A 2023 ClearMatch Medicare/OnePoll survey of 2,000 Americans aged 65+ found that roughly two-thirds (~67%) regret not taking their health more seriously when younger. Exercise is the #1 ignored doctor’s advice in the same survey (21%), ahead of nutrition (16%), scheduled appointments (13%), and medications (12%) — the single largest named lapse within that broader regret figure, though the survey does not report a regret rate isolated to exercise alone. On the action side, no published survey directly asks regular exercisers “do you regret exercising?” — the question barely arises because exercise-action regret is treated as near-zero in the literature. The best available proxy comes from Rhodes and Mistry (2016), who found that 95% of university students anticipated they would regret missing physical activity, leaving roughly 5% indifferent — though this measures anticipated regret about inactivity, not retrospective regret about having exercised. Roese and Summerville’s meta-analysis of regret-ranking studies confirms the broader temporal pattern: regrets of inaction persist longer than regrets of action, because they remain psychologically open.
The pattern maps cleanly onto Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal model: in the short term, the hassle of getting to the gym dominates; in the long term, the failure to have maintained a habit dominates. Retirees do not lie awake wishing they had skipped fewer workouts. They lie awake wishing they had shown up.
The main limitation is measurement asymmetry. The action-side 5% is an anticipated-regret proxy from a small convenience sample (n=120 Canadian undergraduates), while the inaction-side 67% comes from retrospective surveys of US retirees and measures general health regret rather than a rate isolated to exercise specifically. These populations differ in age, country, and framing, and the 67% should be read as a general-health proxy for exercise-related regret — not a directly surveyed exercise-only rate. Still, the directional finding — that sedentary regret dwarfs exercise regret — is consistent across every survey in the literature and is unlikely to reverse under any reasonable reweighting.