Dear Felix,

So i should just exercise in my room to make my body sweat?

you can buy a couple of dumbbell weights, or the rod with weights, and lift that in your room. You can exercise by the window, to have enough oxygen. I imagine you can also lift weights in the garden, since it doesn’t require a lot of space and moving around, so you probably wouldn’t disturb your father. Although 2 dumbbells doesn’t replace going to the gym, it’s a beginning, and you’ll feel better. Once the lockdown is over, you can continue in the gym.

Also, if I remember well, you said that sometimes your father goes for a jog – is he still doing that? Maybe you can join him, so you wouldn’t feel scared of the dogs?

if i really use braces i think the dentist will sacrifice that one tooth (backwards position) to be able to place the braces

how do you mean “sacrifice” your tooth? If your tooth is bent, can’t it be straightened by the braces?

As a person who frequently feels regret… So in the future, every time i feel regret doing something… i should just let it be and don’t think much about it? Even though it’s a part of humans emotion?

Regret is a normal human emotion, and sometimes healthy too, e.g. if we realize that we’ve hurt someone, and we decide never to do it again. Regret should lead us to change our behavior, but it’s only healthy if we also forgive ourselves for the wrong-doing we did. Beating ourselves up for something we did and never forgiving ourselves is not a good kind of regret.

A while ago you asked me about some instagram posts that you felt embarrassed about. I told you that if you’ve mislead people into believing that you’ve been working hard on a housing project, while you haven’t, you can feel regret about it (a healthy regret), realize it was a wrong thing to do, but also forgive yourself and move on. Beating yourself up forever for having made that post would be an unhealthy and destructive form of regret.

You’ve also expressed regret for admitting to your girlfriend/crush that you love her and for crying when she refused you. In this case you haven’t really hurt anybody’s feelings, you didn’t do anything wrong, you simply showed honest emotions. You showed vulnerability. Being yourself and being vulnerable isn’t a wrong-doing, and therefore regretting it isn’t a healthy thing, but it’s actually self-condemnation and it’s destructive.

To sum up, this is how I see regret: A healthy regret is accompanied by self-forgiveness and a positive behavior change, while unhealthy regret comes with self-condemnation and getting stuck in the past and ruminating about the past.

Can you see the difference between the two?