Life Uncut - Extrovert, Introvert, Neurotic Or Agreeable; Can You Change Your Personality? Uncut with Olga Khazan

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Have you ever wondered “If I wanted to change my personality, would I be able to?” Or have you ever wondered if it was possible for someone else to truly change their personality? This was a question that today’s guest wondered about herself and so she went on a journey to find out whether it was really possible to change your entire personality! Joining the podcast today is Olga Khazan. Olga is a writer for The Atlantic, and the author of the new book Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change. Olga spent a year experimenting with her own personality to see if she could become more extroverted, a lot less neurotic, and a little more agreeable.  We speak about: Exactly why you might like to change your personality How much of our personality is ‘hard wired’ The ‘big 5’ personality traits: extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness. How different aspects of our personality affects our relationships Making friends when you’re not particularly extroverted Can you change someone else’s personality? Do certain life stages encourage a personality change? What things can you do to change your personality? You can get Olga's new book Me, But Better You can watch us on Youtube Find us on Instagram Join us on tiktok Or join the Facebook Discussion Group Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! XxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Laura and I'm Keisha and I'm so excited to do a bit of a deep dive on whether we can change our personality. Okay so I found this one really interesting because often we seem to and I would say it's something that comes up in Ask Uncut quite a bit. This idea of being in a relationship with someone and wanting to change their personality or them wanting to change your personality but rarely do I think that we have enough self-awareness or introspection to really consider whether or not we can change our own personality and whether we want to. And I think it's also because often like we, and I say we as a very general thing, but often I think we struggle to see fault in ourselves. The reason

why we're so excited to have this conversation is because it's very much based around whether it is possible to, or whether you could, if you desire to make changes to your personality that might make you more likable, that might make you more social, might make you more dateable. Who knows? Might make you better at work. Maybe this conversation Laura's deliberately had me on for. Yes. Keisha, this is for you. Okay. Well, joining the podcast today is Olga Hazan. Now, Olga is a writer for The Atlantic. She's the author of a new book, Me But Better, The Science and Promise of Personality Change. Olga spent a year experimenting with her own personality to see if she could become more extroverted, a little bit less neurotic,

and also more agreeable. So all of these things that we've just spoken about in terms of I guess being perceived as more likable. Olga, welcome to the pod. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Firstly, before we get into like how you've gone about this and why it was something that you kind of took on as your personal endeavor, how did personality and exploring personality become a focus of interest for you? Yeah, so it does. I admit it sounds kind of strange because it's personality. I don't want to change my personality. I like who I am. Personality is just who I am. It's what I like and dislike. But when you think about it, personality is actually at the root of a lot of different things that we might want to improve about ourselves. So if you want to make

more friends or get organized or stop running late, or even just be less anxious or less depressed, those are all examples of personality change because personality traits encompass so much of who we are and what we do, it's really hard to change yourself without changing your personality, if that makes sense. Do you think that we kind of live in a bit of a time when people, I mean, and I even think about that Marilyn Monroe quote, which is like, if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best. Like we almost expect that the way we show up in the world, we should be accepted for exactly the type of people that we are and exactly the way that we are. But sometimes that might not be the best version

of what we could be. Yeah. And I mean, maybe that's true. Like there definitely should be people in your life who accept you, you know, even when you are having a really terrible day and you're in a really shitty mood and you like are just a pain to be around. That's not really what I'm talking about. The point of personality change is not so much for you to come off better, although that certainly can be one of the effects. It's actually for you to be happier or even just to enjoy your life more or to appreciate what you have and kind of go through life a little bit more smoothly. It is kind of an external thing, but it's also kind of a selfish thing. Personality change is for you, not for everyone else. I mean, I think the common thought

about personality is that you get given one at birth and that's just how you're hardwired. Like that's just who you are. How malleable do you think personality is? That's not untrue. Part of our personality is just given to us at birth and basically stays the same. It's about half. So 30 to 50 percent of our personality is genetic or it's inherited. So that means it's in your genes. That doesn't mean you're exactly like your parents. It just means that that part is hereditary. The rest of your personality is kind of up to this thing that scientists call environment, which just means the way you were raised, your friends, whether you go to college, what kind of job you have, who you get married to, whether you have kids, who your friends are.

Those things all kind of combine and they exert a force on your personality and tend to kind of move your personality in different directions, even if you don't especially try to change. So an example of this is if you knew someone who was like a crazy partier in college, you know, they just love to go drinking, never did their homework, whatever, just like always off having fun. and then they get a job that's like a total dream job for them. And suddenly they're like never partying anymore. They're always working. They're super conscientious. They've got two iPhones. They're always working on emails on the weekend or whatever. That's an example of personality change that's driven by the fact that someone experienced a life change. They got a really important job and they became different. That is also personality change. Olga, what was happening in your life when you decided to undertake this

self-growth or experiment on yourself like what were you experiencing and like why was it that you wanted to explore a personality change so what I found was that I really was getting worn down by small bs that would happen to me every day like my life wasn't bad and in fact I opened the book with a story about a day that is objectively not bad but that so many small things happened and it just like ate away at me and ate away at me I guess to summarize I was in Miami in the middle of winter. So yay, perfect weather, perfect everything. I had to get professional photos taken. On the way to get these photos taken, I got a really bad haircut. So I'm like, on the way, I go get the photos taken. The photos look bad to me because of the

bad haircut. Yeah. But also just, I don't like the angle. I don't like the lighting. My angles were off. You know how it is. And I was like, okay, whatever. Try to move on. I get stuck in horrible traffic. I end up running even later because as I'm trying to get out of traffic, I somehow go the wrong way and end up on a highway I'm not supposed to be on. Then I get to the store and I buy groceries and then my shopping cart gets stuck in the parking lot because I'm out of range of the store and they think I'm trying to steal the shopping cart. And so I have to drag the shopping cart to my car because I can't carry all the bags myself. And while all of this is happening, my boss is like messaging me to make edits to a story.

And it's just adding to my stress and my kind of frustration. So I get back and I just have this huge meltdown. But then after the smoke clears, I sort of start thinking like, was that day really that bad? Or was I sort of making it bad by taking every little thing and sort of making it the worst thing ever? And I kind of had a tendency to do that a lot. that negative viraling thinking is associated with the trait of neuroticism. And that's something I

scored really high on when I started taking these personality tests. So part of it was I just wanted to be less anxious and less kind of frustrated by everything. I wanted to have more resilience in the face of big things, but also in the face of just small things. So that's kind of where it all started. I think it's really interesting that you were presented with a situation like that, where you had that realization and you immediately went to the thought of maybe I need to change my personality I think at the moment particularly we make a joke that I'm a bit of a biohack bro I love ice baths I love shit like that but I would assume that if any of us came to that realization my immediate thought would be like okay well maybe I need to learn to meditate maybe

I need to learn to do yoga like I think I would look external rather than internal and I find it really interesting that you were like, hmm, this must be connected to my neuroticism. You like that that to me is very interesting that you had so much insight into the fact that it would be connected to something like that. For anyone who doesn't know about the big five personality types, I don't even know if that's actually the label that you would use. Do you mind explaining what they are and whether you would like to be high or low on the scale and kind of where they came from? So there are five personality traits. You can remember them with the acronym OCEAN. O for openness to experiences, which is like imaginativeness and creativity. C for conscientiousness, which is like getting places on time and being super organized and diligent. E for extroversion, which is being sociable and outgoing and active. A for agreeableness, which is like warmth and empathy and trust. and then N for neuroticism, which is depression and anxiety. And you want to be really high on

all of them except for neuroticism and you want to be low on that one. And it's funny that you should mention meditation because most of what I did to help with my neuroticism is meditate. So even though it seems like personality change is just sort of like thinking really hard, it's mostly about action. It's mostly about things that you do in order to change your personality traits, not just sitting on a mountain and like deciding your personality should be. And hoping. I mean, knowing that you were high in neuroticism, where did you score on the other four personality traits? Yeah, I scored low on extroversion, especially the part of extroversion that's associated with being cheerful. Just a little added twist there. I scored like kind of

medium on agreeableness, medium low, I would say. I did and I always have scored really high on openness and on conscientiousness. Olga, this feels like the epitome of having a Taylor Swift moment where you're like, I'm the problem. It's me. Like, okay, I'm going to make some changes. Had you felt as though your personality was affecting any of your relationships or how you showed up either at work or in your romantic life or with your friends? Yeah. So one thing that would happen, my extroversion was low and I didn't have a lot of friends, but I also like didn't go out and try to make a lot of social connections. And the reason is that I had always taken, like I'd taken, or I don't know, not even personality tests, but just,

I just always thought I'm an introvert. And whenever I was feeling bad or like sad, I would spend more time by myself. I thought that that is what I would want as an introvert. I spent all day by myself, but I'm still feeling sad. So I need to spend even more time by myself. I think what I didn't realize that some of the personality change techniques kind of tell you is that sometimes it's more about doing the opposite thing. So for me, one thing that became really important or just like a kind of a big moment for me was in realizing that sometimes when I'm having that withdrawn or lonely feeling, it actually makes more sense to go out and seek connection with other people rather than to spend even more time by myself. So that was like a big change that

I noticed pretty much right away. Did you find that challenging though to do it when you're someone who's like conditioned to being an introvert and when you have these feelings of wanting to sort of spend time on your own like I can only imagine that that's a very hard mold to break it was it was really hard especially since for extroversion I signed up for improv that was like one of the first activities that I did and I actually have really bad stage fright I'm not a natural performer and I especially don't like being silly in public and this is like all that improv comedy is for those who aren't familiar. So it was something where I would feel a lot of dread and anxiety before I would go. And then as I was there, I would loosen up progressively.

And then what I found is that at the end of every class, I was always pretty happy. It always was kind of a mood boost. I don't know. I can almost compare it to people who exercise before they go for that run at 5 a.m. or whatever. They're like, oh, I just want to stay in bed. I don't want to go, like, can I skip today? And then they're like going for the run, whatever, they're getting into it, listening to their Taylor Swift or whatever. And then they get back and they have like that runner's high. That's like a very similar thing as what happened to me with a lot of these kind of activities that I did. What are some, I mean, you mentioned it, that there are some tools. If anyone's listening to this and they're wanting to change aspects of their personality, like

how do people go about this? What is like a tangible way to set out to make tweaks to what your personality is? It's tricky to like say what specifically to do because they're different for every trait. So for extroversion, you're going to want to go out a lot. For neuroticism, you're going to want to do a lot of mindfulness type work and sort of like yoga and meditation could be two things that you start doing. For agreeableness, what I did is I did a lot of work on deepening my friendships and my relationships, like how to have deeper conversations or how to set better boundaries with friends. Sort of not just like getting out there and meeting people, but actually like establishing those deep friendships. The things

you're going to want to do are different for every trait, but I would just start honestly, like, I mean, buy my book, but if you don't buy my book, just think about people in your life that have the traits that you want and ask them what they do. That is to some extent what I did as well. Like I just would ask people who were already really good at the stuff that I wanted to get good at, how do you do that? And then I would kind of do versions of that. What were some of those things I'll go so I have a friend who is very good at meeting people and just like be friends everyone everywhere she goes that's Keisha if you need any tips here she is for some reason I'm like the pied piper I just clicked people along the way everyone that's amazing we'll do

an interview with some person and then like would never have spoken to them again and Keisha's like still texting them three years later and they're like best friends now she's going out for coffee and I'm like how did this happen and she's like I don't know I got a whatsapp number and now we're best friends i promise i won't i won't bombard you with messages oh no please do because i want this friend kathy who's like very good at making friends and i basically just texted her and i was like how do you make friends like i was a little robot and she was like oh yeah i just text people who she'll like meet acquaintances you know that seem cool and she'll just text them to hang out a lot and you know eventually they become friends or she'll like ask them to lunch or ask them for

beers or just ask if she can you know come over and chat for a while and I didn't realize that a lot of friendship is just making an interest like kind of showing an interest and like you know not being aggressive or hounding people but yeah kind of being like hey let's do something kind of being the instigator a lot. Can I interject with something that I think I've come to the realization this year in particular that actually has really helped me maintain friendships because we've had quite a particularly busy year work-wise and some things in my personal life I don't have a lot of free time to actually maintain physical connections with friendships. But I've found this really easy way to maintain like that, you know, we would speak at least once a week. And it's if

I see something on Instagram that is funny, you know, for each of my friends, I will have a bit of like a topic that I think we have as a connection. For example, one of my friends loves his cat, like is obsessed with his cat. So if ever I see a funny cat reel, I'll send it to him one of my other friends is really funny in terms of like social interaction and so if there's ever a real or a meme or something that is quite funny about being like oh there's nothing better than when someone cancels plans I will send that to her and I've realized that that's kind of the way that I've been maintaining a lot of these connections it's through memes it's like it's actually through this like shared funny interest because it's really low effort that it's not like

this big message of tell me everything you've been up to for the last three weeks because that can get really exhausting like and you're kind of just balancing it back and forth my suggestion in that is that if you have a desire to like maintain these connections with friends start with the small stuff that's just like light and fun and it's not much effort for either of you yeah oh yeah I love that I love that suggestion I've tried doing that more of that too it's great for people who are pressed for time so Olga like I kind of mentioned at the start it's something that we do experience in terms of like ask uncut questions and I think it's something that we can be guilty of in relationships when we feel as though our partners aren't being the version

of themselves we want them to be is it possible to change someone else's personality or encourage someone else to change their personality or is it something that's like impossible task so I have been trying to make my husband more conscientious that's like my secret not so secret goal he's not conscientious and I'm very conscientious and it's like the source of a lot of our fights conscientious is the one where it's like on time and organized right yeah yeah and he's just like super messy, doesn't know what's going on, like doesn't have a Google calendar, come what may. Just tries to put it all in his brain and then like remember some and forget some. That's me. Yeah. I'm like, I don't need a calendar. I just remember it all, but poorly.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I would say that personality change works best when the person really wants to do it. Like when they have some reason or some project that they're working toward that helps them change their personality. So the people that I talked to that became more conscientious, one of them really wanted to start a business. One of them really wanted to go to graduate school for psychology.

And one of them really wanted to drink less. So they had these big quests that they were on. And then the personality change was like what helped them achieve that quest. So it's hard for a different person because unless whatever the goal is, is like a shared goal for both of you. If you and your partner wanna have a child together,

and it's really important for both of you to, I don't know, become more organized before the child comes, then, you know, that's something where your partner might be inspired to become more conscientious for that reason. But it's really hard to just like foist personality change on someone else because it does require them to behave differently pretty much every day. Olga, on this with like the having kids thing, are there certain times of our lives or certain things that can happen to us over the course of our life that naturally will shift our personality? Yeah, it seems like starting a new job and starting a romantic relationship are the two big ones that do seem to change personality. Starting a new job makes you a little more

conscientious and starting a new relationship tends to bring down your neuroticism a little bit. Depending on how toxic the relationship is. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Those research was done a while ago before Tinder. But I will say that especially the time of life that's like your early 20s is a time of great change and a lot of people find their personalities changing a lot during that timeframe, just because that is a time when you're kind of figuring out who you are in the world. You're getting a job, you're developing a career, you're developing a friend group, you're figuring out where you're going to live. So it's a lot of those factors that change your personality are coming into place around that time. But they've also done

a lot of research that looked at all sorts of different life events, like having a baby and ask people, did this change your personality? And the answers are kind of all over the place. I wrote an article about this but it's basically like it's really hard to tell how any given life event will change you specifically it's not totally clear I definitely like if I was to look at the sort of big five personality traits and think about like how I've changed after having kids I would say that my extrovertedness has gone down even like risk taking behavior has gone down things that I would have done before having kids in terms of like being super social or like having energy to do things but also going skydiving or like going

bungee jumping or things like that like things that I would say I would have had a higher propensity to do before having kids now I'm like no that seems unnecessary and really dangerous so I think I say no to a lot more stuff I don't know sometimes I'm like maybe that's like a natural progression of getting older when you're more aware of things that can go wrong as well but it definitely has had an impact on me. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think it's made me more agreeable. So I had a baby, interestingly, in the middle of writing the book. So before I had Evan, I really thought I would not enjoy the baby phase of having a baby. The baby talk and the giggling and the cuddling were not going to appeal to me really. But that's

actually been my favorite part. I really like being silly and making him laugh and playing with him. But the part that I thought I would be really good at, which is figuring out like how many ounces and like what time and like how many diapers and how often that part has not been as fun for me. Like it hasn't been, I like do it and I'm pretty good at it, but that part hasn't been as enjoyable as I thought it would be. Oh, that's so interesting. Another part of the lifespan that I am curious about is when you get into older age, you know, I know that politically we tend to say that as you get older you become more conservative and younger people tend to be slightly more progressive is that related to openness to experience and do you see a change

as people age like into their you know 70s and 80s people do tend to become less open to experiences as they get older and that could be one reason why older people become more conservative as they get older because openness is generally associated with political liberalism it's sort of the like, yeah, whatever you want to do, like kind of free to be you and me type thing. So that kind of declines as you get older. Also, as you get older, other things happen to like you tend to become less neurotic, you tend to become more conscientious. So there are positive changes. And I mean, negative changes, depending on how you look at it. And also depending on like, how open you start out as because if you're a Berkeley protester in the, you know, 70s,

as a young person like you'll probably still be pretty liberal even in old age in terms of your experience and like the changes you saw in yourself when you originally did this kind of like you know personality testing verse after having these different experiences of trying to change your personality what was the end result like where are you at now in terms of your testing and how you show up for these personality types the end result was that my extroversion did increase a lot. I think I just found that I was sort of unnecessarily isolating myself kind of with the excuse of introversion. I still think I'm an introvert in that I do need a lot of downtime and alone time and just like time to process. But I also, I think I found that I get a lot more out

of social interaction that I was maybe thinking that I did. I also found that my neuroticism went down, but I thought I was working on the anxiety component and that did go down a little bit, but mostly what went down was my depression. And I chalked that up to meditation actually. And just some of the, I guess, learnings about Buddhism that I encountered while I was taking this intensive meditation class. My agreeableness did go up slightly. And I mostly chalk that up to the fact that I did so much with other people. Like I did an anger management program and I went to London for this conversation workshop. And I just, I was like constantly around other people and like hearing other people's stories. And that I think helped boost my own levels of

empathy or kind of like this realization that a lot of times you're sharing a struggle with a lot of other people. I don't know. So that did increase my agreeableness. Can I ask about the anger management class? I read that you were the only person in it that wasn't forced to be there. Yeah. What happens in an anger management class and how does that help with neuroticism? Well, it was supposed to help me with agreeableness. I found the anger management class not that helpful because it was kind of telling me stuff that I already knew. It was the teachers walking you through like, take a deep breath. Right. You know, try to focus on something positive, you know, go to the other room. You know, it was kind of like a very generic advice.

But one thing that was helpful there is hearing what made other people angry and why some of us we're able to avoid anger triggers sometimes. So like at one point they brought up traffic and none of us said that traffic makes us angry, even though I know it did make me angry in that story that I told earlier, but usually it's not traffic that upsets us. We live in a very high traffic area where there's always traffic. And kind of the reason why we figured out that traffic doesn't make us angry is that it's beyond our control. Like we didn't cause the traffic and there's nothing we can do about it so in some ways that is like a healthier way to think about stuff that makes you angry is this isn't within my control like if it's something that happens at work or

something that someone does to you it's not a personal yeah like one way that i've kind of tried to process it is just this isn't up to me you know this isn't in my hands this is kind of along the lines of the let them theory that mel robbins has written a book about it's going very very very viral at the moment kind of the concept is if something happens outside of your control you have to let them you have to let them do it in that way I mean I'm not quite at that point in traffic yet I am probably my worst version of who I am in a car yelling at people for doing stupid things or what I deem to be stupid but I think that what you're referring to is kind of along those same lines of what you don't have control over you can't change

yeah yeah exactly I mean it's a concept is all the time but yeah some people we need to hear it Yeah. But also on this, I mean, like we've spoken about how score wise your personality had changed, but did you feel it in yourself? Could you tell that there was changes that had been made? I definitely felt less depressed. Like I felt happier throughout working on the project and I definitely felt more extra, like I found myself like looking forward to things with other people that I would do with other people, like my sailing class or improv class, even I found myself, oh yeah, I can't wait for that. Or like, that'll be so fun. And like, that's not really a thought that I had had before. Like my mentality before the book was much more

like get home on Friday, pop a bottle of wine. Thank God the week is over. What's on TV? Kind of a lot more just trying to get through and survive as opposed to looking out and seeing hope and like something to look forward to. I'm interested in kind of the dichotomy of these personality traits. And, you know, we said that you want to be high on the scale in everything other than neuroticism. But are there positives to being the opposite? You know, if let's say that you are high on neuroticism like you were, is there an environment that that is a good thing? Yes. Importantly, you don't want to be all the way over. They're all a spectrum, right? And you don't want to be all the way over to the end for any one of them because we do need a little bit

of anxiety. Like if you didn't have anxiety, you wouldn't have shown up for work today and you wouldn't have, you know, you wouldn't do anything. You wouldn't make doctor's appointments and people would just languish. They wouldn't move through life. So you do need anxiety to like get up and go in the morning. But the trick is not letting it get the best of you and not letting it spiral out of control. So having a little bit of that nervousness or those jitters is totally normal and adaptive and healthy. But the trick is, you know, at the same time, not being like all the way over on neuroticism so far that you can't cope. And you're, you know, you also don't do anything because you're too anxious. And some of it might be situational, right? It might be like

changing your personality from moment to moment where you know maybe you're an introvert one day because you really got to buckle down and study for something or prepare for something and then you're an extrovert the next day because you have to give a huge speech for tons and tons of people that kind of switching between traits or like trying on different traits is also a version of personality change Olga thank you so much for coming and being a part of the pod and for anyone who is or has considered potentially maybe changing their own personality might make themselves happier. Please we'll link the book and everything about it in the show notes as well. It is called me, but better the science and promise of personality change. Thanks for coming and

being a part of the pod. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.