How to Be More Mature: A Practical Guide to Growing Up (At Any Age)

What Does Maturity Actually Mean?

When people talk about wanting to be "more mature," they usually mean something deeper than acting serious or paying bills on time. Maturity is the capacity to respond to life's situations with emotional awareness, personal responsibility, and a long-term perspective. It is not a single trait but a constellation of psychological skills that develop — at different rates — across your entire life.

Psychologist Erik Erikson framed human development as a series of eight psychosocial stages, each presenting a core challenge — from learning basic trust as an infant to achieving a sense of integrity in old age^[1]. In Erikson's model, maturity is not a destination you arrive at but an ongoing process of resolving tensions: independence versus connection, ambition versus acceptance, identity versus openness to change. You don't "finish" growing up — you simply get better at navigating the contradictions.

What makes someone mature, then, is not the absence of struggle but the quality of their response to it. A mature person can sit with discomfort, take ownership of mistakes, and consider how their actions affect others — even when it's inconvenient. The good news? These are all learnable skills, not fixed personality traits you either have or don't.

8 Practical Steps to Becoming More Mature

Maturity is less about grand epiphanies and more about daily habits. The following eight steps are grounded in psychological research and designed to be practiced by anyone — regardless of age, background, or starting point.

1. Practice Emotional Regulation

Emotional regulation is the foundation of mature behavior. It does not mean suppressing your feelings — it means creating a gap between stimulus and response. The next time you feel a strong emotion rising, try this: name it before you act on it. "I'm feeling frustrated," or "This is anxiety, not danger." Research by James Gross has shown that simply labeling an emotion reduces its intensity and gives you more control over what you do next^[6].

Over time, this practice rewires your default reactions. Instead of snapping at a coworker, you pause. Instead of spiraling into worry, you observe. Emotional regulation is not about becoming stoic — it is about becoming deliberate.

2. Take Responsibility Without Excuses

One of the clearest markers of maturity is how you handle being wrong. Immature responses deflect blame: "It wasn't my fault," "You made me do it," "Nobody told me." Mature responses own the outcome: "I made a mistake, and here's what I'll do differently." This shift is uncomfortable at first, but it earns trust and respect faster than any amount of talent or charm.

Taking responsibility also means recognizing that your life circumstances — while not always your fault — are your responsibility to navigate. This is not about self-blame; it is about agency. When you stop waiting for someone else to fix things, you start growing.

3. Develop Delayed Gratification

In the late 1960s, psychologist Walter Mischel conducted his now-famous marshmallow experiment at Stanford University. Children were offered one marshmallow immediately or two if they could wait fifteen minutes. Follow-up studies found that children who waited tended to have better outcomes in education, health, and relationships decades later^[4].

The lesson for adults is straightforward: the ability to tolerate short-term discomfort for long-term reward is a muscle, and you can strengthen it. Start small — finish a task before checking your phone, save before you spend, have the difficult conversation now rather than letting resentment build. Each act of delayed gratification makes the next one easier.

4. Listen More Than You Speak

Mature communication is not about having the best argument — it is about understanding what the other person actually means. Most people listen only long enough to formulate their response. Genuine listening means setting aside your own agenda, asking clarifying questions, and being willing to be changed by what you hear.

A practical test: after someone finishes speaking, try summarizing what they said before offering your own perspective. If they correct you, listen again. This simple habit transforms relationships and reveals how much you've been missing in conversations your entire life.

5. Embrace Discomfort as Growth

Psychologist Carol Dweck's research on mindset distinguishes between a fixed mindset — the belief that your abilities are static — and a growth mindset — the belief that effort and challenge expand your capacity^[2]. People with a growth mindset interpret difficulty as information, not as evidence of inadequacy.

Maturity requires the same reframe. That awkward feeling when you try something new? That is learning. The sting of honest feedback? That is data you can use. The temptation to avoid conflict? That is your comfort zone trying to keep you small. Growth lives on the other side of discomfort, and mature people learn to walk toward it rather than away.

6. Set Goals and Follow Through

Anyone can set a goal on January 1st. Maturity is what happens on February 15th, when the novelty has worn off and the work remains. Following through on commitments — to yourself and to others — builds the internal scaffolding of self-trust. When you keep promises to yourself, you start to believe you are someone who can be relied on, and that belief transforms how you approach every area of your life.

Start with goals small enough that failure feels almost impossible, then build. The point is not perfection — it is consistency. A mature person understands that showing up at seventy percent is infinitely better than waiting for conditions to be perfect.

7. Learn to Apologize and Forgive

A genuine apology has three parts: acknowledgment ("I did this"), empathy ("I understand how it affected you"), and commitment ("Here is what I will do differently"). Notice what is missing — excuses, justifications, and the word "but." Learning to apologize well is one of the most powerful maturity skills you can develop, because it requires vulnerability, empathy, and accountability all at once.

Forgiveness is the other side of that coin. Holding onto resentment often feels like strength, but it is actually a form of emotional stagnation. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what happened — it means deciding that the past will not control your present. Both skills free you to move forward instead of endlessly relitigating old wounds.

8. Seek Feedback, Not Validation

There is a critical difference between asking "What do you think?" because you want honest input and asking because you want someone to confirm you're already right. Mature people actively seek out perspectives that challenge their own. They ask questions like, "What am I missing?" and "Where could I improve?" — and they mean it.

This does not mean accepting every piece of criticism uncritically. It means treating feedback as raw material to evaluate, not as a personal attack to defend against. The person who can hear hard truths without crumbling — and extract the useful parts — has an enormous advantage in both personal and professional life.

What Maturity Doesn't Mean

There is a persistent myth that maturity means becoming boring, rigid, or perpetually serious. Nothing could be further from the truth. The most genuinely mature people are often the most playful, because they are secure enough not to perform seriousness for an audience. They can laugh at themselves, be spontaneous, and embrace silliness precisely because their sense of self does not depend on external approval.

Maturity also does not mean giving up your passions, your quirks, or the things that make you uniquely you. It means engaging with those things from a place of intention rather than compulsion. You can love video games, dress boldly, or make terrible puns — and still be deeply mature. What makes someone mature is not the content of their interests but the quality of their character: how they treat people, how they handle adversity, and whether they keep growing.

The Science of Growing Up

If you're worried you have "missed the window" for maturity, the research has encouraging news. Psychologist Brent Roberts and colleagues conducted a landmark meta-analysis of 92 longitudinal studies and found that personality traits associated with maturity — particularly conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability — continue to increase well into middle age and beyond^[3]. Roberts termed this the maturity principle: people naturally become more mature as they age, though the pace varies widely between individuals.

What is especially interesting is that this change is not purely biological. The maturity principle appears to be driven by a combination of life experiences (taking on new roles, navigating relationships, facing challenges) and deliberate effort. In other words, maturity is not something that simply happens to you — it is something you participate in. The same APA research on personality underscores that traits are not fixed at birth but continue to develop across the entire lifespan^[5]. Whether you're 18 or 58, you can become meaningfully more mature — if you're willing to do the work.

Sources & References

1. ^ Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis. Norton. link
2. ^ Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House. link
3. ^ Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of Mean-Level Change in Personality Traits Across the Life Course. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1–25.
4. ^ Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. L. (1989). Delay of Gratification in Children. Science, 244(4907), 933–938. link
5. ^ American Psychological Association. APA Topics: Personality. link
6. ^ Gross, J. J. (1998). The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299.

Further Reading

• Emotional Maturity — Understand the emotional dimension of growing up
• Signs of Immaturity — Recognize the patterns that hold people back
• What Is Mental Age? — Explore the concept behind the quiz