Five regrets before dying and how to make it SuperBetter

A hospice volunteer reads to a patient. Caregivers often find common wishes among patients as they near the end of their lives.

Bronnie Ware was a nurse working in palliative care. She took care of people with multiple illnesses, some curable, others not. She also watched over sick people in the last days of their lives.

The things people said to her as they lay dying changed her life.

She learned their regrets.

A popular list has been circulating from Ware’s accounts through media online, and it is now available in a book. It chronicles the clarity in patients’ last thoughts, and the epiphanies they experience near the end. The same wishes emerged among many patients.

Here is a list of the top regrets Ware encountered during her time with patients.

1.) I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2.) I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3.) I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4.) I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5.) I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Compassion Care, a local hospice care provider in Las Vegas, has been caring for people since 2006, specializing in five types of hospice treatment. Shawn Clanton, the Clinical Director and a registered nurse, has been working as a hospice nurse for five years. When asked if some of their patients expressed any of the regrets on this list Clanton said, “Absolutely. All five of those are true. I have yet to meet a patient that has not expressed at least one of those regrets from their life.”

Clanton says there are many misconceptions about her line of work. The most common? “That we give up on a person and pump them full of narcotics and make them lethargic until they pass away or they won’t be able to live their life. We provide care to anyone wherever the patient may call home — a house, assisted living or a nursing home,” Clanton said.

Ware did not write this book to depress people. It gives insight and perspective allowing others a chance to learn from her patients experiences.

Clanton says many nurses have read the book too.

“I read it. As a hospice nurse it is a book that is common to see passed around the office, and I knew I would identify with it,” she said. “I wanted to educate myself and be a better, more knowledgeable hospice nurse. Reading a fellow nurse’s experience you will find you identify with them. I don’t know what it is like to be near death, and you understand the patients better too. That is always a good thing.”

In the same way that Ware was inspired to help others, Jane McGonigal, a game developer, created a game to combat the top five regrets through improving mental dexterity and overall health.

SuperBetter helps to develop a person’s physical resilience and mental focus with positive emotions. The game lets players create silly quests and after they are accomplished, power ups are awarded to the gamer. When a person is sick or depressed, the simplest accomplishments are great achievements.

Building up personal resilience is a skill psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists are constantly studying, looking at how the brain responds to resilience and how trauma victims use resilience as part of not only a coping mechanism, but as a healing tool as well.

Suniya S. Luthar is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University. Luthar’s essay, titled, “The Construct of Resilience,” has been cited more than 2,000 times in other scholarly works. It discusses people’s ability to have a stronger sense of resilience after a tragic event. McGonigal, a trauma survivor herself, made SuperBetter to aid with her recovery during treatment.

McGonigal emphasizes that math and science back up her sometimes wacky theories, including giving someone seven and half extra minutes of life by playing a game. McGonigal has also been featured on two separate TED talks, discussing gaming and how SuperBetter can help battle the top five regrets of the dying.

Does this game actually make people feel happier? The outpouring of testimonials on YouTube from people with illnesses, sometimes terminal, are a fair indicator that this game really does make people feel super better.