Humility and Mental Health

The Shape of Joy has three parts. Part 1 is entitled "Curved Inward." In this part I describe how our identities have become increasingly self-referential and how this undermines our mental health. Part 2 is entitled "Turning Away" and in this section I describe how the first step toward joy is a step back from yourself. We disengage from our neurotic, self-referential loop. 

One of the lines of research I discuss in Part 2 concerns the surprising science of humility. I say "surprising" because I don't think many people would have picked humility as being among the most robust predictors of mental health and well-being. For a lot of people, perhaps especially those raised in religiously conservative spaces, humility involves denigrating yourself, actively mortifying your ego and self-image to combat pride. But as psychologists have studied humility they have observed something quite different.

What, then, is humility? In The Shape of Joy I share two influential descriptions. The first comes from the psychologist June Tangney. According to Tangney, humble people possess the following qualities:

• An accurate assessment of yourself
• An ability to acknowledge your mistakes and limitations
• An openness to other viewpoints and ideas
• An ability to keep your accomplishments in perspective
• A low self-focus
• An appreciation of the value of all things, including other people

A second influential list, overlapping some with Tangney’s but also different in some points, comes from the researchers Joseph Chancellor and Sonja Lyubomirsky. Humble people possess or are characterized by the following:

• A secure, self-accepting identity
• A view of yourself free from distortion
• An openness to new information, being teachable
• Being other-focused rather than self-focused
• Possessing egalitarian beliefs, that is, seeing others as having the same intrinsic value/importance as oneself; lacking feelings of superiority

You'll notice that neither list has "thinking less of yourself" as a feature of humility. What these lists do describe is someone who is secure and grounded, and how from that groundedness flow social and psychological capacities. In short, as I describe in The Shape of Joy, humility isn't thinking less of yourself but a capacity to turn away from yourself and toward others.