3 Bad Habits Emotionally Secure People Avoid
#1: Criticizing others
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Emotionally secure people have a healthy relationship with their emotions.
They don’t avoid them or ignore them just because they’re uncomfortable. And they don’t try to eliminate or “fix” them no matter how unpleasant they are.
As a result, emotionally secure people have relatively calm, balanced emotional lives:
- They don’t overreact to stressors and challenges or take things too personally.
- They don’t get stuck in patterns of worry or rumination.
- And they don’t let bad moods or difficult emotions get in the way of what matters most — their values.
So how do they do this? How do emotionally secure people get to where they are?
Of course, everything from genetics and family history to diet and exercise plays a role in our levels of emotional security. But here’s the real secret to emotional security:
Becoming emotionally secure is usually about what you do less of, not more of.
Emotionally secure people don’t treat difficult moods and emotions like enemies. Instead, they cultivate healthy attitudes and routines around all their emotions.
But more than just cultivating good emotional habits, they also know how to avoid certain bad habits that lead to emotional fragility and insecurity.
If you want to become more emotionally secure and stable, one of the best ways to do it is to identify and eliminate these threebad habits from your life.
1. Criticizing Others
Criticizing others gives us an ego boost in the short term, but actually lowers our self-esteem and resilience in the long-term.
Of course, our ability to think critically and make judgments isn’t a bad thing in general. After all, critical thinking is the foundation of progress and human flourishing in almost every aspect of life from medicine and politics to communication and engineering.
If we couldn’t think critically, compare alternatives, and make judgments, we’d still be living in caves… or worse.
