268. Humility Can Be Stressful... But Worth it for Mental Health

June 01, 2026

Humility is not a weakness or a sign you're a pushover, instead it's a mental health tool that just might be exactly what our loneliness epidemic and anxiety culture are desperately craving. Humility is an accurate, grounded sense of who you are. And that grounded sense of self is a foundation for confidence, deeper connection, and holistic mental health.

Here's what we'll explore this episode:

There are four research-backed types of humility to focus on:

Relational humility — how you hold yourself in relation to others; not above, not below
Intellectual humility — holding beliefs with openness; curiosity over certainty
Cultural humility — recognizing the limits of your own cultural lens and genuinely welcoming differences
Existential humility — making peace with uncertainty, impermanence, and the big unanswerable questions of human life

You might be doing great in one area and struggling in another (that's normal). These types aren't perfectly clean categories, but they offer areas for self-reflection and focus as you work to boost your humility and emotional wellbeing throughout the month.

With these areas in mind, we'll use researcher Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren's framework to build humility through three core ingredients:

Know Yourself — honest self-awareness of strengths and limits, without self-preoccupation
Check Yourself — reducing defensiveness and the need to protect your ego
Go Beyond Yourself — cultivating empathy and humility as a deep relational practice

These three ingredients aren't just a nice framework for self improvement, they're a pathway to reducing loneliness, increasing connection, and building the kind of holistic healing and joy that Joy Lab is all about. If you're in the Joy Lab Program, your first Experiment will help you locate yourself within these four types and start the work.

About: The Joy Lab Podcast is an Ambie-nominated podcast that blends science and soul to help you cope better with stress, anxiety, and depression. It's hosted by integrative psychiatrist Dr. Henry Emmons and holistic mental health researcher Dr. Aimee Prasek. The podcast is best paired with the Joy Lab Program. Bonus: spread some joy and keep this podcast ad-free by donating (Joy Lab is powered by the nonprofit Pathways North and your donations are tax-deductible).

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Sources and Notes for our Element of Humility:

Joy Lab Program: Take the next leap in your wellbeing journey with step-by-step practices to help you build and maintain the elements of joy in your life.

More on C.S. Lewis from the C.S. Lewis Foundation.

Book: Humble by Daryl Van Tongeren, PhD
Hagá & Olson. ‘If I only had a little humility, I would be perfect’: Children’s and adults’ perceptions of intellectually arrogant, humble, and diffident people. Access here.
Nielsen & Marrone. Humility: Our current understanding of the construct and its role in organizations. Access here.
Porter et al. Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility. Access here.
Van Tongeren et al. Humility. Access here.
Weidman et al. The psychological structure of humility. Access here.
Wright et al. The psychological significance of humility. Access here.
Wendell Berry's book Standing by Words

Key moments:

[00:00:00] Welcome + intro to Joy Lab's Element of Humility — solo episode with Dr. Aimee Prasek

[00:00:30] Clearing up the bad takes: what humility is not — not weakness, not martyrdom, not dismissing your talents

[00:01:00] The social science of humility: why we're drawn to humble people from mid-adolescence on, and why it primes us for connection

[00:02:00] Humility as antidote to certainty culture and self-destructive perfectionism; the formal definition unpacked

[00:02:45] C.S. Lewis on humility as self-forgetfulness — and the powerful paradox it reveals about hyper self-focus

[00:03:30] The reframed Lewis quote: "Humility is not thinking less of yourself — it's thinking of yourself less often"

[00:04:15] Introducing the four research-backed types of humility: relational, intellectual, cultural, and existential

[00:05:00] Deep dive into intellectual, cultural, and existential humility — leaning into curiosity over certainty

[00:06:00] Why humility is harder than other Elements — and why it's worth it anyway

[00:07:00] The obstacles: certainty culture, fear of being wrong, pressure to perform vs. just be

[00:08:00] Ego protection, the stress response, and why humility can feel like a physical threat to the nervous system

[00:08:45] Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren's three ingredients for building humility: Know Yourself → Check Yourself → Go Beyond Yourself

[00:09:45] Humility as medicine for the loneliness epidemic, anxiety, and depression — why culture is craving this right now

[00:10:30] What's coming next: knowing ourselves, plus your first Joy Lab Program Experiment

[00:11:00] Closing poem: The Real Work by Wendell Berry

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Episode Transcript

268. Humility Can Be Stressful... But Worth it for Mental Health
===

[00:00:05] Aimee Prasek, PhD: Well, welcome to Joy Lab. It is just me today, Aimee Prasek, and I am really looking forward to starting our newest Element of Joy, which is Humility. Henry will be back next Episode.

Today, we need to get a handle on what humility is, and what it isn't, because I think humility has gotten a bad rap. There are so many bad takes that are related to humility, like bad advice that has beaten some of the humility out of us. Humility is not about being a pushover. It's not dismissing your own talents. It's not about being a martyr. It's not weak. In fact, it is one of the greatest strengths that we have as a species. Beginning in about mid-adolescence or so, we are actually more drawn to humble people, and there's a pull to practice it ourselves. It's a really strong social signal that primes us to connect, and that's essential because we need connection. We talk a lot about that here. We can't know it all. We can't do it all. We need connection and community, not just to survive, but to thrive, to flourish, to tap into our meaning, into our joy.

And so the wild, kind of, antidote to all these bad takes. You know, like, "don't trust anyone. If you're not first, you're last." I think that's, um... oh my God, what movie is that from? Help me out... _Talladega Nigh__ts_ — a lot of bad takes. Or the pressures to be right or perfect all the time, all that self-destructive crap. Humility is an antidote to that. And I think a big reason why, is it frees us from this prison of thinking that we're in this alone; that we have to, again, know everything, that we can't make mistakes, that we are 100% responsible for everything in our lives.

That's not to dismiss responsibility, but there is nuance there. There is recognition that we're part of something bigger. Humility offers that to us. Humility means that you have an accurate, grounded sense of who you are. It's not inflated, it's not deflated. So that's kind of, more or less, the formal definition. Again, you have an accurate, grounded sense of who you are. Not inflated, not deflated. C.S. Lewis, in one of his books, kind of describes humility as self-forgetfulness, which maybe doesn't sound great initially, but it kind of gets at this powerful paradox of humility, and the freedom that it can offer us.

I think we probably know, or have felt, that when you're hyperfocused on yourself — when you're self-monitoring constantly, when you're only focused on all of the things that are happening right from your head to your toes, within that skin — that kind of hyper self-attention is paradoxically self-destructive. It's just too much. And it either runs into excessive self-criticism; negative self-attention, or to the other side, into kind of a narcissistic self-obsession; self-aggrandizement. Both of those extremes shrink our world. They close us off to others, to our environment, to possibilities, to connections; to trust — trust in ourselves, trust in others. So this self-forgetfulness is freeing. There's a quote that's been, I think, actually falselyattached to C.S. Lewis, but it gets at this argument of, of C.S. Lewis. It's that, "Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It's thinking of yourself less often." Not thinking less of yourself, just thinking of yourself less often.

So what does humility look like? There are really four types of humility in the research that can help us kind of categorize [humility] to make it a little easier to assess our own humility. The types are relational, intellectual, cultural, and existential.

So relational humility has to do with how you hold yourself in relation to others. Not above, not below.

Intellectual humility has to do with holding your beliefs and your opinions with openness; that you lean toward curiosity instead of certainty.

Cultural humility is about recognizing the limits of your cultural perspective, the lenses that influence what, and how, you see and interpret the world. You have a genuine openness to differences with this type of humility.

Existential humility is about making peace with uncertainty, impermanence; like the big mysteries of being human, those big questions in life. And like all the other types of humility I just noted, you're again open to the differences, and leaning into curiosity rather than certainty.

Humility can show up in these four different areas in our lives, and we may be really nailing one area; not so great in another. And they cross over, there [are] not super clean lines between these. But identifying them can help us just get a bit of a category to assess how we're doing in certain areas.

We'll bring these back — these four types of humility — through the next Episodes, and in your Experiments in the Joy Lab Program, to make our work with Humility just a little bit more focused, 'cause this is big stuff, and working with Humility can be hard. It's not like our Element, I don't think, of Savoring, or Awe — where so much of it feels really good to do. This can be uncomfortable. It is so worth it, but it can be uncomfortable. And we'll dig into why that is, in later Episodes. But I just wanna highlight a few reasons for us to consider now, and to help those of us in the program maybe get started with our first Experiment as well this month.

So here are a few reasons why we might struggle with Humility.

First, a lot of us have been taught, or pressured, to perform rather than to be ourselves in the world. We've been warned to not trust, maybe — to believe that only one way, or person, or perspective can be right, and that being wrong is a threat to your survival, or your everlasting life, or whatever. And so of course we fear being wrong, or exposed. We've created a kind of certainty-culture that is super toxic. It makes being wrong, being unsure, really hard. There's a lot of pressure to be confident that you're right. Not to be right, but to be confident that you're right. There's a difference, and it really matters.

And of course, it is really common to wanna protect our ego. Humility can feel like a threat, like a physical threat. We're opening up; we're trusting in uncertainty, we're increasing our uncertainty-tolerance, and that can feel like a threat, which means our stress response shoots up. And that can make stepping into humility actually pretty difficult even when we wanna do it, but there are strategies to help us do it.

So there are some big obstacles here. We'll get into these a lot more over the next four Episodes. Most importantly, we'll talk about how we can build Humility up, and we'll do this using some guidance from humility researcher Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren, who notes that humility requires three ingredients, essentially, to help us build it. And this will be our agenda, kind of what's coming up for us, over the next Episodes and Experiments in the Program. We'll focus on these three ingredients 'cause they're super helpful.

The first ingredient to build up your Humility is to know yourself — developing honest self-awareness, so that you can see your strengths and limits clearly; that you can know yourself without being preoccupied with yourself.

The second ingredient is to check yourself. This is about reducing defensiveness; reducing the need to protect your ego. These all sound pretty difficult — know yourself; check yourself.

The next one: going beyond yourself. This is where we cultivate more empathy, I'd say, and seeing others. This is like humility as [a] deep relational practice. It's fuel for us to connect more deeply, to not feel so lonely; to go beyond ourselves.

So this is tough stuff. It is doable; you are wired for this, and we're gonna use some really great strategies — we're gonna use this framework to help us. I just love that we're digging into this together — everyone. It feels very counterculture and radical, which I dig, but also it's just really, really good for our minds and hearts. And I think we are absolutely craving this right now as a culture. Just like, looking at the loneliness epidemic, looking at [the] increases in depression and anxiety that we're seeing — Humility has something to say here. It is a strong bit of medicine for us.

So Henry and I will see you on the Pod again soon as we talk about knowing ourselves. If you're in the Program, head over there for your first Experiment — a nice little check-in.

And to close us, I wanna share some wisdom from Wendell Berry. It's from his poem called _The Real Work_. It's from his collection, _Standing by Words_ — a must-read. I'll link it in the show notes. Here's that poem.

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey."

[00:11:21] Thanks for joining us!: Thank you for listening to the Joy Lab podcast. If you enjoy today's show, visit JoyLab.coach to learn more about the full Joy Lab program. Be sure to rate and review us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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268. Humility Can Be Stressful... But Worth it for Mental Health

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