Olga Khazan opens her new book with a crisis.
The Atlantic writer is distraught, gulping wine between hard sobs. Why? The stress of her photoshoot for her prestigious magazine, a GPS mishap on her “work-cation” in Miami, and a batch of other minor inconveniences.
“If I was a different person,” Khazan writes. “(I’d) spend the next few days feeling nothing but cheer, gratitude, and most of all, serenity that my life was turning out so well. … Instead, I possessed a unique ability to find suffering in even the best of circumstances.”
The incident crystallized something for Khazan: Her personality was making her miserable. So, over the course of several months, she set out to fundamentally change herself using a refreshing, rigorous approach to self-growth.
When most of us think about the components of personality, hundreds of characteristics spring to mind: confidence, kindness, irritability, impulsiveness, maybe even a passion for Cool Ranch Doritos, and the list goes on. But psychologists believe our personalities can be boiled down to just five: openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These are referred to as the Big Five (which Psych 101 students the world over remember with the acronym OCEAN), and your character is largely determined by how much or how little you possess of each attribute.
Researchers have found that the happiest people rank low in neuroticism and high on the other four. Khazan, however, found that she scored quite low on extraversion and — predictably — high on neuroticism. In pursuit of altering that balance, she followed science-backed methods to tweak each of her five traits — and at the end of it, she found some of the serenity she’d been searching for. She documented her fascinating journey of self exploration in her new book, Me, But Better (out March 11).
We spoke to the journalist about the science of personality, how to measure your Big Five, and the steps you can take to change, too.
Katie Couric Media: What does the science say about how malleable our personalities are?
Olga Khazan: Most people naturally change over the course of their lives, but not dramatically. There’s a little bit of wiggle room. But if you actually try to change, by changing your behavior and building the habits of the kind of person you’d like to be, you create even more wiggle room. On a given personality trait, you may shift from the 30th percentile to the 50th — it’s not a huge adjustment, but it’s enough that you would notice a difference.
A lot of people think of their personalities as something they’re born with. How much is learned and how much is hardwired?
About 40 to 60 percent of our personalities are inherited. The rest is dictated by your experiences: Did you go to college? What kind of job do you have? Who are your friends? Are you married? These are all experiences and relationships that end up molding your personality — at least, the part of it that’s flexible — over time. So you can choose to change your personality in the desired direction.
What are the Big Five personality traits? And how are they used to study our character?
Scientists generally agree that there are five traits that make up personality that you can remember with the acronym OCEAN. The first is openness to experience, which is sort of like imaginativeness and creativity. Then there’s conscientiousness, which is the ability to get things done, to get to places on time, be dutiful, and meet deadlines. Extraversion, which is pretty intuitive; it’s about how much you like to socialize. There’s agreeableness, which is warmth, empathy, and how well you get along with others; and neuroticism, which is depression, anxiety, and a tendency toward negative thinking.
How can people measure their Big Five?
I would go to PersonalityAssessor.com, which was created by Nathan Hudson, a professor who’s done a lot of research in this space. It’s used for personality studies and is a science-backed test.
Which of these traits are the easiest to change?
The easiest would probably be conscientiousness and extraversion. With conscientiousness, it’s really just about making to-do lists, setting calendar reminders, decluttering, and coming up with an organization system. Once you do those things — even if you don’t necessarily want to become more conscientiousness — you will change.
I also found that extraversion is pretty simple to shift, because it just requires you to get out there. That’s not easy for everyone to do, and a lot of times I kind of dreaded it, but it’s a trait that’s more about the behavior. There’s not a lot of self-reflection needed to accomplish that one.
What are the hardest traits to change?
The one I found really difficult was neuroticism. It should come as no surprise when you consider how much people spend on therapy and psychiatric drugs. Unlike the other two I mentioned, with neuroticism you really have to want to change and be willing to do the internal work. You can’t just walk up to someone and tell them to stop worrying.
What are things we can do to change our Big Five balance?
For openness, I would try traveling. There’s limited research that suggests traveling, getting out of your day to day, and experiencing new cultures can help. For conscientiousness, I would declutter. I’d try to eliminate things around the house, or your workspace, or even from your life that you don’t need anymore. For extraversion, you have to go out and interact with people. As an introvert, I found this pretty difficult, so I signed up for activities every week, like improv and a sailing club, that forced me to meet up with others.
I spent some time volunteering for agreeableness, and I found the interaction with my community and seeing the gratitude from people to be really agreeableness-boosting. It does make you feel kind of better about humanity. And then for neuroticism — people hate when I say this — all of the research points to meditation. I know we’re all told to meditate, and a lot of people tend to hate it, but it really does work. What I ultimately ended up doing was using a program called MBSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction, that’s really well-researched and has been shown to have lots of benefits.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
