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You feel it while polishing off a second piece of chocolate cake. You sense it as you dial a girlfriend’s phone number to cancel dinner because you’re behind on a pressing work project. It hits you when you’re crawling into bed knowing you missed yet another workout this week. You judge yourself and come up short. The verdict: guilty.

NOT ALL GUILT IS BAD

Guilt has its place, according to behavioral experts. “It is an important emotion,” says Karen Reivich, Ph.D., co-author of The Resilience Factor: 7 Essential Skills for Overcoming Life’s Obstacles (Broadway, 2003). Reivich also is the co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Resiliency Project, a 15-year ongoing series of studies that aim to help participants increase positive emotions and decrease feelings of depression and anxiety. “If you were to eradicate guilt, we would be doing the human race a disservice,” Reivich says. “[It’s an] emotional system signal that we’ve caused harm. People experience anticipatory guilt. You start thinking [of the consequences]. [You realize] uh-oh, you’re veering off course.”

“Having mild guilt is very helpful in a lot of situations,” says psychologist Judith S. Beck, Ph.D., director of The Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research in Philadelphia, and author of The Beck Diet Solution (Oxmoor House, April 2007). “If we feel guilty it is because we violated a rule we have. That nudge of negative emotion can tell us that next time we want to do things differently.”

HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?

Guilt becomes unhealthy, however, when it takes over your life. The guilt-prone person who is late to a meeting assumes she has ruined her boss’s day, for example. She tends to overreact, Reivich says. “Instead of having guilt that’s in proportion to the event, she has overblown guilt. That really undercuts health and resilience. If [your] guilt is out of proportion, you are unable to do anything about [the situation].”
Magnifying a negative event can send you on a downward spiral that petrifies you with anxiety and shame, leading you to sabotage your goals. Suddenly, that bagel with extra cream cheese you had this morning means you’ll never lose weight. Cognitive psychologists call these absolutist thoughts “all-or-nothing thinking.”

When you think like this, you relinquish the opportunity to do anything about the mistake you’ve made, Reivich says. The result is helplessness.

MINIMIZING GUILT

So what’s the answer? You’ll feel better if you look for solutions rather than expend time and psychic energy blaming yourself, Beck says. “Ask yourself, ‘What should I do the next time?’” Stop seeing your shortcomings in black-and-white terms and search for shades of gray, the experts here advise.

Take the judgment off of yourself, Beck suggests. Don’t label yourself lazy or think you’ll never get in shape if you’ve missed a workout. When you have a setback, you can either beat yourself up over it and use the mistake as an excuse to stop working toward your goal, or you can address the problem, says Joseph R. Ferrari, Ph.D., professor of psychology at DePaul University in Chicago, who studies the emotions of guilt and shame. “All successful people know that it’s not whether you win or lose, but how well you pick yourself up after failure” that counts.

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