Regret and worry are both fear. Regret looks to the past and worry looks to the future. Fear is a function of your Ego. Your Ego is fear-based. That is why fear seeks to control.

Fear seeks to control you so that it can use you to control your environment. Of course fear never achieves complete control and therefore never feels secure.

Fear can not exist in the now.

Your Ego does not exist in the now. It only exists in the past or the future. When you worry or regret you are ceding control of yourself to your Ego.

Therefore, if you do worry it is always about a future event. It might be a future event a few seconds from now but it is always in the future.

You can not worry about what is happening right now. As such, the now is a refuge you can escape to. There is no fear in the now because you have all the information on the now in the now.

There is freedom in the now and seemingly infinite possibility. Your true Self exists in the now. When you worry or regret you abandon your true Self to fear and your Ego.

You can not change the future or the past but you can change (that is, take action in) the present. And really now is the only thing that exists or ever exists.

Even if you had a time machine and used it to travel back in time, when you arrived at your destination it would still be now.

Therefore, now is all you have or will ever have. When you worry or regret you fall asleep to this essential fact.

When you worry or regret you are not actively living your life. You are passively watching a depiction or version of your life.

It is possible to have positive depictions of the past or future (nostalgia or anticipation) and it seems impossible or impractical to always exist in a state fully appreciating the now.

So, cultivate an active experience of the now, It is a useful exercise.

An unrealistic perception of life is the basis of fear.

People are not willing to live, people are not willing to die, that is their whole predicament right now. The fear is simply because you are not living with life, you are living in your mind. Your fear is always about what’s going to happen next. That means your fear is always about that which does not exist.

If your fear is about the non existent, your fear is 100% imaginary. If you are suffering the non-existential, we call that insanity. So, people may be in just socially accepted levels of insanity. But, if you are afraid or if you are suffering anything which does not exist, it amounts to insanity. Isn’t it?

People are always suffering, either what happened yesterday or what may happen tomorrow. So your suffering is always about that which does not exist. Simply because you are not rooted in reality, you are always rooted in your mind.

Mind is one part of it is memory, another part of is imagination. Both of them are in one way imagination, because both of them don’t exist right now, you are lost in your imagination that’s the basis of your fear. If you are rooted in reality, there would be no fear.