Learning how to be more mature mostly comes down to a few habits we can practice on any ordinary day: owning our part when things go wrong, making room for other people’s point of view, and leaving a small pause between what we feel and what we do.
Age helps, because the brain keeps maturing for longer than most of us realize, but it does none of the work for us, which is why plenty of teenagers handle a bad day better than some grown adults do.
Quick pick
Which Habit Should You Start With?
Tap the line that sounds most like you to jump to your starting point.
- Do you snap, then regret it later? Name the feeling first
- Do you blame others when things go wrong? Start by owning your part
- Do the same arguments keep coming back? Try the relationship fixes
- Are you a teenager told to grow up? Read the teen section
- Know what to do but never stick to it? Use an if-then plan
Keep reading below What maturity means Age and maturity The 9 habits Train yourself Questions
Being told to ‘grow up’ stings, mostly because the advice never comes with instructions. Like everything else in our self-help section, maturity is something we can learn, and we would rather give you the instructions than give you the same lecture again.
What Does It Mean to Be Mature?
Ask around and we get a different answer from everyone, whether it is being calm, being responsible or being ‘old for your age’. A far more useful answer comes from psychologists Cauffman and Steinberg, who studied over 1,000 people aged 12 to 48 and looked at how three qualities shaped their judgment, which were responsibility, perspective and temperance.
In plain words, responsibility means owning our choices and keeping our word, perspective means seeing a situation from more than one side and thinking beyond today, and temperance means holding back the first impulse long enough to choose. In our view, almost everything else we call maturity, from staying calm in an argument to sticking with a slow, boring project, grows out of these three.
Mark Manson puts the same idea in a way that is easy for us to remember. In his essay How to Grow Up, the child does whatever feels good, the adolescent sees everything as “a trade-off”, and the adult holds a few values that “cannot be bargained with”.
Well, most of us are a mix of all three, depending on the day and on how much sleep we got!
○ Emotional Maturity and a Mature Mindset
When people call someone mature, they usually mean emotionally mature. That person feels anger, jealousy and hurt like the rest of us, but does not hand the feeling the steering wheel.
So emotional maturity is not about feeling less, but about noticing more and choosing better.
A mature mindset is the thinking side of the same coin, and it sounds like “What part of this is mine?” instead of “Whose fault is this?” We would count intellectual maturity, the willingness to change our mind when the facts change, as part of this mindset rather than a separate skill.
○ A Quick Maturity Check
Here is an honest test we can run on ourselves tonight. We think back to the last time something went wrong, perhaps a sharp message, a bad grade or a plan cancelled at the last minute, and we replay the first few minutes in slow motion.
Did we react before we understood what had happened? Did we blame, sulk or go silent, and did we later admit our share of it, or quietly hope nobody would bring it up?
Nobody scores perfectly on this, and we are all still learning, so the point is not guilt. The point is to find the one habit worth working on first.
Does Age Make You More Mature?
Partly, yes. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s, and the prefrontal cortex, the area behind the forehead that handles planning, prioritizing and good decisions, is one of the last parts to mature.
So a teenager who acts on impulse is not broken, just still under construction.
However, age is far from the whole story. Cauffman and Steinberg found that socially responsible decision making was clearly more common in young adults than in teenagers, but hardly increased at all after 19, and that people with more responsibility, perspective and temperance decided more maturely regardless of age.
They also saw big differences between teenagers in the same age group, which is something we can all see in any classroom.
Our personalities keep growing as well. A large review of 92 samples by psychologist Brent Roberts and his colleagues found that people become more conscientious and emotionally stable over time, especially in young adulthood, between 20 and 40.
In other words, time moves most of us in the right direction, and our habits decide how far we actually go.
○ Why Do I Lack Maturity?
Sometimes the honest answer is that life has not asked much of us yet. If someone else has always paid the bills, made the phone calls and fixed our mistakes for us, we simply have not had the practice, and maturity is mostly practice.
Other times an old hurt sits underneath, and we react to today’s small slight with yesterday’s big pain. Working through that, for example with these shadow work prompts, often does us more good than any list of tips.
And sometimes it is something else altogether. The NHS lists interrupting conversations and making quick decisions without thinking about the result among the signs of ADHD in adults, and suggests seeing a GP when symptoms affect your studies, work or relationships.
If that has been our pattern for as long as we can remember, booking an appointment with a doctor is a kind thing to do for ourselves, not an admission of failure.
How to Be More Mature: 9 Habits to Practice
None of these habits is new or clever, and that is rather the point. Maturity is less about what we know and more about what we do on an ordinary Tuesday evening, when we are tired and somebody has just annoyed us.
We would start with whichever habit stings the most to read, because that sting usually points to the right place. We do not have to work on all nine at once, and one habit we really practice will do more for us than nine habits we only read about.
1. Own Your Part
Responsibility comes first because every other habit leans on it. When a group project falls apart or a friendship goes cold, the immature move is to build a case against the other person, and the mature move is to ask, “What did I do that made this worse?”
Owning our part does not mean taking all the blame. It means saying the plain sentence, “I was late, I’m sorry, and it won’t happen again,” without a “but” added on the end.
That one small word has a way of quietly erasing everything that came before it!
2. Hold Your Views Firmly, Not Rigidly
Too many of us think that being stubborn is the same as being confident. A rigid person defends an opinion because changing it feels like losing, whilst a confident person can hear a better argument, change course and feel no smaller for it.
Mature people look at a problem from more than one side, then decide and stand by the decision without needing the whole room to agree.
If we keep needing that agreement before we feel sure, it helps to read about how the need for recognition affects our minds, and if self-belief is the thing we are short of, these confidence building exercises build the real kind.
For the ‘other angle’ part, a simple tool is perception checking. We describe what we saw, offer two possible explanations for it, and then ask the other person which one is closer to the truth.
3. Name the Feeling Before You React
This one has real science behind it. In a brain scan study, psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues found that putting feelings into words, which they called ‘affect labeling’, calmed the amygdala’s response to upsetting pictures.
So when the heat rises, we can say it to ourselves, even silently, as in “I’m embarrassed” or “I feel left out.” A named feeling is still there, but it is no longer driving.
That tiny gap between feeling and doing is exactly where a mature response becomes possible.
4. Sleep on Big Decisions
The decisions we make in the heat of the moment are usually the ones we end up having to explain later. Quitting a job over one bad meeting, sending the angry text or leaving a friendship in the group chat all feel urgent at the time, and they almost never are.
A mature person takes a step back, lets the body calm down and only makes the decision once they feel calm again. Not every choice can wait (some calls need instinct and intuition in real time), but most of the big ones can easily wait a night.
5. Listen to Understand, Not to Reply
Most of us are not really listening when we talk with someone, we are just waiting for our turn to talk. The mature habit is to let the other person finish, ask one question about what they actually said, and only then offer our own view.
It also means getting comfortable with a little silence. A pause after someone speaks is not awkward at all, it simply shows we are thinking about their words instead of loading our next line.
6. Let Small Insults Pass
A cutting remark is very often bait, and we do not have to take it. The immature response is to bite, and before long two people are trading insults and both walk away worse off, whereas the mature response is to see that the remark says more about the other person’s mood than about our worth.
However, letting small things pass is not the same as accepting real disrespect. If someone keeps belittling us, the mature step is a calm, clear boundary, and our guide on why we should never tolerate disrespect explains where that line sits.
7. Keep Small Promises
Nothing makes people see us as mature faster than being reliable. Replying when we said we would, turning up on time and returning the borrowed charger are small things, yet they build a reputation that no speech about our good character ever could.
The trick is to promise less and deliver all of it. “I’ll try to make it” is far more honest than “Definitely!” followed by a no-show.
People always notice the difference, even when they are too polite to say so.
8. Accept What You Cannot Change
Some things are simply out of our hands, like the rain on the day of the trip, a friend’s decision to move away or the exam paper we wish had been kinder. Immaturity spends its energy complaining about them, whilst maturity accepts them first and only then asks what can still be done.
Acceptance starts with ourselves, our quirks and mistakes included, because we cannot improve what we refuse to look at. Our post on accepting the good and the bad goes further into this.
9. Ask for Feedback, and Take It Well
For most of us, this is the hardest habit on the list, and it is also the one that helps us the most. Asking a trusted friend, “What is one thing I do that puts people off?”, and then thanking them instead of defending ourselves, takes real courage.
We do not have to agree with every piece of feedback. However, a mature person hears all of it, sleeps on the uncomfortable bits and keeps whatever turns out to be true.
How to Train Yourself to Be More Mature
Here is the good news. Our personality is not set in stone, and in two 16-week experiments, psychologists Hudson and Fraley found that people who set goals to change a personality trait tended to change in that direction, and that teaching them to form ‘implementation intentions’ helped them get there.
An implementation intention is just an if-then plan. Instead of a vague “I’ll be calmer”, we decide, “If I feel my face getting hot in an argument, then I’ll say I need a minute and take one slow breath before I answer.”
So we can choose one habit from the list above, write a single if-then line for it, and keep that line somewhere we will see it every day.
At the end of each week, a short review is enough, and we only need to ask when we reacted instead of responded, what we owned and what we dodged, and what our if-then line will be next week. Progress here is slow and quiet, and that is perfectly normal.
Nobody else notices the day we did not send the angry text, except us, and that is enough!
Maturity in Everyday Life
○ How to Be More Mature in a Relationship
Relationships are where our maturity gets tested the most, because the people closest to us know exactly which buttons to press.
The Gottman Institute, which studies couples, warns about four habits it calls the four horsemen. Criticism attacks a partner’s character, contempt takes a position of moral superiority, defensiveness is really a way of blaming a partner, and stonewalling is when the listener shuts down and stops responding.
The Gottman Institute’s antidotes read like a short course in maturity. We complain about one specific behavior with an “I” statement instead of an attack, we keep showing appreciation, and we accept responsibility for our share of the conflict, even if it is only part of it.
When an argument floods us and we feel ourselves shutting down, it helps to stop, ask for a break and spend 20 minutes doing something soothing on our own before coming back.
Walking away to calm down is mature, whereas walking away to punish someone is not. The same habits work at home with parents and siblings, where the oldest arguments tend to restart over the smallest things.
All of this is for ordinary arguments between people who feel safe with each other. If a partner frightens us, controls us or hurts us, that is not something we can fix by being more mature, and the mature move is to tell a trusted adult or friend.
○ How to Be More Mature as a Teenager
Search this question and much of what comes back is about looking older, as if a haircut could do the job. Being mature has nothing to do with how we look, and a teenager who keeps their word and owns their mistakes will be trusted long before one who simply dresses the part. Nor does it mean giving up being silly, since the people most worth copying can be goofy on Saturday and still keep their word on Monday!
It also helps to know that the brain is still being built during these years. The National Institute of Mental Health notes that challenging classes, exercise and creative activities like art or music can strengthen brain circuits and help the brain mature.
So the sport, the music lessons and the tough subject we picked are quietly doing their part, and so are small real responsibilities, like cooking a family meal or booking our own appointments.
○ How to Be More Mature as a Man or a Woman
Maturity looks the same in everyone, because responsibility, perspective and self-control have no gender. Where it gets tricky is the old script many of us were handed, such as “boys don’t cry” or “good girls keep the peace”, because both push people away from naming their feelings honestly.
A mature man is allowed to say he is hurt, and a mature woman is allowed to say no. For more on the first, our longer guide on how to be a better man picks up where this leaves off.
○ How to Talk More Maturely
The way we talk says a lot about how mature we are. Words like “always” and “never” turn one bad evening into a verdict on a whole person, and sarcasm tends to sound clever only to the person saying it.
Mature talk is slower and more specific, so we say “I felt ignored when you were on your phone at dinner” rather than “You never care about me.” It also includes a few short sentences many of us find hard to say out loud, such as “I was wrong” and “Tell me more.”
The Muddy Road
There is an old Zen tale, retold in the collection 101 Zen Stories, about two monks, Tanzan and Ekido, traveling together down a muddy road in heavy rain. At a crossing they meet a young woman who cannot get across the mud, so Tanzan simply lifts her up and carries her over.
Ekido says nothing for hours. That night at the temple he finally bursts out that monks should not go near women, let alone carry them, and Tanzan replies that he put her down back at the crossing, then asks whether Ekido is still carrying her.
Tanzan did what the moment needed and let it go, whilst Ekido carried a grudge all the way home.
In the end, maturity is mostly the art of putting things down and walking on a little lighter.
Frequently Asked Questions About Maturity
How do I train myself to be more mature?
Pick one habit, such as pausing before you react or owning your part when things go wrong, and turn it into an if-then plan: “If I feel my face getting hot in an argument, then I’ll ask for a minute before I answer.” Psychologists Hudson and Fraley found that people who set goals to change a personality trait tended to change in that direction over 16 weeks, and that if-then plans helped. Review the plan once a week and swap in a new habit when the first one feels natural.
At what age are you most mature?
There is no single age. The National Institute of Mental Health says the brain keeps developing and maturing into the mid-to-late twenties, and personality research finds that, on average, people grow more conscientious and emotionally steady between 20 and 40. After that, maturity keeps growing for as long as we keep learning from our mistakes, and it can stall at any age if we stop.
Is 23 still immature?
Not necessarily. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the part of the brain that handles planning and good decisions is one of the last to mature, and the brain is still finishing that work into the mid-to-late twenties. But plenty of people in their early twenties are more mature than people twice their age, because responsibility, perspective and self-control matter far more than a birthday.
How can I be more mature mentally?
Mental maturity is mostly about how you think before you act. Name what you are feeling before you respond, look for at least one other explanation for what happened, be willing to change your mind when the facts change, and sleep on big decisions instead of making them while you are upset.
Can you become mature faster?
You cannot skip experience, but you can get much more out of it. Take on real responsibilities, look after someone younger, spend time with people older and wiser than you, ask for honest feedback, and look back each week at what you handled well and what you would do differently.
I’m blessed and humbled after reading all about how to be mature. Thank you so much for writing such important and amazing words. God bless you.