3 Things Emotionally Resilient People Don’t Do

It’s the opposite of emotional fragility which is when we get hijacked by our painful emotions and end up sabotaging our best intentions:

• Lashing out with a passive-aggressive comment rather than acknowledge and sitting with your anger.
• Getting lost in spirals of worry and catastrophizing as soon as you hear a piece of bad news.

If you want to be more emotionally resilient, watch out for these three bad habits keeping you emotionally fragile.

Running away from painful emotions

Our natural instinct is to avoid things that cause pain.

For example: If you feel your fingertip burning after touching a hot pan, it makes sense to quickly move your finger off the pan to avoid a serious burn.

But the point of moving your hand off the hot pan isn’t to avoid pain. The goal is to avoid danger — tissue damage, in this case.

Pain is just a messenger telling you to watch out for danger.

This means you don’t want to avoid pain. I mean, just think of how many serious burns you’d have on your fingers if your hands were incapable of sending pain signals to your brain?

Just like the pain you feel in your finger when it’s getting burned, emotional pain like anxiety, guilt, or sadness are uncomfortable but not themselves dangerous.