How the concept of the decision believed best leads to absence of alternative realities which leads to absence of unhealthy anger and regret?

The causal chain connecting our decision-making process to the elimination of unhealthy anger and regret rests on the realization that our choices inherently make alternative realities impossible.

Here is the step-by-step breakdown of how this concept dismantles these negative emotions:

1. The “Decision Believed Best” Eliminates Alternative Realities Whenever we make a choice, we evaluate our options based on our prior ability, knowledge, perceptions, and reasoning available at that exact moment. Even if we assume human beings possess absolute “free will” operating outside the laws of physics, a decision-maker will always select what they believe is the single best possible decision from their known options. For instance, a chess player will always evaluate their known moves and choose the single move they believe is best, even if that decision ultimately leads to them losing the game.

Because a person will always—without exception—execute the one choice they believe to be the best in that moment, only one possible choice is ever allowed. Therefore, ex post (after the fact), alternative realities are logically impossible.

2. The Absence of Alternative Realities Eliminates Regret Regret is an emotion that relies entirely on hindsight; it is the belief that we could have, or should have, chosen a different path in the past. However, the concept of the decision believed best proves that we always made the move we believed best at that specific time, meaning we could not have done anything else. Once you realize that no alternative realities could have existed, regret completely disappears because you fully understand that nothing that happened could have ever happened differently.

3. The Absence of Alternative Realities Eliminates Unhealthy Anger We distinguish between healthy boundary-setting anger and unhealthy anger. Unhealthy anger is entirely generated by “should stories”. A “should story” creates an imagined alternative reality—a scenario where things went the way you think they “should” have—and causes you to compare actual reality against this imagined, “better” outcome. This comparison between reality and an imagined alternative is what generates mental suffering and unhealthy anger, as you implicitly believe the universe was “unfair” or “wrong”.

However, because the concept of the decision believed best proves that alternative realities are logically impossible, the foundation of the “should story” completely collapses. Once you realize that the imagined alternative reality could never have existed, you stop comparing actual reality to it. As a result, the mental suffering and unhealthy anger generated by that comparison disappear completely.