I was scrolling through LinkedIn at 2 AM—that peculiar form of modern insomnia where you’re too wired to sleep but too tired to do anything useful—when I saw it. A CEO I’d met at a conference had posted about “crushing Q4 goals” and “leveling up.” Standard corporate performance. But in the background of his home office selfie, barely visible on his bookshelf, sat a worn teddy bear.
He deleted the post within minutes. I know because I refreshed the page, wondering if I’d imagined it. But that glimpse stayed with me. Here was someone running a hundred-million-dollar company, someone who gave keynotes about “radical leadership,” and he kept a stuffed animal in his office. The disconnect between his digital persona and that small, soft truth felt like everything wrong with how we perform adulthood.
A week later, I brought it up with my brother over coffee. “You know what’s weird?” I said. “I bet half the people we know still have some kind of comfort object. They just hide it better than that CEO.”
He laughed. Then went quiet. “I still have my blanket from when I was a kid,” he admitted. “It’s in my laptop bag. I don’t know why. It just… stays there.”
This confession opened a floodgate. Once I started paying attention, the evidence was everywhere. A friend mentioned her “lucky” stuffed elephant she touched before important presentations. Another entrepreneur confessed he couldn’t sleep in hotels without the small bear his daughter had given him. My own girlfriend finally admitted why she always packed that specific pillow—sewn inside was a piece of fabric from her childhood rabbit.
Donald Winnicott called them transitional objects back in the 1950s, these first possessions that help children navigate the space between self and world. The psychology textbooks will tell you we’re supposed to outgrow them by age four. What they don’t mention is that 34% of adults still sleep with one, according to a 2017 study. And those are just the ones willing to admit it to researchers.
I started wondering what kind of person maintains this practice despite decades of cultural programming telling them it’s childish. What I found challenged everything I thought I knew about strength and maturity.
The CEO who deleted his post? I ran into him at another event months later. After a few drinks, I mentioned what I’d seen. Instead of embarrassment, his face softened. “That bear got me through my parents’ divorce, boarding school, my first startup failure,” he said. “Why would I abandon something that’s been more reliable than any human?”
This is what psychologists miss when they pathologize comfort objects in adults. They see regression where they should see continuity. In a culture obsessed with constant reinvention—new year, new you—these teddy-bear adults maintain a thread to their essential self. While the rest of us perform increasingly elaborate versions of who we think we should be, they keep one foot planted in simple truth: some needs don’t go away just because you get a mortgage.
My brother’s blanket in his laptop bag started to make sense. He works in private equity, a world that rewards sociopathic detachment. That hidden square of fabric is his rebellion, his refusal to fully transform into the machine his industry demands. It’s what I’ve called “fluid integrity”—the ability to meet the world’s demands without losing your essential softness.
The research backs this up in unexpected ways. Adults who maintain transitional objects score higher on measures of emotional intelligence and distress tolerance. They’re better at self-soothing during crisis. They show lower rates of substance abuse. It’s as if keeping the bear prevents them from needing other, more destructive comforts.
But here’s where it gets really interesting. A 2019 study on “object attachment in adults” found that people who openly acknowledge their comfort objects demonstrate higher levels of what researchers call “authenticity.” Not despite the teddy bear. Because of it.
Think about what it takes to keep a stuffed animal as an adult. You have to resist decades of messaging about what maturity looks like. You have to risk discovery and judgment. You have to choose personal meaning over social approval. Every night you don’t hide it is a small act of defiance against the performance of adulthood.
As I’ve explored in writing about independent thinkers, this ability to hold private truth despite public pressure is increasingly rare. We live in a time when everyone’s interior life is up for display, for optimization, for judgment. The teddy-bear adult has maintained a sacred space that exists outside the economy of performance.
The friend with the lucky elephant? She’s one of the most effective executives I know. But unlike her peers who rely on Adderall or alcohol to manage corporate pressure, she’s found a way to touch base with her humanity between meetings. Thirty seconds with a stuffed elephant. A brief return to a self that existed before KPIs and quarterly reports.
This is advanced emotional intelligence disguised as childishness. While her colleagues burn out maintaining their professional personas, she’s created a bridge between who she has to be and who she is. The elephant doesn’t make her weak. It keeps her whole.
There’s something else I noticed about the teddy-bear adults I encountered. They all shared a quality I couldn’t quite name at first. They seemed less anxious about being discovered as frauds. Less concerned with maintaining their image. It was as if the bear served as a constant reminder: you’re playing a role, but you’re not the role.
This matters more than we realize. As I’ve written about the exhausting performance of modern self-development, most of us get trapped in our own stories about who we’re supposed to be. We lose track of what feels true versus what looks good. The comfort object becomes an anchor to something more essential than any identity we construct.
The psychologist Michael Balint wrote about “benign regression”—the ability to temporarily return to earlier states of being without losing adult functionality. He saw it as a sign of psychological health, not weakness. The executive who touches her elephant between meetings is practicing exactly this. She’s not stuck in childhood. She’s fluid enough to visit it.
But perhaps the deepest strength of teddy-bear adults is their relationship with shame. Everyone I talked to had wrestled with the embarrassment of their practice. And they’d chosen authenticity anyway. In a world where we’re constantly curating ourselves for public consumption, they’d maintained one thing that was purely, unapologetically private.
My girlfriend’s pillow with the hidden fabric? She told me it took her years to stop feeling ashamed of needing it. “But then I realized,” she said, “the shame was more exhausting than just accepting I’m someone who needs comfort. We all are. I’m just honest about it.”
This radical acceptance of human need might be the teddy bear’s greatest gift. While the rest of us pretend we’ve transcended vulnerability, these adults have integrated it. They know they’re not above needing comfort. They’ve just found a way to provide it for themselves that doesn’t require explanation or justification.
The CEO never reposted that photo. But when I saw him at the next conference, something had shifted. He seemed less performative, more grounded. During his keynote, he actually mentioned the importance of “staying connected to what grounds you.” The audience assumed he meant meditation or exercise. I knew he meant the bear.
That’s the final paradox of teddy-bear adults. Their secret practice of self-comfort makes them more capable of authentic leadership, not less. They’re not performing invulnerability. They’re modeling a different kind of strength—one that includes tenderness, continuity, and the courage to need what you need without apology.
A few months after that LinkedIn scroll, I found myself packing for a work trip. Stressful agenda, difficult conversations ahead. Without thinking, I grabbed an old t-shirt from college—soft from a thousand washes, carrying the scent of a simpler time. Not quite a teddy bear, but close enough.
On the plane, I thought about all the hidden bears in laptop bags and briefcases around me. All the grown adults secretly carrying their tenderness through a harsh world. And I realized we’ve been asking the wrong question.
It’s not why some adults still need comfort objects.
It’s why the rest of us pretend we don’t.
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