Your early adulthood is the perfect time to figure things out. It’s a time to explore, be introspective, learn, and grow. Set a goal of finding yourself in your 20s.
But what does “finding yourself” really mean? What if you don’t know how to “adult?” What if you just struggle to function some days? How do you find a balance between work, school, family, friends, relationships, and quote-unquote finding yourself?
If it sounds daunting, don’t fret. There are several ways to make life in your 20s go a little smoother. Of course, figuring out relationships in your 20s, your career, and what you want is part of the process. Here are 20 tips for finding yourself in your 20s to help! (Not in your 20s anymore? Don’t worry—these tips can still apply even if you’re a little late to the party!)
1. Give Yourself Time
The older you get, the more life seems to whiz by. As you get into your 20s, your teen years will seem like a distant memory. Life speeds up, and suddenly, time seems to move faster and faster. One of the biggest ways to manage life in your early 20s is to give yourself time.
Many of us are afraid of being “bored” or of wasting our time, but if you’re feeling stressed out and out-of-balance, indulge in a few slow activities. Read, go for long wandering walks, meditate, and think. When you find yourself with a free pocket of time, lean in and enjoy the break!
2. Date Yourself
In many cases, dating in your 20s is a top priority. You’re meeting people, testing the waters on relationships, and figuring out what you want. You might even feel an urgency to jump into a relationship in your 20s rather than embrace the single life. When the urge to “find a relationship” strikes, consider spending some time dating yourself.
What does it mean to date yourself? Take yourself out to dinner. See a movie or go shopping alone. Get to know and feel comfortable with who you are on your own. Finding yourself in your 20s requires a lot of introspection and getting to know (and fall in love) with your adult self.
3. Set Up a Lifetime of Healthy Habits
Maybe you think that you’ll party it up in your 20s and slow down once you reach 30 or 40. Why not indulge your vices now? But unfortunately, damage to your health can start in your teen years and early 20s. If you’ve started smoking cigarettes, regularly drinking, or overeating, now is the time to rein it in and start building those healthier habits.
Embrace exercise in your 20s. Find a workout that you enjoy—something that doesn’t feel like work—and make it a regular habit. Take a multivitamin (I like Melaleuca’s Vitality Multivitamin & Mineral™ for women). Learn to enjoy vegetables and experiment with cooking healthy meals. The practices you set up in your 20s will become lifelong.
4. Learn About Finances
When you get that first credit card, it feels powerful. You can buy anything you want. You have money to burn! But the truth is that financial mistakes in your 20s can lead to stress, debt, and financial strain down the road. Rental companies may check your credit score. Jobs can come and go, and student loan payments can pile up.
Learn about finances in your 20s–even if you don’t have much in savings and aren’t making a huge salary right now. Check out your company’s savings plan and 401(k) and tuck a little into it. Set aside some portion of your earnings in savings. By the time you’re ready to take the next big steps in life, whether it’s getting married, buying a car, or buying a house, you’ll be glad that you have a nest egg and you’ve learned a little about money.
5. Get Social Media Smart
Life in your 20s probably includes social media. Whether it’s TikTok or Instagram, Twitter or WhatsApp, be careful what you share and what you say. Unfortunately, as many people figure out too late, the internet is forever, and no matter what you do, the receipts can come back to haunt you.
That said, it’s perfectly okay and even fun to engage in social media. In fact, social connections help you build your network as you grow your career. Your connections might help strengthen friendships, build relationships, and discover more about yourself. Just limit your social media time, and don’t leave yourself overexposed.
6. Let Go of Stuff
When you’re moving around, living in different places, and finding yourself in your 20s, the last thing you need is a bunch of furniture and knickknacks weighing you down. Although it may be tempting to accumulate a lot of stuff, especially when you first move out on your own, resist the urge!
Keep your possessions simple and focus on what you really need to be comfortable. When you get more settled down the road, you can start to furnish a house and worry about setting up a fully functional kitchen, but for now, skip out collecting and accumulating too much stuff. Instead, keep yourself free and untethered to possessions.
7. Get Enough Sleep
Between work, school, dating, and life, you may feel like you never have time for sleep. There’s just too much to do and too many demands. You may even feel like you don’t need that much sleep—drink some caffeine and keep going, right?
But if you want to avoid feelings of burnout, stress, and low performance, you must prioritize your sleep. In your 20s, you can often get by with a little less than the standard 8 hours, but this time in your life is also where you establish good sleep practices. Sleep is good for your immune system and your energy. Try training yourself to get up a little earlier and head to bed early most nights. Aim to establish a consistent bedtime whenever possible.
8. Travel with Friends
Your 20s are a great time to explore the world with friends. If you can’t afford to fly around the globe, consider taking a road trip across the state or going camping for a weekend. There are rarely other times in your life when you’ll have a chance to travel with friends. As you get older, work, kids, and relationships can get in the way of friend trips.
So grab some of your besties and start planning your experience. It doesn’t need to be a big trip for weeks on end, either. A few days away can be a great way to bond, discover more about each other, and find yourself along the way.
9. Be Adventurous
Your 20s are full of adventures. You’re enjoying new experiences and finding new discoveries. Adventure can be daunting and even frightening, but if you want to find yourself in your 20s, embrace the explorer’s spirit. Give yourself permission to make each experience a chance to discover, learn, and grow.
Adventures can happen anywhere—in your own neighborhood or while visiting somewhere new. You can have an indoor adventure or explore the great outdoors. The key to creating an adventure is to approach experiences with a natural curiosity. Be open to what you might find as you uncover the world around you.
10. Experiment
In your 20s, it’s okay to embrace the idea of experimentation. It’s often through trial and error that we find ourselves and discover new things about who we are. Experiment with fashion, makeup, and different looks. Try different approaches to problems. Try on different hats.
Experimenting pushes you out of your comfort zone. Sometimes, it can be a little painful—you might discover something that doesn’t work, whether it’s a relationship or an approach to a problem. You might find out certain friendships aren’t for you. It’s okay. There’s plenty of time to reroute and adjust your path as you move forward. Give new experiences a try to see what suits you best.
11. Uncover Your Personal Values
Often our values and morals develop into our 20s. Many people may have personal values that they’ve already become familiar with in their teen years. Some values may be either handed down from parents or formulated as a rejection or rebellion of the way they were raised.
In your 20s, you have time to figure out what you really value and what you believe. You can find values politically, spiritually, and morally. Read and learn about the values and beliefs of others to help you decide what speaks to your heart and feels right to you.
12. Set Goals for Finding Yourself in Your 20s
Goal setting is a big part of finding yourself in your 20s. When you set and work toward a goal, you’ll find out many new things about yourself. Maybe you’ve never really worked toward a goal without the push from your parents or friends. Perhaps you aren’t sure you can achieve something you really want to do.
Setting measurable goals in your 20s will build up your confidence and belief in yourself. You’ll discover your sense of self-efficacy—your belief that you can handle situations. Career goals can help you build your work style and push yourself at your job. Fitness goals can keep you healthy and give you a great sense of achievement. Financial goals can help you stay on track with your money and learn about your priorities.
13. Strike a Balance
Balance is one of the most important lessons in your 20s. Figuring out how to juggle your obligations, goals, and social life is a huge job (and one that will only get more challenging as you reach your 30s). It’s important to learn to balance aspects of life now.
In your 20s, you may be very focused on finishing school and launching your career. Be sure to make time for dating in your 20s and for creating social connections and friendships too. Work is important, but it isn’t everything. It’s also important to enjoy your young adult years too.
14. Learn Life Skills
Do you know how to change a car tire? Do you know how to clean the fridge? What about doing laundry? Sewing on a button? How are you at cooking? These are essential life skills that we all need to know and have if we want to be functional adults. However, many people reach adulthood and realize they didn’t learn some of these critical lessons for adulting.
There’s no better time like the present. Look up lessons on YouTube or Google tips and tricks for the task you want to learn. There are resources for almost any endeavor. Don’t expect that you’re going to know how to cook a perfect seven-course meal or replace a light fixture right away. Many life skills take some practice and can be pretty rough on the first go. Give yourself room to learn but keep on trying.
15. Be (a Little) Selfish
When you’re in a relationship in your 20s, there’s often a tendency to give it your all, especially if this is your first time in love. You might put your boyfriend or girlfriend’s wishes above your own, give into things you don’t want to do, or sacrifice what’s important to please someone in the name of romance.
Give yourself permission to be selfish. If you’re in a relationship in your 20s, be sure that you are happy and it’s what you want, especially before you make a long-term commitment. Dating in your 20s, especially in your early 20s, is a great adventure—so don’t take it all too seriously. Instead, maintain your independence and your own interests. There’s time to work on your relationship together and decide if it’s what you really want.
16. Practice Gratitude
Sometimes you might feel down. There’s a lot of stress in your 20s. You’re juggling many moving pieces, and there’s often pressure from school, work, relationships, your parents, even from what you see on the internet. You might think that there’s some standard, and you aren’t quite measuring up to the way you’re “supposed” to be.
One of the anecdotes to these feelings and frustrations is practicing gratitude. When we acknowledge the good in our lives, we make room for more of it. We find a greater sense of peace and purpose. Gratitude can shift your outlook and help you see the positives in challenges. Try to set a habit of acknowledging a few things on your “thankful list” each day.
17. Permit Yourself to Make Mistakes
An important aspect of self-care that is often overlooked is forgiveness. Give yourself forgiveness when you make mistakes. No one is perfect, and no one will do everything perfectly on the first try. We’re all just learning and growing as we go along.
Often, we can be harder on ourselves than we would be on a friend. If your friend came to you and said she’d made a mistake, you’d encourage her to acknowledge it (or apologize if needed) and then to forgive herself and move forward. Extend the same forgiveness to yourself. If you make a mistake, dust yourself off and try, try again.
18. Document and Photograph
When life moves fast in your 20s, you might forget to take photos (although in the Instagram day and age, most of us take more pictures than we did in years past). So before you snap pictures of your food or your pet, remember to get in the photos too. If you don’t get a photo, write down what you did—keep a journal or a record so you can go back and remember.
Someday you will look back at the photos and mementos of your 20s and remember how beautiful you were and all the fun times you had. Don’t worry about the zit, or getting the perfect angle, either. Those things are rarely noticed down the road. What you will want is the ability to look back fondly and recall the good times and the major milestones you hit in your career, your relationships, and more.
19. Talk it Out
One important life lesson to learn in your 20s is handling and processing your emotions. We all have emotions and feelings. It’s part of being human. Our emotions are vital to helping us make decisions, avoid danger, feel connected, and much more.
But in early adulthood, you might feel out of touch with your emotions or overwhelmed by them. It can be hard to know how to process feelings, how to express them responsibly, and how to let go of feelings once the trigger has passed. When we talk about our feelings, we can often start to manage them better. Talk to a friend about your emotions, or if that’s not getting to the heart of the matter, consider a professional counselor or therapist.
20. Have Fun!
The most important part of finding yourself in your 20s is to have fun with it! Your 20s are a time when you start to become your real, adult self. You begin to figure out what you want in life and gain your independence. You’re learning, growing, and having many amazing experiences. You might finish college, land your dream job, get married, have kids…or not. It’s all ahead of you.
While you should be responsible and focused on your future, you should also remember that your 20s only happen once. It’s important to have fun and enjoy these years. The foundations you set now, especially in your attitude and outlook, will carry you through your 30s, 40s, and beyond.
Do you think it’s possible to find yourself in your 20s? What’s the most important lesson of your young adult years? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
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