How Do You Change Your Personality Snarky
One morning time last summer, I woke up and announced, to no one in particular: "I choose to be happy today!" Next I journaled about the things I was grateful for and tried to think more than positively almost my enemies and myself. When someone afterward criticized me on Twitter, I suppressed my rage and tried to sympathize with my hater. And so, to loosen up and aggrandize my social skills, I headed to an improv form.
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I was midway through an experiment—sample size: 1—to see whether I could alter my personality. Because these activities were supposed to make me happier, I approached them with the drastic promise of a supplicant kneeling at a shrine.
Psychologists say that personality is made upwardly of five traits: extroversion, or how sociable you are; conscientiousness, or how self-disciplined and organized yous are; agreeableness, or how warm and empathetic you are; openness, or how receptive you are to new ideas and activities; and neuroticism, or how depressed or anxious y'all are. People tend to exist happier and healthier when they score higher on the first four traits and lower on neuroticism. I'm pretty open and conscientious, just I'chiliad low on extroversion, middling on agreeableness, and off the charts on neuroticism.
Researching the science of personality, I learned that it was possible to deliberately mold these five traits, to an extent, by adopting certain behaviors. I began wondering whether the tactics of personality alter could work on me.
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I've never really liked my personality, and other people don't similar information technology either. In grad school, a partner and I were assigned to write false obituaries for each other by interviewing our families and friends. The nicest affair my partner could milkshake out of my loved ones was that I "really enjoy grocery shopping." Recently, a friend named me maid of honour in her wedding; on the website for the event, she described me equally "strongly opinionated and fiercely persistent." Not wrong, only not what I want on my tombstone. I've always been bad at parties considering the topics I bring upwards are too depressing, such every bit everything that's wrong with my life, and everything that's incorrect with the world, and the futility of doing annihilation most either.
Neurotic people, twitchy and suspicious, can oft "detect things that less sensitive people simply don't register," writes the personality psychologist Brian Little in Who Are You, Actually? "This is not conducive to relaxed and easy living." Rather than being motivated by rewards, neurotic people tend to fear risks and punishments; we ruminate on negative events more than emotionally stable people do. Many, like me, spend a lot of money on therapy and brain medications.
And while at that place's nothing wrong with being an introvert, we tend to underestimate how much we'd enjoy behaving like extroverts. People have the most friends they will ever have at age 25, and I am much older than that and never had very many friends to begin with. Likewise, my editors wanted me to come across if I could modify my personality, and I'll try anything once. (I'm open to experiences!) Maybe I, too, could become a friendly extrovert who doesn't acquit around emergency Xanax.
I gave myself 3 months.
The best-known expert on personality change is Brent Roberts, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Our interview in June felt, to me, a flake similar visiting an evidence-based spiritual guru—he had a Zoom groundwork of the ruby rocks of Sedona and the answers to all my big questions. Roberts has published dozens of studies showing that personality can change in many ways over fourth dimension, challenging the notion that our traits are "set up similar plaster," as the psychologist William James put it in 1887. But other psychologists notwithstanding sometimes tell Roberts that they simply don't believe it. There is a "deep-seated desire on the role of many people to think of personality equally unchanging," he told me. "Information technology simplifies your earth in a manner that's quite nice." Because and so you don't have to accept responsibleness for what you're like.
Don't go too excited: Personality typically remains fairly stable throughout your life, peculiarly in relation to other people. If yous were the most outgoing of your friends in college, you will probably withal be the bubbliest amongst them in your 30s. But our temperaments tend to shift naturally over the years. We change a scrap during adolescence and a lot during our early 20s, and keep to evolve into belatedly adulthood. Generally, people abound less neurotic and more than agreeable and conscientious with historic period, a trend sometimes referred to as the "maturity principle."
Longitudinal inquiry suggests that devil-may-care, sullen teenagers tin can transform into gregarious seniors who are sticklers for the rules. I study of people built-in in Scotland in the mid-1930s—which admittedly had some methodological issues—found no correlation between participants' conscientiousness at ages 14 and 77. A later study by Rodica Damian, a psychologist at the University of Houston, and her colleagues assessed the personalities of a grouping of American loftier-school students in 1960 and once again fifty years later. They plant that 98 percent of the participants had changed at to the lowest degree one personality trait.
Even our career interests are more stable than our personalities, though our jobs tin can also modify u.s.: In one study, people with stressful jobs became more introverted and neurotic within five years.
With a little work, you tin can nudge your personality in a more positive direction. Several studies have found that people tin can meaningfully change their personalities, sometimes inside a few weeks, by behaving like the sort of person they want to exist. Students who put more attempt into their homework became more conscientious. In a 2017 meta-analysis of 207 studies, Roberts and others found that a month of therapy could reduce neuroticism past about one-half the amount it would typically decline over a person's life. Fifty-fifty a change every bit pocket-size as taking upward puzzles can have an issue: Ane report found that senior citizens who played brain games and completed crossword and sudoku puzzles became more open to experiences. Though near personality-alter studies have tracked people for only a few months or a year afterward, the changes seem to stick for at least that long.
When researchers ask, people typically say they desire the success-oriented traits: to get more extroverted, more than careful, and less neurotic. Roberts was surprised that I wanted to get more than agreeable. Lots of people think they're also agreeable, he told me. They feel they've become doormats.
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Roberts whether in that location's annihilation he would change about his own personality. He admitted that he's not always very item-oriented (a.1000.a. conscientious). He also regretted the anxiety (a.chiliad.a. neuroticism) he experienced early in his career. Grad school was a "disconcerting feel," he said: The son of a Marine and an artist, he felt that his classmates were all "brilliant and smart" and understood the world of academia ameliorate than he did.
I was struck by how similar his story sounded to my own. My parents are from the Soviet Union and barely sympathize my career in journalism. I went to crappy public schools and a little-known college. I've notched every minor career achievement through night sweats and meticulous emails and aching figurer shoulders. Neuroticism had kept my inner burn down called-for, but now information technology was suffocating me with its smoke.
What about your life are you near afraid to alter, and why? Please record an audio clip, no longer than 3 minutes, and send it to howtopodcast@theatlantic.
To begin my transformation, I called Nathan Hudson, a psychology professor at Southern Methodist University who created a tool to help people alter their personality. For a 2019 newspaper, Hudson and three other psychologists devised a listing of "challenges" for students who wanted to change their traits. For, say, increased extroversion, a challenge would be to "introduce yourself to someone new." Those who completed the challenges experienced changes in their personality over the course of the 15-week report, Hudson found. "Faking it until you make it seems to exist a feasible strategy for personality change," he told me.
Only before I could tinker with my personality, I needed to notice out exactly what that personality consisted of. So I logged on to a website Hudson had created and took a personality test, answering dozens of questions nigh whether I liked poetry and parties, whether I acted "wild and crazy," whether I worked hard. "I radiate joy" got a "strongly disagree." I disagreed that "we should exist tough on law-breaking" and that I "try non to think well-nigh the needy." I had to agree, just not strongly, that "I believe that I am better than others."
I scored in the 23rd percentile on extroversion—"very depression," especially when it came to being friendly or cheerful. Meanwhile, I scored "very high" on conscientiousness and openness and "average" on agreeableness, my high level of sympathy for other people making upward for my low level of trust in them. Finally, I came to the source of one-half my breakups, 90 pct of my therapy appointments, and most of my bug in general: neuroticism. I'm in the 94th percentile—"extremely high."
I prescribed myself the aforementioned challenges that Hudson had given his students. To become more extroverted, I would meet new people. To decrease neuroticism, I would meditate oftentimes and brand gratitude lists. To increase agreeableness, the challenges included sending supportive texts and cards, thinking more positively nearly people who frustrate me, and, regrettably, hugging. In addition to completing Hudson's challenges, I decided to sign up for improv in hopes of increasing my extroversion and reducing my social anxiety. To cut down on how pissed off I am in general, and because I'm an overachiever, I too signed upwards for an anger-management class.
Hudson'southward findings on the mutability of personality seem to endorse the ancient Buddhist idea of "no-self"—no core "you." To believe otherwise, the sutras say, is a source of suffering. Similarly, Brian Lilliputian writes that people can have "multiple authenticities"—that you tin can sincerely be a different person in different situations. He proposes that people accept the ability to temporarily act out of character by adopting "free traits," frequently in the service of an important personal or professional person projection. If a shy introvert longs to schmooze the bosses at the function holiday party, they tin can grab a canapé and brand the rounds. The more yous do this, Little says, the easier it gets.
Staring at my test results, I told myself, This volition exist fun! After all, I had changed my personality earlier. In high schoolhouse, I was shy, studious, and, for a while, securely religious. In college, I was fun-loving and boy-crazy. Now I'm a basically hermetic "force per unit area addict," as ane former editor put it. Information technology was time for yet another me to make her debut.
Ideally, in the end I would be happy, relaxed, personable. The screams of angry sources, the failure of my boyfriend to do the tiniest fucking affair—they would be zip to me. I would finally empathise what my therapist means when she says I should "simply find my thoughts and let them pass without judgment." I made a list of the challenges and attached them to my nightstand, because I'm very conscientious.
Immediately I encountered a trouble: I don't like improv. It's basically a Quaker coming together in which a bunch of office workers sit quietly in a circumvolve until someone jumps upwardly, points toward a corner of the room, and says, "I think I found my kangaroo!" My vibe is less "yes, and" and more "well, actually." When I told my swain what I was up to, he said, "You doing improv is like Larry David doing water ice hockey."
I was also scared out of my mind. I detest looking lightheaded, and that's all improv is. The kickoff night, we met in someone'southward townhouse in Washington, D.C., in a room that was, for no discernible reason, decorated with dozens of elephant sculptures. Right later on the instructor said, "Let's get started," I began hoping that someone would take hold of one and knock me unconscious.
That didn't happen, so instead I played a game called Zippo Zap Zop, which involved making lots of eye contact while tossing around an imaginary brawl of free energy, with a software engineer, two lawyers, and a guy who works on Capitol Hill. Then we pretended to be traveling salespeople peddling sulfuric acrid. If someone had walked in on usa, they would have thought nosotros were insane. And yet I didn't detest information technology. I decided I could think of existence funny and spontaneous as a kind of intellectual challenge. Even so, when I got home, I unwound past drinking i of those single-serving wines meant for petite female alcoholics.
A few days later, I logged in to my starting time Zoom acrimony-management grade. Christian Jarrett, a neuroscientist and the author of Be Who Yous Want, writes that spending quality time with people who are dissimilar to you lot increases agreeableness. And the people in my anger-management class did seem pretty different from me. Amidst other things, I was the only person who wasn't court-ordered to be there.
We took turns sharing how anger has affected our lives. I said it makes my relationship worse—less like a romantic partnership and more than like a toxic workplace. Other people worried that their acrimony was pain their family. Ane guy shared that he didn't understand why we were talking about our feelings when kids in Red china and Russia were learning to make weapons, which I deemed an interesting indicate, because you lot're non allowed to criticize others in anger direction.
The sessions—I went to half-dozen—mostly involved reading worksheets together, which was tedious, just I did larn a few things. Anger is driven by expectations. If you lot think you're going to be in an anger-inducing state of affairs, one instructor said, try drinking a cold tin of Coke, which may stimulate your vagus nerve and at-home you downward. A few weeks in, I had a rough day, my boyfriend gave me some stupid suggestions, and I yelled at him. Then he said I'one thousand merely like my dad, which made me yell more. When I shared this in acrimony management, the instructors said I should be clearer near what I need from him when I'one thousand in a bad mood—which is listening, not advice.
All the while, I had been working on my neuroticism, which involved making a lot of gratitude lists. Sometimes information technology came naturally. As I drove around my little town one morn, I thought about how grateful I was for my beau, and how lonely I had been before I met him, even in other relationships. Is this gratitude? I wondered. Am I doing it?
What is personality, anyway, and where does it come up from?
Reverse to conventional wisdom about bossy firstborns and peacemaking middles, nascence order doesn't influence personality. Nor do our parents shape us similar lumps of clay. If they did, siblings would take like dispositions, when they frequently have no more in common than strangers chosen off the street. Our friends exercise influence u.s.a., though, and so one manner to become more extroverted is to befriend some extroverts. Your life circumstances also have an issue: Getting rich can make you less agreeable, but then can growing upwards poor with high levels of lead exposure.
A common approximate is that about thirty to 50 pct of the differences between two people's personalities are owing to their genes. Just simply because something is genetic doesn't mean it'due south permanent. Those genes interact with i another in means that tin change how they behave, says Kathryn Paige Harden, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Texas. They also interact with your environment in ways that can change how you behave. For case: Happy people smile more, then people react more than positively to them, which makes them fifty-fifty more agreeable. Open-minded adventure seekers are more likely to go to higher, where they grow even more open up-minded.
Harden told me about an experiment in which mice that were genetically similar and reared in the same conditions were moved into a large cage where they could play with one another. Over time, these very similar mice developed dramatically different personalities. Some became fearful, others sociable and dominant. Living in Mouseville, the mice carved out their ain means of beingness, and people do that too. "We can think of personality every bit a learning process," Harden said. "Nosotros larn to be people who interact with our social environments in a sure way."
This more fluid understanding of personality is a departure from before theories. A 1914 best seller called The Eugenic Marriage (which is exactly as offensive as it sounds) argued that it is not possible to change a child'south personality "1 particle after conception takes identify." In the 1920s, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung posited that the earth consists of different "types" of people—thinkers and feelers, introverts and extroverts. (Even Jung cautioned, though, that "there is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.") Jung's rubric captured the attending of a mother-girl duo, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, neither of whom had any formal scientific training. As Merve Emre describes in The Personality Brokers, the pair seized on Jung'southward ideas to develop that staple of Career Day, the Myers-Briggs Blazon Indicator. But the test is well-nigh meaningless. Most people aren't ENTJs or ISFPs; they fall between categories.
Over the years, poor parenting has been a popular scapegoat for bad personalities. Alfred Adler, a prominent plough-of-the-20th-century psychologist, blamed mothers, writing that "wherever the mother-child relationship is unsatisfactory, we unremarkably observe certain social defects in the children." A few scholars attributed the ascent of Nazism to strict German language parenting that produced mean people who worshipped ability and authority. Merely peradventure whatever nation could have embraced a Hitler: It turns out that the average personalities of different countries are adequately similar. Still, the conventionalities that parents are to blame persists, so much so that Roberts closes the form he teaches at the University of Illinois by asking students to forgive their moms and dads for any personality traits they believe were instilled or inherited.
Not until the 1950s did researchers acknowledge people'due south versatility—that we can reveal new faces and bury others. "Everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role," the sociologist Robert Ezra Park wrote in 1950. "It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves."
Around this time, a psychologist named George Kelly began prescribing specific "roles" for his patients to play. Awkward wallflowers might become socialize in nightclubs, for example. Kelly's was a rhapsodic view of change; at 1 point he wrote that "all of u.s. would be ameliorate off if we set out to be something other than what we are." Judging past the reams of cocky-help literature published each year, this is ane of the few philosophies all Americans can go behind.
About six weeks in, my adventures in extroversion were going ameliorate than I'd anticipated. Intent on talking to strangers at my friend's nuptials, I approached a group of women and told them the story of how my boyfriend and I had met—I moved into his former room in a group house—which they deemed the "story of the night." On the winds of that success, I tried to talk to more strangers, but soon encountered the common wedding ceremony problem of Too Drunk to Talk to People Who Don't Know Me.
For more advice on becoming an extrovert, I reached out to Jessica Pan, a writer in London and the author of the book Pitiful I'm Late, I Didn't Desire to Come up. Pan was an extreme introvert, someone who would walk into parties and immediately walk out again. At the showtime of the book, she resolved to become an extrovert. She ran up to strangers and asked them embarrassing questions. She did improv and stand-upwardly comedy. She went to Budapest and made a friend. Folks, she networked.
In the process, Pan "flung open the doors" to her life, she writes. "Having the ability to morph, to modify, to endeavor on free traits, to expand or contract at will, offers me an incredible feeling of liberty and a source of promise." Pan told me that she didn't quite become a difficult-core extrovert, simply that she would now describe herself as a "gregarious introvert." She still craves alone time, but she's more willing to talk to strangers and requite speeches. "I volition be anxious, simply I can do it," she said.
I asked her for advice on making new friends, and she told me something a "friendship mentor" once told her: "Brand the first motion, and make the 2d move, too." That means you lot sometimes have to ask a friend target out twice in a row—a strategy I had thought was gauche.
I practiced by trying to befriend some female journalists I admired but had been too intimidated to get to know. I messaged someone who seemed cool based on her writing, and we arranged a casual beers affair. But on the dark we were supposed to get together, her power went out, trapping her car in her garage.
Instead, I caught up with an old friend by phone, and we had i of those conversations y'all can have only with someone y'all've known for years, nearly how the people who are the worst remain the worst, and how all of your issues remain intractable, simply good on you for sticking with it. By the end of our talk, I was high on agreeable feelings. "Love yous, cheerio!" I said as I hung up.
"LOL," she texted. "Did you mean to say 'I love you'?"
Who was this new Olga?
For my gratitude journaling, I purchased a notebook whose cover said, "Gimme those bright sunshiney vibes." I soon noticed, though, that my gratitude lists were repetitive odes to fauna comforts and amusement: Netflix, yoga, TikTok, leggings, wine. After I cutting my finger cooking, I expressed gratitude for the dictation software that let me write without using my hands, simply then my finger healed. "Very hard to come with new things to say," I wrote one day.
I detect expressing gratitude unnatural, because Russians believe doing so volition provoke the evil eye; our God doesn't like too much bragging. The writer Gretchen Rubin hit a similar wall when keeping a gratitude periodical for her book The Happiness Project. "It had started to feel forced and affected," she wrote, making her annoyed rather than grateful.
I was also supposed to be meditating, but I couldn't. On well-nigh every page, my journal reads, "Meditating sucks!" I tried a guided meditation that involved breathing with a heavy book on my stomach—I chose Nabokov'due south Messages to Véra—only to find that it'south actually hard to breathe with a heavy book on your stomach.
I tweeted most my meditation failures, and Dan Harris, a former Good Morning America weekend anchor, replied: "The fact that you're noticing the thoughts/obsessions is proof that you are doing it correctly!" I picked up Harris's book x% Happier, which chronicles his journeying from a high-strung reporter who had a panic attack on air to a high-strung reporter who meditates a lot. At one point, he was meditating for two hours a day.
When I chosen Harris, he said that information technology's normal for meditation to experience like "training your mind to not be a pack of wild squirrels all the time." Very few people actually clear their minds when they're meditating. The point is to focus on your breath for nonetheless long you can—even if it's merely a second—before yous get distracted. And then practise it over and over again. Occasionally, when Harris meditates, he still "rehearses some grand, expletive-filled spoken communication I'one thousand gonna deliver to someone who's wronged me." But now he tin can return to his jiff more than speedily, or just laugh off the obsessing.
Harris suggested that I try loving-kindness meditation, in which yous beam affectionate thoughts toward yourself and others. This, he said, "sets off what I call a gooey upward spiral where, as your inner weather gets balmier, your relationships get better." In his book, Harris describes meditating on his 2-twelvemonth-erstwhile niece. As he thought virtually her "fiddling feet" and "sweet face up with her mischievous optics," he started crying uncontrollably.
What a pussy, I thought.
I downloaded Harris'south meditation app and pulled up a loving-kindness session past the meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. She had me repeat calming phrases like "May y'all be safe" and "May you alive with ease." So she asked me to envision myself surrounded by a circumvolve of people who beloved me, radiating kindness toward me. I pictured my family, my swain, my friends, my former professors, emitting beneficence from their bellies similar Intendance Bears. "You're expert; you lot're okay," I imagined them maxim. Before I knew what was happening, I had broken into sobs.
Afterward ii cruel years, people may be wondering if surviving a pandemic has at least improved their personality, making them kinder and less likely to sweat the small stuff. "Mail-traumatic growth," or the idea that stressful events can make united states better people, is the subject of one especially cheery branch of psychology. Some big events exercise seem to transform personality: People grow more than conscientious when they start a job they like, and they become less neurotic when they enter a romantic relationship. But in general, information technology's not the event that changes your personality; information technology'southward the way you lot experience it. And the evidence that people grow as a result of difficulty is mixed. Studies of post-traumatic growth are tainted by the fact that people similar to say they got something out of their trauma.
It'south a nice thing to believe nigh yourself—that, pummeled by misfortune, you've emerged stronger than always. Merely these studies are generally finding that people prefer to look on the bright side.
In more rigorous studies, evidence of a transformative upshot fades. Damian, the University of Houston psychologist, gave hundreds of students at the university a personality exam a few months later on Hurricane Harvey hit, in November 2017, and repeated the test a year later. The hurricane was devastating: Many students had to leave their homes; others lacked food, water, or medical treat weeks. Damian plant that her participants hadn't grown, and they hadn't shriveled. Overall they stayed the same. Other research shows that difficult times prompt united states to autumn back on tried-and-truthful behaviors and traits, non experiment with new ones.
Growth is also a strange thing to enquire of the traumatized. Information technology's similar turning to a wounded person and demanding, "Well, why didn't you grow, yous lazy son of a bitch?" Roberts said. Just surviving should be enough.
It may exist impossible to know how the pandemic will alter us on average, because there is no "average." Some people take struggled to keep their jobs while caring for children; some take lost their jobs; some have lost loved ones. Others accept sabbatum at dwelling house and ordered takeout. The pandemic probably hasn't changed you if the pandemic itself hasn't felt like that much of a change.
I blew off anger management 1 week to become run into Kesha in concert. I justified it because the concert was a group activeness, plus she makes me happy. The next fourth dimension the class gathered, we talked about forgiveness, which Child Weapons Guy was not big on. He said that rather than forgive his enemies, he wanted to invite them onto a bridge and light the bridge on burn. I thought he should get credit for being honest—who hasn't wanted to light all their enemies on burn?—but the anger-management instructors started to expect a little aroused themselves.
In the next session, Child Weapons Guy seemed contrite, saying he realized that he uses his acrimony to deal with life, which was a bigger breakthrough than anyone expected. I was also praised, for an unusually tranquil trip domicile to see my parents, which my instructors said was an example of skillful "expectation management."
Meanwhile, my social life was slowly blooming. A Twitter associate invited me and a few other strangers to a whiskey tasting, and I said yes fifty-fifty though I don't like whiskey or strangers. At the bar, I made some normal-person small talk before having two sips of booze and wheeling the conversation effectually to my personal topic of interest: whether I should have a baby. The woman who organized the tasting, a self-proclaimed extrovert, said people are always grateful to her for getting everyone to socialize. At starting time, no one wants to come, but people are e'er happy they did.
I idea peradventure whiskey could be my "thing," and, to tick off another challenge from Hudson's list, decided to become to a whiskey bar on my own one night and talk to strangers. I bravely steered my Toyota to a sad little mixed-use development and pulled upwardly a stool at the bar. I asked the bartender how long it had taken him to memorize all the whiskeys on the menu. "Two months," he said, and turned back to peeling oranges. I asked the woman sitting side by side to me how she liked her titbit. "It's expert!" she said. This is awful! I thought. I texted my boyfriend to come up encounter me.
The larger threat on my horizon was the improv showcase—a free operation for friends and family and whoever happened to jog past Picnic Grove No. one in Rock Creek Park. The night earlier, I kept jolting awake from intense, improv-themed nightmares. I spent the day grimly watching old Upright Citizens Brigade shows on YouTube. "I'm nervous on your behalf," my boyfriend said when he saw me clutching a throw pillow like a life preserver.
To draw an improv testify is to unnecessarily punish the reader, but information technology went adequately well. Along with crushing anxiety, my brain courses with an immigrant kid'south overwhelming desire to do whatever people desire in substitution for their approval. I improvised like they were giving out expert SAT scores at the end. On the drive home, my boyfriend said, "Now that I've seen you do it, I don't really know why I idea it'south something y'all wouldn't do."
I didn't know either. I vaguely remembered past boyfriends telling me that I'm insecure, that I'm not funny. Merely why had I been trying to prove them right? Surviving improv made me feel like I could survive annihilation, as bratty as that must sound to all my ancestors who survived the siege of Leningrad.
Finally, the day came to retest my personality and run across how much I'd inverse. I thought I felt hints of a balmy metamorphosis. I was meditating regularly, and had had several enjoyable get-togethers with people I wanted to befriend. And considering I was writing them down, I had to admit that positive things did, in fact, happen to me.
But I wanted hard data. This time, the test told me that my extroversion had increased, going from the 23rd percentile to the 33rd. My neuroticism decreased from "extremely high" to merely "very high," dropping to the 77th percentile. And my conjuration score … well, it dropped, from "about average" to "low."
I told Brian Little how I'd done. He said I likely did experience a "small-scale shift" in extroversion and neuroticism, simply also that I might take just triggered positive feedback loops. I got out more than, so I enjoyed more things, so I went to more things, and so forth.
Why didn't I get more agreeable, though? I had spent months dwelling on the goodness of people, devoted hours to anger management, and even sent an eastward-card to my mom. Picayune speculated that maybe by behaving so differently, I had heightened my internal sense that people aren't to be trusted. Or I might take subconsciously bucked against all the syrupy gratitude time. That I had tried and then hard and made negative progress—"I think information technology's a bit of a hoot," he said.
Maybe information technology's a relief that I'm non a completely new person. Footling says that engaging in "gratuitous trait" behavior—acting outside your nature—for too long can be harmful, because you can commencement to feel like yous are suppressing your true self. Yous end up feeling burned out or contemptuous.
The key may non be in swinging permanently to the other side of the personality scale, but in balancing between extremes, or in adjusting your personality depending on the state of affairs. "The thing that makes a personality trait maladaptive is non being high or depression on something; it's more like rigidity beyond situations," Harden, the behavioral geneticist, told me.
"So it's okay to be a little bitchy in your heart, equally long as you can plow it off?" I asked her.
"People who say they're never bitchy in their heart are lying," she said.
Susan Cain, the author of Quiet and the globe's almost famous introvert, seems reluctant to endorse the thought that introverts should try to be more approachable. Over the phone, she wondered why I wanted to be more extroverted in the offset place. Gild often urges people to suit to the qualities extolled in performance reviews—punctual, chipper, gregarious. Simply in that location are upsides to beingness introspective, skeptical, and fifty-fifty a piddling neurotic. She said information technology'south possible that I didn't change my underlying introversion, that I only acquired new skills. She idea I could probably maintain this new personality, so long every bit I kept doing the tasks that got me here.
Hudson cautioned that personality scores can bounciness around a flake from moment to moment; to be certain of my results, I ideally would have taken the exam a number of times. Yet, I felt sure that some change had taken place. A few weeks later, I wrote an article that made people on Twitter really mad. This happens to me one time or twice a twelvemonth, and I usually suffer a minor internal apocalypse. I fight the people on Twitter while crying, call my editor while crying, and Google How to become an actuary while crying. This time, I was stressed and aroused, but I but waited it out.
This kind of minor comeback, I realized, is the goal of and so much self-help material. Hours a mean solar day of meditation made Harris merely 10 pct happier. My therapist is always suggesting ways for me to "go from a 10 to a nine on feet." Some antidepressants brand people experience only slightly less depressed, yet they have the drugs for years. Perhaps the real weakness of the "change your personality" proposition is that it implies incremental change isn't real change. Simply being slightly dissimilar is yet existence dissimilar—the same you lot but with better armor.
The belatedly psychologist Carl Rogers once wrote, "When I accept myself just as I am, so I can change," and this is roughly where I've landed. Maybe I'm just an anxious petty introvert who makes an effort to be less and then. I can learn to meditate; I can talk to strangers; I can be the mouse who frolics through Mouseville, even if I never become the alpha. I learned to play the part of a calm, extroverted softy, and in doing and so I got to know myself.
This article appears in the March 2022 print edition with the headline "My Personality Transplant." When you buy a volume using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/03/how-to-change-your-personality-happiness/621306/
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