Make amends or changes sooner rather than later

If your guilt is for a specific and rational purpose – e.g., it’s healthy guilt – take action to fix the problem behavior. While many of us are gluttons for self-punishment, ongoing guilt weighs us down as we try and move forward in life. It’s easy enough to apologize to someone whom we’ve offended by a careless remark. It’s a little more challenging to not only recognize how your 80-hour-a-week career may be harming your family, but to also change your work schedule (assuming that there were legitimate reasons for working 80-hours a week in the first place).
Healthy guilt is telling us we need to do something different in order to repair relationships important to us (or our own self-esteem). (Unhealthy guilt’s purpose, on the other hand, is only to make us feel badly for little legitimate reason.) While sometimes we already know the lesson guilt is trying to teach us, it will return time and time again until we’ve actually learned the lesson fully. It can be frustrating, but it seems to be the way guilt works for most people. The sooner we “learn the lesson” – e.g., make amends, work to not engage in the same hurtful behavior in the future, etc. – the sooner the guilt will disappear. If successful, it will never return for that issue again.