What Are the Five Regrets of the Dying, According to Gabor Maté?

Most people treat Bronnie Ware’s “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” as a tidy bucket-list prompt—something meant to nudge you toward more travel or bigger risks before time runs out. That’s not really what’s happening underneath it. The list points to something rawer: how far people drift from their own needs long before death forces the reckoning. I came across Ware’s writing while digging into anxiety research for this blog, and I ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting. What stayed with me wasn’t how novel the regrets were—it was how ordinary and recognizable they felt. Nothing exotic or overly philosophical about any of it. I saw pieces of myself in there, pieces of people I know, and patterns I was starting to notice across the mental health struggles people carry.

From there I found that Dr. Gabor Maté had taken these same five regrets of the dying and woven them into his broader work on trauma, embodiment, and the mind-body connection. He doesn’t just catalogue the regrets—he digs underneath them. His questions go deeper: What drives us to live this way in the first place? What happens in childhood that trains us to perform a role instead of simply being ourselves? And how does swallowing our emotions eventually turn into physical illness?

So here’s the direct answer: what does Gabor Maté say the five regrets of the dying actually are? Beyond just naming them, I want to unpack what they mean—and why they matter to anyone paying close attention to their own mental health right now.

The Book That Connects Regret to Somatic Patterns: Why We Abandon Ourselves

These five regrets Ware identified aren’t some abstract philosophical exercise—they trace back to decades of learning to tune out our own bodies and our own needs. What Maté’s work makes visible is that regret usually sits on top of something deeper: the chronic stress and dissociation that build up from putting everyone else’s comfort ahead of our own internal survival signals.

Where It Holds Up

• Maté traces the thread from childhood adaptation, through emotional suppression, to the very regrets Ware catalogued—framing this as nervous system conditioning rather than simple choice.
• It confirms something painful that the people I support often already sense: refusing others could feel, at the time, like refusing safety or love itself—which is why living authentically can register internally as a genuine threat.
• It offers a kinder reframe, moving clients from self-blame (“I should have known better”) toward context (“this choice made sense given what I knew and had at the time”).

Where It Falls Short

• Recognizing why the pattern took root doesn’t automatically dissolve it—insight on its own rarely produces lasting change without ongoing therapeutic work or body-based practice alongside it.
• If you’re in the middle of acute grief or an active crisis, Maté’s deep dive into trauma and dysfunction may land as overwhelming rather than freeing; it tends to work best as a companion to professional support, not a replacement for it.

I occasionally worry that readers will use this book as a substitute for doing the harder relational work—knowing where your patterns came from is only half the equation. That said, When the Body Says No has a way of cracking open the self-compassion people need before real change becomes possible.

Continue Exploring This Series

• When the Body Says No: What Gabor Maté’s Work Taught Me About Stress and Illness
• Gabor Maté on ADHD: Why Scattered Minds Changed How I Understand Attention
• Gabor Maté on Addiction: It’s Not About the Drug — It’s About the Pain