This is not an easy admission to make, not least because this isn’t the first time I’ve done it. I’m all too aware of my tendency to lose hours of my life on ‘research’ inside the internet, whether that be for something I find interesting, or on the new kitchen item we are about to buy. I can likewise waste hours trying to find storage solutions for the crap I hoard (hint: there will always be more crap. There is no solution, save the bin.) or devote myself to a not quite necessary task like scrubbing the grout, or watching some rubbish on tv. The hours disappear. They never come back.

I read Alain de Botton’s post this week about scheduling in appointments with soul nourishing things, like reading books we want to read, or whatever it is that feeds your emotional and psychological hunger, and I get it. I really do. But seemingly in vain, because this is not the first time I’ve identified the need to schedule in time for my mental nutrition, and then gone on to ignore it.

We are creatures of habit. Habit make us feel safe and secure – when the chips are down, there is comfort in reaching for your regular afternoon coffee, conveying to your body via the medium of caffeine that there are only a few hours left to this day and you re going to make it. When the kids have gone to bed at seven, the cracking open of a bottle of wine and a half hour of channel hopping is not so much about the booze or avoiding the One Show as it is about sending a giant message to your brain that it’s ok to switch off and do adult stuff.

The problem with habits is that we tend to cling on to them long after they’re useful. We might adopt them to ‘get us through’, but what do we do when the ‘through’ changes? We feel dissatisfied with our current routines, but we keep on doing them because we come to think of them as steady, fixed points in what now feels like an even more unsteady universe, all the time blind to the obvious and necessary.

We need new habits.

We all make lists of things we want to do (‘build a doll’s house’, ‘learn to speak Norwegian’, ‘make lampshades’) and gripe about how we don’t have the time. But I think we do have the time, hidden away under layers of habits we no longer need, and patterns of living that make us feel more square pegged in our round holes, rather than less.

Change is hard, no denying that. And perhaps the answer is just to start with fifteen minutes a day, doing something just for you, whether that is literature or whittling.

So I thought I’d look at the regrets and see if I had any of them now. Want to join in?

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

On the one hand, supported and encouraged, over the last decade I’ve pursued my own interests in a way that most people don’t get to do. On the other, I’m still holding back on my true dream: I want to write. I’ve been captivated by words for as long as I can remember, and when I was a young girl, no more than six, I used to get up and record myself onto a tape reading stories aloud. The music of the words is the important thing for me, but I have not learned to live outside the shadow of my Grandmother, who thinks that the fortune of J. K. Rowling is the thing.

I’m not sure that I can quite get out from under this shadow without a lot of expensive therapy, so I’m just going to congratulate myself for even trying and move on.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.

I definitely don’t have this regret (see item one above). But I do sometimes regret not working enough, which might seem odd. I still want to be a part-time librarian in a private library, and I still think I have a tendency to slack off when it comes to dream number one.

Do you really have to have a masters to become a librarian these days?

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

“We cannot control the reactions of others” says Bronnie, as part of her encouragement to speak out. I’ve discovered that sometimes the reactions aren’t as bad as you might fear. I have one safe place where I can express myself without fear of judgement or rejection: my marriage. Is that unusual? I don’t know. I feel lucky to have even that, and knowing it makes it easier to speak out elsewhere. Not easy, never that. It’s a work in progress.

My real hope is that I can encourage true and free expression in my two year old son. It’s going well so far. Today he ran into the bathroom to shout at me “I’m not impressed!” and ran out again.

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

This will be true. Is true. I have never chased friendships, though my mother used to try and encourage me to pull my fair share even when I was five and never thought to call for Nicky round the corner. It’s not that I don’t want them – I love my friends, perhaps more so for clinging on in the face of my terrible communication skills and/or efforts. “It all comes down to love and relationships in the end” as Bronnie points out. No one wants to die alone.

This is not the place to ruminate the whys and hows of letting friendships fade away. It’s just time to make a bit more effort before it’s too late. You know what might help? The internet. Twitter. Facebook. Text messaging if all else fails (thank goodness for iMessage when friends are abroad).

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

Ah. Yes.

“Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice.”

Perhaps you feel happier if you manage to eliminate the four other regrets above. Perhaps you can simply choose to feel happier at the end of the day by finding something that was good in it, however crappy the day might have been. Perhaps it’s just a case of choosing a smile over a frown more times than not.

I don’t have as many of these regrets as I imagined I might. Even skimming the article I thought I’d have more, but it was the one about friendships that stuck with me. How lucky to get a chance to think about it now, while I have time to spare.

Which regrets are you living with?