Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Company’s work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions.

Q: How can I handle regret?

A: I think of regret as the flip side of worry. Worry is concern over what might go wrong and regret is concern over what did go wrong. There’s really no way to avoid some degree of worry and regret. Feeling them means you are a human living a life.

Fast Company contributor and cognitive scientist Art Markman says there are two kinds of regret: the kind you experience when you reflect on actions you took that went badly, and the regret you feel when you reflect on the things you did not do. “As you get older, the things you did not do tend to loom larger compared to regrets about the dumb things you did,” he writes. “For instance, you might feel regret over not taking a certain job that was offered to you, or deciding not to go back to school.”

I certainly feel that the older I’ve gotten, the less I get embarrassed by little things that used to replay over and over in my mind. It’s a cliché, but I often remind myself that no one is thinking about me half as much as I am. Chances are your blunders loom much larger for you than they do for anyone else. If you regret saying something dumb in a meeting, it might help to remind yourself that the others in the room either didn’t notice or have already forgotten.

The exception to this is if you say something that hurt or offended someone. Those are the kinds of things that stay with people and fester if not addressed. For that, refer back to my advice on how to apologize at work.

As for those bigger life regrets, like wishing you pursued a different career, Markman has two good pieces of advice:

1. Check that it’s not just a “grass is greener” moment. It’s called work for a reason and every job has its downsides. When you’re having a bad week, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you would be happier in a different job. “It is easy to think only about the wonderful things that may have happened if you had done something else. But, every job has its travails. No matter what you do, you’ll have some periods of struggle,” says Markman.

2. It’s not too late to make a change. If feelings of regret linger, it may be worth investigating what making a change would entail and if you’re willing to pursue it. I often think of the line from that Mary Oliver poem. “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” she writes. We all only get one. Rather than learning to live with large feelings of regret, make the move to change what you don’t like.