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

A few years ago, I came across Bronnie Ware’s “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” while researching anxiety for my own mental health blog. I read it in one sitting. What struck me wasn’t the regrets themselves—it was how universal they felt. These weren’t exotic philosophical musings. They were things I recognised in myself, in friends, in the patterns I was beginning to notice across people’s mental health struggles.

Then I discovered how Dr. Gabor Maté had woven these five regrets of the dying into his work on trauma, embodiment, and the body-mind connection. Maté doesn’t just list the regrets; he excavates them. He asks: Why do we live this way? What happens in childhood that makes us perform instead of being ourselves? How does emotional suppression literally become illness?

This post answers the question directly: what are the five regrets according to Gabor Maté? More importantly, I’ll walk you through what they mean—and why they matter to anyone paying attention to their mental health right now.

What Are the Five Regrets of the Dying, According to Gabor Maté? — image 1

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

Bronnie Ware’s five regrets aren’t abstract—they’re rooted in how we’ve learned to disconnect from our own bodies and needs over decades. Gabor Maté’s work shows us that regret often masks a deeper pattern: the chronic stress and dissociation that come from prioritizing everyone else’s comfort over our own survival signals.

What works

Maté connects the dots between childhood adaptation, emotional suppression, and how we end up living out the regrets Ware documents—it’s not just about choice, it’s about nervous system conditioning.
The book validates a painful truth my clients often sense: that saying “no” to others often felt like saying “no” to safety or love, making authentic living feel genuinely dangerous from the inside.
It provides a compassionate reframe that moves clients from shame (“I should have known better”) to understanding (“Here’s why I made that choice given what I knew then”).

What doesn’t

Understanding why you adapted this way doesn’t automatically undo the pattern—insight alone rarely creates lasting change without concurrent therapeutic work or body-based practice.
For readers in acute grief or active crisis, Maté’s exploration of trauma and dysfunction can feel overwhelming rather than liberating; this works best alongside professional support, not instead of 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.