month
Living for others' expectations	Write down one thing you want to do for its own sake, and book the first step
Working too hard	Protect one evening a week that work cannot touch
Not expressing feelings	Tell one person something true that you have never quite said
Losing touch with friends	Send a message to someone you have not spoken to for a year
Not letting yourself be happier	Notice and write down one good thing each day for a week

Small steps matter more than grand gestures. A friendship is kept alive by a message every few months, not by one big reunion.

If you want a nudge, the Life Clock shows how much of a typical life you have already lived and how much is likely left. Seeing it as a single bar on a screen is oddly motivating. And the Death Clock estimates how lifestyle choices shift the numbers, which links closely to the habits in the 5 habits that add the most years to your life.

Saying the unsaid, in writing

One of the most common regrets, not expressing feelings, has a gentle practical answer: write things down. A letter to a child, a note to a partner, a few lines to a friend. Many families say that a handful of handwritten words from someone they lost became one of their most treasured possessions.

That is why our When I'm Gone planner includes a "Messages & Memories" section alongside the practical pages on documents, accounts and wishes. It is not about expecting the worst. It is about making sure that the things that matter are said, whatever happens.

A different way to see the counter

It is easy to look at the live death counter and see only an abstract number. But every tick is a life that ended with a story, and very often with a few regrets mixed in with the love.

The regrets are remarkably consistent, across countries and decades: not enough courage, too much work, too little said, friends allowed to drift, and happiness postponed. The good news is that every one of them can still be acted on today, by almost anyone, in some small way.

Sources: Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying (Hay House), based on her experience as a palliative carer; Gilovich, T. and Medvec, V. H. (1995), "The Experience of Regret: What, When, and Why", Psychological Review; Davidai, S. and Gilovich, T. (2018), "The Ideal Road Not Taken", Emotion; Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret (2022) and the World Regret Survey; the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Global death figures are based on WHO and UN estimates of around 62 million deaths a year. This article is for general information and is not medical or psychological advice. If you are struggling, please speak to your GP or a support service such as Samaritans (116 123 in the UK and Ireland).