Can you personality change

His life of lonely self-reliance had come crashing down, and he had decided to change his personality in order to make more friends.

You might think that you just are a certain way. But the idea that our personalities are biologically programmed and totally unchangeable is not quite true. Research suggests that personalities are fairly flexible, and for those who are interested in changing themselves, change is not only possible—it can happen rather quickly.

Many researchers have now found that adults can change the five traits that make up personality: extroversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Changing a trait primarily requires acting in ways that embody that trait, rather than simply thinking about it. Therapy can help with this process. Take neuroticism, a trait responsible for anxiety and rumination. Neuroticism tends to decline naturally with age.

Coauthor Brent Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says that much of our personality does seem to stay the same—just not as much as we might expect. For example, an extraverted teenager like me would have a 63 percent chance of still identifying as an extravert in their 60s, he says.

Why does this matter? What seems to be more consistent over time is the relationship among all of our personality traits. This means that if someone tended to be really conscientious but a bit disagreeable or neurotic early on, they might keep that relative personality profile as they aged, even if some of their traits shifted a bit.

Additionally, the researchers found that adolescents as a group tended to move in a positive direction for particular traits—like emotional stability, conscientiousness, and agreeableness—after 50 years, suggesting a growth in social maturity. And it helps confirms his theory that personality change is cumulative over our lifespan, likely happens in response to our life experiences, and often leans in a positive, helpful direction.

So, apparently, our personalities are a mix of stable and unstable. Roberts advises parents and teachers to keep that in mind when they try to influence their children to be more responsible or mature.

Almost everyone has something they want to change about their personality. A whopping 97 percent said they wished they were more conscientious.

These desires appeared to be rooted in dissatisfaction. They wanted to become more conscientious if they were displeased with their finances or schoolwork. Each year, Americans spend billions of dollars on self-improvement books, CDs, seminars, coaching, and stress-management programs to become better, more sociable, effective, compassionate, and charismatic versions of themselves.

There are so many common misconceptions of what having a personality actually entails. In his controversial book, Personality and Assessment , Walter Mischel, the social psychologist best known for leading the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment , argued that any notion of consistency among personalities is largely a myth.

His research suggested a correlation about. In four studies, Epstein showed that when comparing behaviors over the course of two weeks, the stability of personality shattered the. Eventually, these behaviors simply become second nature. While he suggested that he was still an introvert, he learned how to become extroverted when he needed to be.

Personality change might not be easy, and changing some broad traits might never really be fully possible. But researchers do believe that there are things you can do to change certain parts of your personality, the aspects that exist beneath the level of those broad traits, that can result in real changes to the way you act, think, and function in your day-to-day life. Ever wonder what your personality type means?

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