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Coping with the psychological effects of real estate regret

[Buying or selling a home can be overwhelming, but there are ways to cope.]
[Buying or selling a home can be overwhelming, but there are ways to cope.]

If you’ve played the real estate game even once, odds are good that you may have experienced a whiff of regret at some point.

Nagging though they are, regrets shouldn’t sap your energy, keep you up at night or plague you with chronic medical conditions.

“Real estate is often one of biggest investments you’ll make in your lifetime,” says Dr. Eilenna Denisoff, a psychologist and director at CBT Associates in Toronto. “And so if someone has a predisposition to anxiety and they tend to be a worrier then making a decision around real estate can be very difficult or almost paralyzing.”

Since our emotions are driven by our thoughts, what’s important when you’re experiencing regret is that you focus on changing how you think. To prove her argument, Denisoff uses a simple example of a dog. For one individual, the dog makes that person feel happy and excited, while another is terrified. “It’s the same dog,” she explains. “So it’s not the dog that determines how you feel, it’s what you think about the dog.”

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But learning to love the dog can be tricky. When your “woulda, coulda, shoulda” response seems to dominate your thinking it’s time to teach your brain how to become more flexible and positive.

“Flexible thinking is always associated with better health and very rigid thinking makes it difficult for people to feel good about anything,” says Denisoff. “For example, if somebody has a very high perfectionist standard and they set the bar so high they leave little room for themselves to be happy with any decision they make. And that kind of perfectionism can lead to a lot of regret, sadness and is associated with clinical depression.”

Talking to a professional helps when negative thoughts and self-doubt become debilitating. A psychotherapeutic strategy known as cognitive restructuring teaches people to identify and dispute negative thinking patterns which are commonly associated with mental health disorders. With this process, your brain practices alternative ways of thinking and interpreting events and experiences. Learning to tolerate a certain level of uncertainty is also healthy.

Regrets about Vancouver’s wild real estate market appear to underlie many of the reasons clients come in to seek guidance or advice from Mark Weinberg, a registered psychologist in Vancouver.

“When you talk to anyone here that’s a consideration at the back of their minds,” Weinberg says. “When you are living in [a] place where you sense your opportunity to go up in [the] world in terms of your residential lifestyle is impeded and there’s a sense that your friends are leaving for opportunities elsewhere that will happen. I don’t know if it’s true but there’s a sense of migration here that people are leaving.”

That’s not altogether surprising given the city’s housing prices. A typical single-family home in Vancouver is $1.4 million, while the city’s desirable west side commands $3.2 million for a single family house.

Weinberg says the human mind can’t tolerate the notion of having two competing thoughts so we start to rationalize uncomfortable thoughts, a state known as cognitive dissonance. For example, the thought that a person will never be able to afford to buy a house in Vancouver could drive someone to rationalize that renting is the better way to go because investing in an over-heated market is foolish and prices are far too high.

“With cognitive dissonance you bring down the tension within your mind by telling yourself another story,” he says. “It’s a good thing. That’s how we help regulate cognitively or emotionally, the decisions and things in our lives.”

The research on regret shows that the more opportunity you have the worse you feel, which seems counter intuitive. Weinberg uses the example of not studying for an exam. If you don’t study and fail you’ll be sorry but if the reason you didn’t study was because your power went out, you can say it wasn’t your fault and that you didn’t have a choice in the matter. That sense of having no choice in the matter is what is driving some of his clients to make a move in the real estate market.

“They will say to me I have to do this because I don’t have a choice otherwise I won’t get a property here,” he says.

We should also learn from our regrets, advises Weinberg. Since people who experience regrets tend to think in black and white terms, people should rethink those thoughts which will put them in a better context.

“Usually there’s more grey than they realized,” he says, “because emotionally we tend to go towards the catastrophic in times of stress.”