Olga Khazan is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She has also written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, and other publications. She is a two-time recipient of the International Reporting Project’s Journalism Fellowship and winner of the 2017 National Headliner Awards for Magazine Online Writing.
What’s the big idea?
Personality is not a rigid, immutable part of your life. If you set your mind to adding or strengthening a personality trait—such as extroversion or conscientiousness—then you very well can. By consistently practicing new habits and behaviors that support your desired change, you can evolve into precisely the person you want to be.
Below, Olga shares five key insights from her new book, Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change. Listen to the audio version—read by Olga herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Personality change is possible through consistent habits and behaviors.
You might think your personality just is the way it is. The influential 19th-century psychologist William James even argued, “In most of us, by the age of 30, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.” But James was wrong. Several studies have found that by consistently applying the mindset and behaviors of the kind of person you’d like to be, you can change your personality traits for the better.
For a 2019 study, psychologist Nathan Hudson and three colleagues devised a tool to help people perform personality-altering new behaviors. He and his coauthors created a website that would serve up a list of “challenges” to students who wanted to change their personality traits. To increase, say, extroversion, one challenge was to introduce yourself to someone new. To combat neuroticism, the website suggested, “When you wake up, spend at least five minutes meditating.” Those who completed the challenges saw changes in that trait by the end of the 15-week study. In other words, just behaving in a more extroverted way caused participants to grow in extroversion.
You have to keep up these new behaviors if you want to maintain your new personality trait—if you want to remain an extrovert, you have to keep leaving the house. But Hudson’s study and others show that personality change is, in fact, possible.
2. Introverts should sometimes act like extroverts.
The most common pushback I hear when I talk to people about personality change is that they are introverts and are happy to stay this way. After all, books and articles have extolled the virtues of introversion. Why should they change?
But many studies have found that social connection is one of the strongest predictors of well-being, and extroverts are more socially connected. In lab experiments, extroverts tend to interpret ambiguous stimuli more positively, hearing the word “won” rather than “one,” for example, or writing more uplifting short stories based on generic prompts. People who are extroverted as teenagers remain happier even when they’re 60.
Introverts might not be thrilled to hear this—I initially wasn’t, either—but there are ways to square your natural introversion with the universal human need for connection. For instance, you don’t have to mingle with everyone at the office party. You can just call a trusted friend for a one-on-one conversation. Even hanging out with others and listening more than you talk can be a form of extroversion.
“Behaving against our nature doesn’t bother us as much as we fear it might.”
Several studies have shown that introverts who occasionally behave in extroverted ways experience more positive affect—science-speak for good feelings. When introverts socialize for a few minutes, they get a big mood boost. Behaving against our nature doesn’t bother us as much as we fear it might. In one study, introverts even reported feeling truer to themselves when they behaved like extroverts.
As much as we might prize authenticity, we have other desires, too. We want to handle difficult situations appropriately, feel embraced by others, and accomplish our goals. Sometimes, achieving those things means going against our “natural” personality traits.
3. Lean into discomfort.
At times, personality change will feel very uncomfortable. You are going to hang out with a group of potential new friends and feel timid and jittery. You are going to be so bored during meditation that you compose an entire work email. But that discomfort doesn’t mean you should rethink changing your personality.
Anxiety can be a sign that you truly are becoming different. Virtually every voice in the world of self-transformation warns against quitting something because it doesn’t feel right at first. “Don’t measure the success of an exposure practice by whether you feel uncomfortable,” writes Martin Antony and Richard Swinson in When Perfect Isn’t Good Enough, their guide for overcoming perfectionism. “If you chose an appropriately difficult situation, you should feel anxious.”
People understandably try to avoid difficult feelings like discomfort, sadness, or anxiety. But those feelings can be a sign that something matters to you and is worth pursuing. A type of psychotherapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, suggests that what we cherish most is often precisely what prompts deep feelings of anguish and uncertainty. ACT encourages you to identify what you care about—your values—and behave in a way that accords with those values, even if it is frightening at times.
I find it easiest to remember ACT through this acronym: accept your negative feelings (A), commit to your values (C), and take action (T) toward the kind of life you want. When I tried improv, this meant accepting that I felt stage fright, recognizing that one of my values is to be more outgoing, and doing the improv showcase anyway.
4. Instead of small talk, try big talk.
When given the opportunity to chat with an acquaintance, we often reflexively snap to small talk. We ask rapid-fire questions like “What do you do?” and “Are you married?” But these tend to make people feel put on the spot, not connected. Studies show that people feel more connected after asking each other deep questions like, “For what in your life do you feel most grateful?” rather than shallow questions like, “How is your day going so far?”
“We often reflexively snap to small talk.”
In 2022, I attended a conversation workshop organized by a woman named Georgie Nightingall to explore this deeper approach to conversations. One day, I found myself sitting across from a random British person, revealing my innermost feelings to him:
“Tell me about your recent vacation,” asked my conversation partner.
“I went to Portugal,” I said.
“Who did you go with?” he asked.
“I went by myself,” I responded.
“Why did you go by yourself?” he asked.
I thought for a second.
“Because when you’ve been in a relationship for a while, as I have, you tend to forget what you’re like individually,” I said. “I wanted to get in touch with that part of myself that’s just me, without my partner’s influence.”
I noticed that this was a much better, and deeper, explanation of my vacation than the kind I would usually give. I felt like I was journaling aloud and like I had learned something new about myself. This exercise was meant to help us try out one of Georgie’s tips for having deeper conversations, which is to listen for the meaning behind people’s stories, rather than collecting facts. This strategy draws out people’s emotions and allows them to feel understood.
5. Imagining the future can help you achieve more today.
Conscientiousness is the personality trait associated with orderliness, dutifulness, and timeliness—in short, getting stuff done. But to some people who are low in conscientiousness, the future rewards of “good” decisions don’t matter as much as the present rewards of “bad” ones. Spending 30 minutes on TikTok feels good now but will probably have negative consequences later. Spending 30 minutes finishing a work presentation might feel boring now but will be beneficial later. Guess which option a person low in conscientiousness would choose.
“Episodic future thinking has been shown to promote a variety of conscientiousness-related behaviors.”
But a technique called episodic future thinking can help correct this cognitive error. Episodic future thinking is our ability to project ourselves into the future, essentially pre-experiencing something, much like we might recall a prior vacation or argument. Instead of remembering the past, though, the practice entails vividly imagining a future scenario, down to the explicit details—like what you’ll be wearing for the work presentation, who will be in the room, and from which deli you’ll order a sandwich afterward. This turns our attention to those far-off rewards and to what we could do now to make them more likely.
In studies, episodic future thinking has been shown to promote a variety of conscientiousness-related behaviors, like abstaining from alcohol, nicotine, and overeating. The more frequently and specifically you imagine these futures, the better this works. Importantly, episodic future thinking doesn’t mean just daydreaming about the future. It’s imagining likely outcomes—positive or negative—that might be influenced by your choices today. In turn, it can increase the trait of conscientiousness.
To listen to the audio version read by author Olga Khazan, download the Next Big Idea App today:
