How to Be More Emotionally Stable

A reader asks:

In most parts of my life, I feel pretty confident and stable. But when I’m at work—especially around my fellow managers—I struggle A LOT with self-doubt and insecurity. Even the smallest worries or fears send me into spirals of anxiety and overwhelm. It’s so frustrating! How can I learn to become more emotionally stable, especially when it comes to anxieties and insecurities?

Difficult emotions like anxiety, embarrassment, or anger are all incredibly common and a perfectly normal part of being a human being.

But if you tend to get overwhelmed by or lost in your emotions, that can be a sign of low emotional stability…

Maybe you tend to get defensive in difficult conversations with your spouse, leading to a lot of unnecessary frustration and resentment.
Or—like the reader who wrote in—maybe you struggle with self-doubt at work, which frequently spirals into bouts of anxiety and overwhelm which hold you back from doing your best work.

Again, this isn’t unusual. Most of us have one or two areas of life where we’re not as emotionally stable and grounded as we would like.

Luckily, just like you can improve your sense of balance and physical stability, you can also improve your emotional stability, which is the ability to experience a difficult emotion without getting overwhelmed by it or lost in it.

In my work as a psychologist, I’ve helped hundreds of people learn how to build the skill of emotional stability so that they can handle any difficult emotion, in any area of life, confidently and productively.

But here’s the thing…

Like any skill, developing emotional stability isn’t just about what you know, it’s about doing things differently—practice and building better habits.

In the rest of this article, I’m going to share three specific habits anyone can build to become more emotionally stable.

1. Replace Self-Criticism with Self-Compassion

One of the strongest drivers of poor emotional stability is the habit of self-criticism. Because when you’re constantly criticizing and judging yourself, your confidence goes down and your anxiety goes up. And low confidence plus high anxiety makes navigating any situation—or any difficult emotion—much harder than it needs to be.

Now, while we tend to think of self-criticism in terms of criticizing ourselves for our actions—mistakes we made or things we should have done but didn’t. But there’s an even more subtle and powerful form of self-criticism that many of us fall into without realizing it: Emotional self-criticism.

Emotional self-criticism is when we judge ourselves for how we’re feeling: Criticizing yourself for feeling anxious, for example. Or judging yourself as “weak” for feeling sad and unmotivated. The trouble is when you criticize and judge your emotions, you compound them and make them much bigger, longer lasting, and more difficult to manage. After all, being anxious is hard enough without being angry at yourself for being anxious. Being sad is hard enough without feeling guilty about feeling sad. Etc.

Ultimately, a huge part of emotional instability and overwhelm comes directly from this habit of self-criticism—especially, criticizing ourselves for how we feel emotionally.

In my experience, the best way to break this habit of self-criticism is to replace it with a better habit… self-compassion.

Now, most people hear the term self-compassion and they immediately think it means reciting a bunch of vague platitudes about how you’re great and everything’s fine. Not at all! Self-compassion simply means being supportive of yourself rather than judgmental when you’re struggling.

Now, there’s actually a lot of nuance to this idea of self-compassion, but if you want to get started right away undoing your habit of self-criticism so you can be more emotionally stable, I recommend two first steps:

Inventory your self-criticism triggers. Like many problems in life, self-criticism is hard to deal with when you get ambushed by it. On the other hand, it’s much easier to deal with when you’re anticipating it and prepared for it. So, for a week or so, simply keep a little list on paper or in your phone of situations or events that trigger self-criticism in you. As your list grows, start to look for patterns. It’s very likely that you’ll notice two or three main situations or triggers for self-criticism, which means you can go into those situations much more prepared. But what does that mean exactly: Being well-prepared for self-criticism?
Validate your difficult emotions. The simplest way to practice self-compassion rather than self-criticism is to validate your difficult emotions as soon as you feel them. Validation simply means reminding yourself that just because an emotion feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad. And what’s more, even though you don’t like feeling that way, on some level it probably makes sense that you feel how you do.

Now, keep in mind that building a new habit doesn’t happen magically overnight. It takes some patience and persistence. But if you make the commitment to practice this habit—replacing self-criticism with self-compassion—you will find yourself much more emotionally balanced and resilient in the face of difficult emotions.

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2. When You’re Upset, Listen to Your “Quiet” Emotions

A more subtle cause of emotional instability and overwhelm is “zooming in” too much on one aspect of your emotional experience, and consequently, ignoring others.

Here’s an example:

You find yourself in a disagreement with your partner that’s quickly escalating toward a full-blown conflict.
By far the biggest and “loudest” emotion you feel is anger and its variants: You’re mad that he’s not taking your position seriously; you’re frustrated that he keeps repeating the same thing over and over again; and you’re feeling increasingly annoyed that the conversation seems to be going nowhere fast.
Now, if anger is the only emotion you’re aware of or “listening to,” your thoughts and actions are going to be dominated by the anger. And in this case, that means ruminating mentally on how bad a partner he is and continuing to try and prove your point—neither of which appear especially productive at this point.
Alternatively, if you listened more carefully for other emotions, you might notice something interesting… Maybe “behind” the anger, there’s some sadness because you’re remembering how lighthearted your relationship was years ago when you first got together.
That sadness is not only interesting but potentially helpful too. For example: If you tuned into that sadness a bit more, the thought might occur to you that maybe lightheartedness and levity is something that could help now… Maybe the understandable urge to take everything so seriously in the relationship is itself part of the problem.
As a result of this line of thinking, maybe you suggest taking a break and revisiting the conversation tomorrow morning when you’re both more rested.
And bigger picture, maybe it leads you to consider what kinds of actions or behaviors you might experiment with to inject more levity and humor into your relationship—something you’ve definitely gotten out of the habit of (no doubt for perfectly understandable reasons).

This example illustrates a more general phenomenon where focusing too much on one emotion leads to a restricted sense of mental and behavioral possibilities. On the other hand, when you practice tuning into your quieter emotions, you foster mental flexibility, which leads to new possibilities and ways of moving through an emotionally difficult situation.

Try this, anytime you find yourself getting upset and emotionally overwhelmed, ask yourself two questions:

What’s the dominant emotion I’m feeling right now?
Am I feeling any other “quieter” emotions right now? And if so, what might they be trying to tell me?

Okay, technically that was three questions, but you get the idea 🙂

Emotional stability depends on mental flexibility. And a great way to stay mentally flexible is to listen to all your emotions, not just the loud ones.

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3. Practice Asking for More Things

Imagine you’re on a boat in the ocean…

If the water is perfectly still and calm, it’s relatively easy to stand up, walk around the deck, and generally maintain your balance.
But if you’re in the middle of a storm with huge waves crashing against the boat, simply standing up is nearly impossible.

My point is there are all sorts of factors in life that make it easier or harder to be stable, including emotionally stable.

One fairly obvious example is sleep: Managing any difficult emotion is far more difficult if you’re running on little to no sleep over the past few days.

But a less obvious destabilizing factor for our emotional lives is something most people don’t think a whole lot about: chronic resentment

When you harbor chronic resentment—especially if you ignore it and aren’t willing to explore it—the resentment magnifies the intensity of just about every other difficult emotion you experience…

Chronic resentment + a little anxiety → a lot of anxiety
Chronic resentment + guilt → even bigger guilt
Chronic resentment + irritability → much more intense and longer lasting irritability

The trouble is that because resentment is such an uncomfortable emotion (a lot of people feel guilty or ashamed for feeling resentful) most people tend to ignore it. And when it’s ignored it goes on making it doubly hard to maintain stability in the face of other difficult emotions.

So, ultimately, exploring your resentment and getting to the bottom of it can be quite helpful. But if you’re not sure how to do that, luckily you can get started lessening your resentments even if you don’t know much about it. And the reason for this probably surprising assertion is that ultimately, chronic resentment is always caused by the same thing: passivity

People get resentful when they want things to be different but aren’t willing to speak up, express themselves, or make the tradeoffs required to do something different. In other words, chronic resentment comes from low assertiveness.

The good news is that regardless of the particulars of your resentment story, you can start improving it right away by practicing assertiveness. And like any form of practice, the best way to get started is with very, very small exercises.

Here’s what I’d recommend:

Sit down with a pen and paper and start brainstorming places in your life where you wish things were different but feel afraid or uncomfortable making a change, expressing yourself, or asking for something. These things could be anything from very small and seemingly insignificant (taking back a coffee when the order isn’t right) up to more weighty things (asking for a raise at work).
Once you’ve got a good sized list—aim for 20-30 things—sort them into three buckets: Small, Medium, Large. Small things feel a little uncomfortable but you could definitely do them. Medium ones are things that seem very scary or uncomfortable but if you absolutely had to, you could imagine pulling it off. And the Large ones are so scary that they feel virtually impossible.
Now, ignore the Medium and Large buckets and focus on the Small one. Use these items as assertiveness practice assignments. Every day, pick one item from your list and practice being assertive: Asking for something you want; saying no to something you don’t want; expressing how you really feel; etc.

Emotional stability is much easier if you’re not in a state of chronic resentment. And you can start becoming less resentful right away by practicing small acts of assertiveness, slowly but surely working your way up to being able to make bigger changes in your life and address the core issues causing the resentment.

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More Resources

If you’re interested in learning more about emotional stability, here are a few recommendations: