6 Ways to Increase Emotional Stability

The Shift

6 Ways to Increase Emotional Stability

1. Cultivate Emotional Presence

One of the most overlooked forms of strength is the ability to feel your feelings. Most of us are conditioned to avoid discomfort: we bury emotions, distract ourselves, blame others, or overanalyze to sidestep the rawness of simply feeling.

Emotional presence is the practice of noticing what arises, thoughts, sensations, moods, without rushing to label, fix, or flee. It’s more about befriending your inner weather than predicting it.

Ironically, developing this kind of presence can feel destabilizing at first. It might seem like you’re becoming more sensitive, more porous. But those who’ve cultivated this skill know that while the emotions may not get easier, the process becomes more familiar when we face them head-on.

Sometimes there’s no need to figure out an emotion. It may be enough to simply witness and acknowledge: I’m having an experience right now. That witnessing itself is a form of integration.

When in doubt, take Jon Hudson’s advice: “If you can’t welcome the emotion, welcome your resistance to it.”

2. Train in the Mental Gym

We've all had moments when our minds convinced us something terrible was imminent, only to realize later we were completely wrong. The mind often functions like the boy who cried wolf. 

Emotionally stable people learn to distinguish between anxious what-if thoughts and genuine concerns that warrant attention and action.

This insight prompted me to rethink mental practices as opportunities for structured training. Meditation isn’t just about relaxation, but a gymnasium. 

Headspace illustrates this beautifully with their traffic metaphor: a small figure sits by a busy road, meant to simply observe cars (thoughts) passing by. Yet invariably, that little observer jumps up and chases after the cars, getting swept away in mental traffic. The training is in tolerating the discomfort of staying present without pursuing.

This concept isn’t new. The Stoics practiced premeditatio malorum, the premeditation of adversity through daily journaling and mental rehearsal 

Samurai warriors cultivated Fudoshin, the "immovable mind”, the ability to remain centered and undisturbed amid external chaos or internal chatter. 

Just as physical fitness requires regular exercise, mental resilience is built through deliberate practice. You can train this capacity through meditation, visualization, state shifting, journaling, breathwork, cognitive load training, mental rehearsal and many other exercises. 

3. Expand Your Complexity Tolerance

We crave clarity. We want emotions to be simple: happy or sad, good or bad, right or wrong. But real life is full of paradox, complexity, nuance, and conflicting states. 

You can be deeply grateful and still overwhelmed. You can love someone and feel anger toward them in the same breath. It can be the right decision and be incredibly painful. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald captured this perfectly: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." 

Emotional stability means developing the capacity to sit in that gray space without trying to collapse it into black-and-white. To hold the “bothness” as my professor once said. The goal isn't to resolve inner contradictions but to hold what poet Keats called "negative capability", remaining in uncertainty and doubt without irritably reaching after fact and reason. 

4. Attune to Interoceptive Intelligence

Interoception is your ability to sense internal cues like heartbeat, breath, hunger, shallow breaths, sweaty palms, knot in your stomach, and muscle tension. 

In many Indigenous traditions, the body is seen as the first site of wisdom, not the mind. The Lakota concept of wohpe speaks to the harmony that emerges when we listen to our physical being as a source of knowing. 

They recognize that anxiety might first appear as a tightening in the chest, that grief often settles in the throat, and that anger burns hot in the belly before we even register the emotion cognitively. 

This embodied knowing challenges Western medicine's tendency to privilege the brain as the sole seat of intelligence, suggesting instead that our entire nervous system is constantly processing and communicating vital information about our internal and external environment.

When you learn to interpret these signals, you gain a powerful tool for self-regulation, and can detect dysregulation faster. Learning this language takes practice, much like developing any form of literacy, but once you become fluent in your body's communications, you can intervene with breathwork, movement, or environmental changes before reaching a point of no return. 

5. Recognize the Limits of Control

We have a peculiar habit: even though we know our limits, we consistently overestimate our sphere of influence.

Epictetus wrote about this around 135 AD:
“Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens. Some things are up to us and some things are not… Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, reputations, or public offices.”

Here’s what is in your control:

• Your attention - Where you place your focus—noticing your breath, shifting from rumination to presence

• Your actions - What you say or do, even in reaction to stress

• Your attitude - Choosing curiosity over judgment, even when it's hard

• Your boundaries - What you say yes/no to, how you protect your energy

• Your effort - Showing up, practicing, taking steps—regardless of outcome

• Your values - What matters most to you, and how you live aligned with that

• Your self-talk - What you say to yourself when no one's listening

• Your response to emotions - You can't control what you feel, but you can choose how you respond to it

Here’s what is not in your control:

• Other people's thoughts, feelings, opinions, or behavior

• The past

• The future

• Unpredictable life events (loss, illness, uncertainty)

• Outcomes of your efforts

• Others' perceptions of you

• The pace at which healing or change happens

• Global events, systems, and collective trauma

Pouring your energy into that second list—trying to force outcomes, control other people, or will your desires into existence, only leads to suffering. A Zen proverb I love cuts to the heart of this: "Let go, or be dragged." 

6. Take Relational Responsibility

Piggybacking off what lies beyond your control. You can't force others to meet your needs, but you hold complete sovereignty over how you honor and express them. Relational responsibility is owning your part in how connections are shaped, sustained, and sometimes strained.

Too often, we believe others should just know what we want or how we feel. John Bowlby called this the “mind-reading fantasy”—the belief that loved ones should come with telepathy. But this fantasy prolongs disappointment. 

Needs that go unspoken don’t disappear. They morph into irritability, anxiety, resentment, withdrawal, even addictive behaviors.

Emotionally stable people don’t wait for others to guess what they’re thinking or fix things they need done. They tell them clearly and kindly. “Here’s what I need to feel safe.”“Here’s what I want more of.”“Here’s where I’m stretched thin.”

John Nash talks affirmed this in game theory: relationships are ongoing negotiations. The healthiest ones function less like zero-sum games and more like collaborative strategies, where both people win when both are seen, heard, and understood.

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