11 Habits Of A Mentally Weak Person That Resilient People Avoid At All Costs
People who know how to adapt and survive don't let themselves get caught in these negative traps.
Dodokat / Shutterstock People are only as strong as they believe themselves to be. Mentally strong people trust themselves to make decisions that will lead them in the direction of the life they want to live. And there are certain habits of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs, because they know that being resilient is more than a mindset — it’s a daily practice.
Confidence and inner strength are traits people cultivate in small, actionable ways every single day. In building up their confidence, mentally strong people also build their resilience, which the American Psychological Association defines as “successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility.” If they want to become more resilient, people have to shift the way they approach life and its inevitable challenges.
Here are 11 habits of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs
1. Letting shame overpower them
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A habit of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs is letting shame overpower them and dictate their ability to do hard things. Everyone feels shame: it's a universal part of the human experience. The difference between a mentally weak person and resilient people comes down to how they manage shame.
Researcher and author Brené Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.”
Brown noted that “the main concern about connection emerged as the fear of disconnection; the fear that something we’ve done or failed to do, something about who we are or where we come from, has made us unlovable and unworthy of connection.”
“I learned that we resolve this concern by understanding our vulnerabilities and cultivating empathy, courage, and compassion — what I call shame resilience,” she shared.
Someone who lacks inner strength and a core sense of self believes the story shame tells them. Resilient people hear the messages shame sends them, but they don’t believe them to be true. They employ Brown’s shame resilience theory, which involves recognizing their shame, giving voice to it, and moving through it, which allows them to grow into their most authentic selves.
Shame feeds on itself, like a snake eating its own tail. The only way to stop it from devouring you whole is to channel empathy and self-compassion, and believe in your own resilience.
2. Giving in to their inner critic
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Another habit of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs is believing their inner critic is more powerful than they are. They give in to their inner critic, while resilient people develop techniques to rise above.
According to therapist Jennifer Kennedy, your harsh inner critic tries to take you down by saying, “You’re not good enough, there’s something wrong with you, people don’t like you."
Kennedy believes the typical narrative on overcoming your inner critic takes “a very harsh approach” that doesn’t actually work.
“It’s kind of like, you need to blast through your inner critic, you need to ignore what it says, you need to argue back with it, so it’s this forceful approach to the inner critic,” she explained. “You’re basically trying to match the harshness of the inner critic with your own harshness.”
Fighting your inner critic won’t tame it. Meeting your critic with empathy allows you to move beyond it, which is an act of resilience, in itself.
“Once you start to listen to your inner critic, once you start to be more open and accepting, and really start to understand why your inner critic is being so hostile, then you will start to see more results, because softness, gentleness, kindness, and compassion soothes and neutralizes the inner critic,” Kennedy concluded.
3. Blaming other people for their problems
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Casting blame on others for their own problems is a typical habit of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs. Resilience doesn’t shield people from life’s challenges, but it does impact the way they see themselves when confronting those challenges.
Resilient people navigate obstacles with grace and determination. They rely on the strength of their relationships to guide them through hardships, but they don’t blame anyone else for what they’re going through.
Dr. Jack Shonkoff, the director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, touched on the connection between resilience and social support.
“Resilience depends on supportive, responsive relationships and mastering a set of capabilities that can help us respond and adapt to adversity in healthy ways,” he explained. “It’s those capacities and relationships that can turn toxic stress into tolerable stress.”
A mentally weak person avoids taking accountability for their struggles. They pin their pain on others. When resilient people encounter adversity, they consider how their patterns pave the way to triumph or keep them stuck, and they take responsibility for all sides of themselves.
4. Avoiding self-reflection
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Avoiding self-reflection is a habit of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs. A mentally weak person stays on the surface of their relationship with themselves. They build walls around the more complex parts of their identity. These walls shield them from having to look too closely at their patterns of behavior or emotional responses.
For a mentally weak person, self-reflection is scary, because it might reveal a side of themselves they’ve never fully acknowledged. While a mentally weak person won’t tune into their own inner landscape, resilient people stay curious about who they are. They seek to know themselves on a deeper level, so they can shed past versions of themselves and evolve into their most authentic selves.
Self-reflection creates a foundation for resilience. Understanding ourselves lets us pivot away from patterns that no longer serve us, which is an essential part of adapting to adversity.
5. Hiding from discomfort
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Hiding from discomfort is a habit of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs. As much as we want our lives to be peaceful and prosperous, feeling pain is an unavoidable part of being human. Pretending that pain doesn’t exist might provide momentary relief, but pushing down difficult feelings isn’t a tenable long-term solution. The only way to move through pain is to accept it.
There’s an important distinction between acknowledging sorrow and making a home within it. A mentally weak person sees hardship as insurmountable, so they settle into hopelessness. Resilient people know that hope is what gives them the strength to sit with discomfort and keep pushing through.
Anthropologist Dr. Catherine Panter-Brick shared her views on the cultural perspective of resilience, noting that “what matters to individuals facing adversity is a sense of ‘meaning-making’— and what matters to resilience is a sense of hope that life does indeed make sense, despite chaos, brutality, stress, worry, or despair.”
“Resilience is about achieving a ‘good enough life,'” she continued. “Resilience is doing more than just ‘functioning well’ or ‘better-than-expected.’ It is about ‘making sense’ of the moral aspects of your life.”
Dr. Canter-Brick pointed out that the “effort to sustain dignity, rather than simply to alleviate misery, is the key to a hopeful future.”
When we hide from discomfort, we hide from reality. There will always be heartache woven into our triumphs. Our ability to acknowledge discomfort, even amidst joy, allows us to hold the complexities of the human experience without shrinking away from them.
6. Ignoring their emotions
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A habit of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs is ignoring their emotions. Resilient people see emotions as messengers, bringing their subconscious selves to the forefront of their awareness. They know that feeling all their feelings will guide them toward a more fully-realized life.
Psychologist Nick Wignall pointed out that “successful people tend to have good relationships with their minds.”
“When you look carefully at people who have achieved and maintained some amount of meaningful success in their lives, one of the hidden factors behind that success is that they don’t get sabotaged and derailed by their thoughts, beliefs, and emotions,” he shared.
According to Wignall, accepting difficult emotions without judgment is the healthiest way to manage them. Recognizing emotions while they’re still small is the first step to facing emotions from a non-judgmental place.
“If you can get in the habit of acknowledging your emotions when they first show up — and then validating them instead of trying to get rid of them — you stand a much better chance of staying emotionally balanced,” Wignall explained.
7. Deflecting feedback
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Another habit of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs is deflecting feedback. While a mentally weak person will interpret feedback as an attack on their character and their worthiness, resilient people welcome it. They believe in their own inherent worth, which means they can hold space for constructive critique without it destroying their sense of self.
Resilient people know that incorporating feedback is the only way to grow. While a mentally weak person becomes defensive when told how they could improve, resilient people welcome the information. They integrate outside advice into their identities. A mentally weak person sees imperfections as an excuse to be stagnant, but resilient people see flaws as a guide for self-improvement.
Evaluating your growth points means letting yourself be vulnerable. Opening up to other people’s assessments means practicing resilience in action. Hearing hard truths takes humility. Harnessing those truths to become your best self takes work, but it’s the good kind of work, the kind that brings you closer to a purposeful life.
8. Refusing to change
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Refusing to change is a habit of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs. A mentally weak person will repeat maladaptive behaviors and wonder why they feel stuck, while a resilient person can step back and see how they need to change.
A mentally weak person thinks that change is too scary to even consider, let alone aim for. Resilient people see obstacles as opportunities to learn more about themselves, which is the primary agent for change.
In an article published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, neuroscience and psychiatry professor Dr. Rachel Yehuda shared that resilience requires people to integrate traumatic experiences, redefine themselves, and move forward.
“The idea of moving forward is an important component of resilience for me because this notion recognizes that some of the most resilient people, at least that I know, may have had or still have very severe PTSD that they struggle with every day. But they don't succumb to its negative effects,” she explained.
“Resilience involves an active decision, like sobriety, that must be frequently reconfirmed,” Dr. Yehuda concluded. “That decision is to keep moving forward.”
9. Relying on instant gratification
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Relying on instant gratification is a habit of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs.
Psychologist Dr. Josh Mirmelli described delayed gratification as “a crucial component of mental resilience” that involves “the ability to resist an immediate reward in favor of a later, often larger, reward.”
“Learning to delay gratification… [is] about fostering resilience, deepening our sense of fulfillment, and building a more robust, enduring sense of self,” he explained. In doing so, “we develop the patience and perseverance necessary to achieve long-term goals, improve relationships, and handle stress more effectively.”
According to Dr. Mirmelli, the first steps to put delayed gratification into practice are to start small, visualize the future reward, and practice mindfulness.
“By staying present, we can better resist the pull of immediate gratification and choose actions that align with our long-term goals,” he concluded.
10. Defining themselves by their mistakes
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Using their mistakes to define themselves is a habit of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs. A mentally weak person tends to overgeneralize failure. They think that one mistake means they can never do anything right. They see themselves as the sum of everything they’ve ever done wrong. They can’t separate the act of making a mistake from their sense of self-worth. They see their mistakes as definitive proof that they’re failures, instead of acknowledging their successes, no matter how small.
Psychological theory differentiates between a challenge perspective and a hindrance perspective. People who have a challenge perspective see their problems as opportunities to learn and grow, while people with a hindrance perspective are derailed by setbacks. They see problems as something happening to them, while people with challenge perspectives see problems as happening “for them.”
Having a challenge perspective allows people to reframe how they approach difficult situations. By seeing adversity, itself, as an inspiration to keep going, they assign new meaning to mistakes they’ve made along the way.
People with a challenge perspective build resilience by persevering. They have gratitude for the hard parts of every journey. They acknowledge small wins, which leads them to believe in their power.
11. Living in the past
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Living in the past is a habit of a mentally weak person that resilient people avoid at all costs. Having regret for things you did or didn’t do is an unavoidable part of the human experience. While regret is universal, the way people navigate regret depends on how resilient they are.
A mentally weak person is more likely to ruminate on the past than resilient people, who see regret as a touchpoint for what to do next time. They catalog their regrets, but they don’t stay tangled in the mire of what they wish they'd done differently.
A mentally weak person might struggle to forgive themselves, but resilient people accept that they did the best they could. Resilient people understand that lingering on the past holds them back from having the future they deserve.
Alexandra Blogier, MFA, is a staff writer who covers psychology, social issues, relationships, self-help topics, and human interest stories.