Humility Can Be Stressful... But Worth It for Mental Health

💭 Go deeper: We talk more about this in episode #268 of the Joy Lab Podcast.

Here's a hot take: humility is a courageous skill you can build to boost your mental health.

Humility is not about being a pushover. It's not self-deprecation, martyrdom, or quietly shrinking yourself in every room you enter. According to the science, humility is actually one of our greatest strengths as a species. The formal definition is refreshingly simple: an accurate, grounded sense of who you are. Not inflated. Not deflated. 

C.S. Lewis called it "self-forgetfulness," which sounds a little alarming until you sit with it. The idea is that hyper self-focus (whether it tips into self-criticism or full-blown self-aggrandizement) paradoxically shrinks your world. It cuts you off from connection, from trust, from joy. 

So what does humility actually look like?

Research points to four distinct types:

• Relational humility — not placing yourself above or below others
• Intellectual humility — holding your beliefs with openness; curiosity over certainty
• Cultural humility — recognizing the limits of your own cultural lens
• Existential humility — making peace with uncertainty and the big unanswerable questions of being human

You might be nailing one and really struggling in another. That's completely normal and also helps point to where your growth can be.

So why is humility so hard?

Because we live in a certainty culture that treats being wrong like a threat. There's enormous pressure to be confident you're right; not to actually be right, but to project certainty at all times. And when you start to practice humility, it can genuinely feel like a physical threat. Your stress response spikes. Your ego pushes back. Even when you want to be more humble, your nervous system sometimes has other plans.

The good news? Humility is a buildable skill and that discomfort is temporary and will ease as you practice. Humility researcher Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren outlines three ingredients that make it buildable:

1. Know yourself — honest self-awareness without self-preoccupation
2. Check yourself — reducing defensiveness and ego-protection
3. Go beyond yourself — cultivating empathy and deeper connection

These aren't just nice ideas. They're a direct response to our collective, waning resilience, our loneliness epidemic, rising anxiety, and the very human craving for something more real than performing confidence we don't always feel.

Humility is counterculture. It's also really, really good medicine.

This topic is the focus of Joy Lab's newest Element — and Dr. Aimee Prasek breaks it all down (with some Talladega Nights references along the way) in episode 268 of the Joy Lab podcast.

👉 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, or visit JoyLab.coach to explore the full program.