Building Emotional Resilience in Your Twenties
Finding Steadiness Amid Change
Your twenties are often described as “the best years of your life.” And while this decade can be full of excitement, possibility, and new beginnings, it can just as easily feel overwhelming, disorienting, and uncertain. Many young adults navigate shifting career paths, evolving friendships and relationships, financial instability, and the ongoing work of discovering who they are and what they want.
Amid these transitions, emotional resilience becomes an essential internal resource – one that helps you feel steadier, more grounded, and more connected to yourself. At its core, resilience is the capacity to adapt, recover, and move forward with vitality after facing challenges. It is not about perfection or having everything figured out. It’s about cultivating the internal conditions that allow you to meet your life with clarity, flexibility, and compassion.
What Does Emotional Resilience Mean?
We hear the word resilience everywhere, but what does emotional resilience in your twenties look like in practice?
Emotional resilience may include:
- Noticing physical sensations and emotional states with curiosity
- Identifying and naming your feelings
- Calming your body and mind rather than reacting impulsively
- Regulating emotions without shutting down or becoming overwhelmed
- Adapting to uncertainty and change
- Learning from challenges rather than letting them define you (i.e. challenges are things that you can face, not definitions of who you are)
Resilience is not about avoiding stress, change or challenges. Instead, it allows you to face what’s unfolding in front of you, digest and integrate it, and continue forward with purpose. It helps you stay internally connected – anchored in your own experience – while also remaining externally connected through supportive, safe relationships.
Start With Awareness: Acknowledge How You Feel
Emotional resilience begins with awareness. When life becomes uncertain or heavy, many people disconnect, distract, or try to push through. We’re often taught that enduring discomfort without pause is a sign of strength. It can feel especially difficult to check in with ourselves when our external world – or internal landscape – feels overwhelming. And yet, strength often grows through stillness – a willingness to pause, listen inwardly and non-judgmentally examine our inner experience.
Consider asking yourself:
- What emotions are present for me right now?
- Where do I feel them in my body?
- What might this feeling be asking of me?
- Is there a message or a need underneath it?
Naming your emotions shifts you from being in the feeling to being aware of the feeling. That subtle separation creates space – space to respond intentionally rather than to react impulsively.
Building Daily Habits That Support Your Nervous System
Emotional resilience is built through proactive consistency. We cannot expect ourselves to ground in moments of acute distress if we haven’t practiced it in our daily lives. Small practices done regularly help your nervous system slow down and regain clarity, especially when stress makes everything feel urgent.
These habits might include:
- Cooking a grounding meal
- Taking a morning workout class
- Watching a sitcom that makes you laugh
- Turning off work notifications after a certain hour
- Journaling or mindful walking
- Set aside five or ten minutes to breathe. Make your inhales slightly longer than your exhales (i.e. breathe in for a count of 4 and out for 6), which helps regulate your nervous system.
Creating a routine can be an invitation (not an obligation) to become curious about and explore what habits serve you. Discover what helps you feel most like yourself, and release what doesn’t work for you. These small, repeated choices tell your body that you are safe, capable, and supported, even when life feels uncertain.
Resilience develops through subtle shifts: moments when you choose rest, presence, or curiosity over urgency or avoidance. Over time, those choices create an internal steadiness that supports you through life’s inevitable fluctuations.
Let Growth Be Messy
It’s easy to imagine that everyone else your age has life sorted out. Social media, comparison, and campus or workplace culture often reinforce that illusion. In reality, this decade is full of transitions, uncertainty, and exploration.
Resilience grows when you release the expectation that your path should look like anyone else’s. Growth isn’t linear – it includes detours, pauses, restarts, and moments of recalibration. It’s nuanced and deeply personal.
Give yourself permission to move at your own pace. When you slow down and lean into your internal world, you create the conditions for genuine transformation. Mistakes, pivots, and recalibrations aren’t signs of failure; they’re evidence of development and signs of an emerging, enduring resilience.
Resilience Also Means Knowing When to Ask for Support
Emotional resilience doesn’t mean doing everything on your own. Sometimes, the most resilient choice is recognizing when you need support and allowing yourself to receive it.
Therapy can offer a space to slow down, explore your inner world with care, and develop tools to navigate uncertainty with more steadiness and self-trust. Working with a therapist can help you deepen emotional awareness, regulate stress, and move through life’s transitions with greater clarity and intention.
If you’re in your twenties and feeling overwhelmed, stuck, or unsure of your next steps, you don’t have to figure it out alone. Support is not a sign of weakness. It’s an investment in your growth and wellbeing.
At Sōhum Therapy, we work with young adults navigating periods of transition, identity development, and emotional overwhelm. If you’re curious about therapy, we invite you to reach out and explore whether working together feels like the right next step.
Isabel Golan, LMSW (she/her)
Isabel Golan is a licensed therapist passionate about helping individuals navigate life’s challenges and uncover the deeper patterns that shape their experiences. She specializes in supporting clients through trauma, life transitions, relationship issues, depression, and anxiety. With a collaborative and compassionate approach, she creates a space where clients feel empowered to explore their emotions and embrace growth.
