Modern Wisdom - #523 - Dr Christian Jarrett - The Science Of Personality Change

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Dr Christian Jarrett is deputy editor of Psyche and an author. Most people believe that they are their personalities. That it's an immutable, unchanging, central part of them as a person. But psychologists and neuroscientists have been studying the science of personality change for many years and have uncovered strategies to nudge your personality in the direction you want. Expect to learn why most personality tests are basically useless, how genetically heritable our personalities are, just how much of a change we can make from where we start off, how to stop being shy or introverted, the best strategies to become more ambitious and conscientious, the most effective ways to maintain personality change and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Our Sponsor - get 25% discount on your at-home testosterone test at https://trylgc.com/wisdom (use code: WISDOM25) Extra Stuff: Check out Christian's website - https://psyche.co/  Buy Be Who You Want - https://amzn.to/3B31sdS  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Christian Jarrett, he's a deputy editor of Psych and An Author. Most people believe that they are their personalities, that it's an immutable, unchanging, central part of them as a person. But psychologists and neuroscientists have been studying the science of personality change for many years, and have uncovered strategies to nudge your personality in the direction you want. Expect to learn why most personality tests are basically useless, how genetically heritable our personalities are, just how much of a change we can make from where we start off,

how to stop being so shy or introverted, the best strategies to become more ambitious and conscientious, the most effective ways to maintain personality change, and much more. Don't forget, you might be listening, but not subscribed, and if that's the case, you're going to miss episodes when they are uploaded, so head to Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you are listening and press the subscribe or the follow button. It'll make me very happy indeed, it supports the show, and it means that you're not going to miss episodes. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Christian Jarrett, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Chris, this is great to be here.

Now, the topic that I know you came to talk about is post-ejaculatory adaptations to self-seem and displacement, a study that I recently read. And I've found in this, contrary to the prevailing view, male sexual jealousy accounts for more cases of family violence, e.g. spouse and child abuse than social class poverty, alcohol, or drug addiction combined. This was shared by Rob Henderson the other day. High level. What are your thoughts on post-ejaculatory adaptations to self-seem and displacement? Wow, that's the most left-field question I've had, I would say. Oh yeah, we know what men are like. Yeah, jealousy probably accounts for a lot of bad personality change. Absolutely. Well, think as well. Like, one of the things that men are

pretty hardwired to avoid is being cooked, right? You know, to raise somebody else's child. So I guess that the jealousy must be tuned up a little bit more in that regard for men. Yeah, I mean more seriously, I guess there is a, an evolutionary thread that runs through, you know, a lot of the personality research. And these kind of, you know, you get, there are six important sex differences in personality and that kind of thing, you know,

to do with the average gender differences in some of the traits. And yeah, the kind of thing you're talking about, you know, aggressiveness and competitiveness and so on. So it does tie in, and it, loosely in some ways. We've leaped it back around. So what do you mean when you talk about personality? Well, the way I approach it is the way it is covered in personality in psychological science by personality researchers. So that like the formal approach, which is so personality is our it's a combination of our habits of thought, feeling the way we relate to other people. And you can measure these tendencies with the big five model of personality. So that's basically what I mean by it in this book that I wrote. I took the scientific route.

There are other models like the Myers-Briggs, that kind of thing. There are some of these, and even more, you know, wackier ones than that that are less scientific. But what I mean by is those ingrained behavioral tendencies and like a favorite way that personality researchers have of describing it is that you can tell what's your personality because it's how you behave without putting any effort into it. So if an extravert, a strong extravert walks into a room, they don't think to themselves, right, I better make an effort to start chatting to the people in the room, that kind of thing. It's just how they act because it's how they are. How they are. How

Wu or unscientific are most of the other personality measures and other elements if big five is what personality is then what's attachment theory or what's my as Briggs or that red blue green thing Yeah, they're pretty woop because I mean they don't have that scientific robustness. So the problem with them is, I mean on the plus side a lot of them are very popular engaging their fun. So you're getting people thinking about personality, they're thinking about their behavior and how they relate to other people, that kind of thing. So that's on the plus side. The problem with a lot of these other approaches is you do the test one day and do it again the next day and you get a different score, that kind of thing. So they just don't hold up to

much scrutiny, that's part of the problem. What's the difference between personality and mood then? So mood is over the short term. So mood state is a state, so it's a transient condition. Personality very much, that's probably something I should have said in the definition, it's something very much plays out over the long term. So we all have our moments where we're lazy. No matter how conscientious we are, we'll all have lazy moments. No matter how highly we score in a careerfulness,

we're all going to have our grumpy days and not be short-tempered. Everyone has these little fluctuations, but the key thing with personality is, if you keep doing the measures over the long term, you see these tendencies, and they're meaningful tendencies, you know, as we really know, you know, it's true, we know that we know that we've got some friends who are chatty, then others have we got some friends who are, you know, more idle or whatever. So personality is like mood, smear across time then. Exactly. I mean, I do think that this is something I explore in the book is these sort of short-term influences interact with our

personality. So there is this kind of malleability to personality and of course the little these little influences day by day kind of crew they can accumulate. And I do think they're important, you know, it's worth paying attention to them because obviously the case I make is that personality isn't set in stone. So it can slowly shift, you know, like an all-time car. It can be gradually shifted, but yeah, the momentary changes are things like moods or emotional state, that kind of thing. How much does personality matter for the outcomes that we get in life? I would say absolutely hugely. I mean, personality traits, these big five traits correlate with all sorts of important outcomes, whether it's longevity, career success,

outcomes, you know, whether it's longevity, career success, relationship success or versus difficulties, your health, so many different that your physical and mental health. And they often, many studies will show that the big five trade scores are as influential as or even more influential than other things that people might think of such as family background, economic background, amount of education, that kind of thing. So they are, it's hugely important. There was one study, one of my favorites, it was focused on trait neuroticism and it that they They calculated it in terms of happiness if you can help people achieve a fairly Modest reduction in their trait neuroticism then in terms of happiness It's equivalent of it of an increase in your income to over three hundred thousand dollars a year

so just to get some kind of handle on, if you can achieve these real genuine shifts in some of your trade scores, it's gonna make a difference to your life. And probably a little bit easier than trying to earn an extra $300,000 a year. Absolutely. Okay.

So getting down to a biological or a neuroscientific level, what's personality there? Is it just like myelin sheets running through the brain? What's going on? Yeah, because it can seem sometimes a little bit, I suppose, willy and subjective, you know. But again, these big five traits, they correlate with some significantly with some very meaningful physiological parameters, suggesting that personality, the one way of putting

it, is that it gets under the skin. So, for example, people hire in neuroticism, which basically means you're less emotionally stable and less emotionally resilient. They have less folding in their brain, less surface area in parts of the brain that are involved in emotion regulation, for example. You find that people who score higher in conscientiousness, you know, how self-discipline they are, orderly, ambitious, that kind of thing. They have, I mean, one study looked at levels of quarter-soul in the hair, like, because you can measure quarter-soul in the hair. People who score higher on a personality test in conscientiousness, they have lower quarter-soul in their hair.

And quarter-soul is a hormone related to stress and inflammation and that kind of thing. So these kind of more objective measures, the gut microbiome is another one that correlates with some of these big five traits, you know, whether you have kind of healthy, more healthy gut bacteria or less healthy blood pressure, heart rate, you know, quite a lot of these things, they correlate with these big five traits suggesting, you know, there is like this objective component to it. Hmm. So it's not just, uh, learned behaviors. It's not just habits and routines. People have predispositions, um, physiologically that are gearing them toward being a particular style,

but I imagine that there must be multiple different ways to achieve certain personality types. So somebody could be high neuroticism because of that folding element, or maybe they have more cortisol receptors, perhaps, maybe there's a ton of different ways that could be contributed to that biologically, then it could be learned behavior. Maybe it was past trauma, maybe it's to do with attachment, maybe it's to do with upbringing, maybe it's to do with whatever.

So it's kind of the same way as I had Robert Ploeman on the show and he was talking about the heritability of weight. And he was saying that he naturally gets quite fat, but mentioned that there's lots of different ways to be fat. You could be fat because your girl in response is down-regulated, so you don't actually know when you're full and satiated that well. Maybe you have an aversion to exercise, maybe you require more sleep than most people, so you're more sedentary, maybe the point being that you can reach the same state in terms of presentation as other people,

whilst coming to it from a very different place. Is that right to say you're wrong? Yeah, absolutely. So there is a strong genetic component to our personality traits. You know, it's tapping into some of those biological processes you know, that you were mentioning. But it's about 50, you're accounts for about 50% of the variation that you see mentioning. But it's about 50, it accounts for about 50%

of the variation that you see in personality between people. So you've got that leaves, obviously, a large chunk, shaping us, to fire our experiences, our relationships, the environment that we raised in and all these things, and continues, that these factors continue to play or off through life.

And those sort of physiological parameters that I mentioned that are connected to the trade. So I think you've got a two-way feedback loop. So if you're in poor health or if you don't pay attention to your physical fitness and so on, there are studies suggesting that is going to have a harmful influence on your personality traits. How so? Things like lack of sleep, smoking, these kind of things are correlated with longitudinal studies show further down the line. you see these kind of harmful effects on the trait, on personality traits.

What, with traits in particular neuroticism? Neuoticism, particularly conscientiousness, open-mindedness, you know, they will suffer extroversion as well with, with smoking, extraversion will tend to go down because it affects habits like smoking, affect our ability to enjoy reward, other forms of reward. So these behaviors or things like our diet, our sleep habits, our fitness routine, habits, lifestyle, I guess you might say, they affect some of the underlying physiology that is relevant to personality traits.

Yes, and it's this constant feedback. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's part of what I, you know, the message I try and convey in the book is to sort of try to hack some of these feedback loops that exist in our between personality and biological processes and the kind of lives we lead, you know, kind of trying to hack into these dynamics, these circles. There's a guy from Stanford's Andrew Huberman, I had him on the show a couple of months ago,

and he was talking about how he prefers to try and change the mind with the body rather than with the mind. And I think that that kind of gets to this physiological interdependence between the way that you feel, the things that you think, the habits you have, the routines that you follow, the way that you show up, what you do with your body, and all of these things are loops. And this is as well. Peter Simmer's on the show at the start of this year, and he was talking about how people accuse perito-principal distributions of well-being or wealth or whatever. They point the finger at capitalism and say, look at these evil capitalists doing this. And says well almost all of the rivers have almost all of the water almost all of the stars have almost all of the mass like these

kind of Matthew principles just Play out like this is just the way that it happens and you can see it happening here as well If somebody Start smoking that means that it's going to be more difficult for them to do this and that and the other and it just Helps to continue to push them down. And the reverse is true as well. And you see these trajectories of people just start to split apart.

Because the person that has good habits engenders more good habits, which gives them better results, which reinforces the good habits and all the way up. Yeah, exactly. It's a lot of, I think, exploiting the research into personality change is recognizing that certain things in motion in the right direction and stopping them spiraling downwards. Yeah, you might be aware of these kind of studies

they came out of Dunedin in New Zealand. These very long-term studies where they actually looked at kids' temperament from a very young age, and children with lower self-control, which is related to when we're adults, it's related to trait conscientiousness. The kids with lower self-control, they are far more likely to grow up to be the adults who are going to be unemployed, going to have poor health and so on and so forth. I know that one criticism is that that is pinning the blame on the individual rather than acknowledging circumstances, but it is also

empowering because these things aren't set in stone. So, you know, it opens the door to an early intervention, and it opens the door to us taking control of some of these factors ourselves by deliberately changing ourselves, thinking more consciously and deliberately about, you know, what we do with our lives and where we put ourselves up the situations we put ourselves in as well. Didn't you look at another study that the longest longitudinal personality study ever done where people were rated by teachers in school and then were tested again at 70?

And that showed that there was a lot of change between the personalities. So what does it mean to talk about personality at all? That doesn't that kind of undo what we just said about the fact that people that don't have so much self-control later in life, like if the personality isn't consistent throughout life, then why would anything in early life

be predictive of stuff later in life? Yeah, one thing to say about that study, that was a Scottish study, and I think it was the longest ever, was it was focused on one sort of tiny part of personality, what it was related to conscientiousness, but it had a number of flaws that city. So I did highlight it because of the dramatic finding that there wasn't a correlation between the scores in childhood and the scores in, like you say, they were about 70 something.

But I mean, there were a few few floors so the childhood ratings were done by teachers I think and whereas when they were in the 70s they rated themselves and stuff. But I mean what the experts usually say is the rank you know, if you were towards the choir to end in your class, in your group, when you're at school, you're probably, although you will all shift through life, because there are these kind of maturity effects through life, you'll probably still be, you know, towards the lower end, even if your whole class has shifted on extraversion, you'll probably still be in the same roughly the same rank. There was another recent study, I think it looked at 50 years comparing personality scores

with the same group of people with a 50-year gap. They looked at 10 different trades rather than just the one. I think they found 98% of the participants showed meaningful change on at least one of the 10 trades. So that obviously there were other traits that showed stability. It's this mixture of, and I tried to deal with this in the book, trying to get across. It's not set in stone, but it's relatively stable, but there is some change as well. So it is meaningful, personality is meaningful while not being totally fixed. Yeah, so the best analogy, and there's lots of similarities, I think,

between personality and what I learned about behavioral genetics, just because there's that kind of set point and an amount of existing direction and then also the stuff and the change that you can make with regards to environment or personal choice. And a plowman says, genetics do not predetermine, but they do predispose. Yeah. And I feel like that highlights the personality thing.

All right. So is it right to say that who we are is our personalities? And if that's the case, what does it mean to change the personality? Does that mean that we're like not accepting ourselves? Does that mean that we're changing who we are, the existential gap between Chris' personality and Chris himself? Yeah, so it can start to get quite philosophical content about what makes us us. And I wanted to, yeah, I mean, I delved into this stuff because I wanted to know how much we can really change

for the better. I'd been covering psychology and neuroscience for so many years writing about cool new studies and so on. And this was something I kind of kept coming back to. Does any of this stuff really work long term? And I suppose that's personality provided, I thought provided an excellent frame for that because it's kind of getting that, you know, really deep down. It's not just changing habits. It's not just changing your routines. It's really

these are your, as we were just discussing, you know, relatively long-lasting stable traits. Can we change those? So it is a very important part of who we are. It's one way of capturing what makes us us. I wouldn't say it is everything. Other things that are important part of who we are are things like our relationship, you know, the relationships that we hold together, a meaningful to us That is a key part of who we are. So we can change our personality, but still love and care about the same people You know, we can change our personality, but still have the same Core values still believe in the same priorities and principles in life priorities and principles in life. Other aspects of ourself, you know, that I encountered, you know, researching this stuff was, you know, like the stories, the story we tell about our lives in a way is a part

of who we are. And of course it can be told different. You can tell your own story in different ways. And that is that, you've probably heard there's a form of therapy and narrative therapy. And I know that is about helping people tell their story differently. And thereby actually change in a way, change themselves or how they feel like to themselves. So yeah, it isn't every, these personality traits on everything, they're very, very important part of it, rather're not, not everything. I suppose the interesting thing about personality is it's so inextricable

from the way that we present for pretty much everything else. So our relationships and the story that we tell ourselves and the values and virtues and integrity that we hold are all influencing and being influenced by the natural set point that we have, like our predisposition, what is it that we are tending toward? So I guess it seems to me, the way that I'm kind of framing it is it's like the foundation of the source code or the set point, the beginning, that everything is coming off of is our personality. And then what you want to try and do is be swimming downstream. You want to try and get yourself to a stage where your personality makes having the kind of life that you want

to have more easy as opposed to you being some incredibly unconscious person that has dreams and goals and aspirations to go and make something better of yourself. And you go, well, hang on a second, I have this desire and yet something in me isn't allowing me to manifest that desire. That sucks. So it's got to be a case that it is again, this completely interdependent link between the two. It definitely is because if any of your listeners, for example, have frustrated in their careers or something like that, they're finding it really hard to get motivated. Obviously one thing they can do is start to try and enhance their trait consciousness,

their various ways of doing that. That's something they can do. They can work on themselves from the inside out, try and change that key personality trait. But it's very important to recognize that actually when people find themselves in a job or find a passion that really sets them on fire, really satisfies them, and it feeds back and increases trade conscientiousness.

You know, it's much easier to be conscientious if you're in a job that you enjoy and you care about. So you're absolutely right. It's this interdependence again. Yeah. I was a club promoter for most of my 20s and was pretty obsessed with work and trying to gain success and also just grow the business because it was something that I felt like I had a lot of personal investment in. My sense of self-worth and the success of the business were kind of pretty closely linked.

I remember thinking, I got to all the end of my 20s and I started learning about leverage which is this concept whereby you can use capital, labor, code or media in order to magnify your effects out into the world. I wasn't doing that. I was running club nights, right? There was no leverage there, really. It's like, look, for one person that came in, one person came in. It wasn't that I ran the club night once and then could run it like, uh, command C,

command V, and then it would just run for the rest of time. We always had to be there blah, blah, blah. So there was a little levels of leverage. And I was learning about leverage at a time when my motivation was waning a little bit within the business. And I remember thinking, oh fuck, like I've spent the fuel that I had of that kind of obsessive passion, that super conscientious grind and drive. And I've spent it on something which I really, really value and I love what I achieved with the business, but there wasn't a massive amount of leverage there. So maybe I've missed out on the opportunity to maximize

this particular part of the drive that was in me. And then whatever four or five years hence now doing the show, and because I get such positive feedback and the dopamine from the show is just insane, I've now rediscovered that same degree of drive and contentiousness and obsession that has been fed back to me by another new project, but this time it's with leverage. I remember thinking it was just an interesting insight that I've not spoken about before that I thought I'd not wasted because I didn't waste it at all and I adore the work that I did and it was very successful and fulfilled me, but I was concerned that I'd kind of spent all of the fuel tank that was there. And I saw in front of my own eyes what happens when the environment re-enables and like re-kick

starts that capacity for super, super, super high conscientiousness. Yeah, so I think in an alternative reality, a version of reality, if you hadn't made that big career change, I think what the research would predict is there is a risk you're, like you say, you had a lot of motivation, you were very organized and driven, but obviously something was, the reward was diminishing maybe whatever you were describing. If you hadn't made that, I guess ambitious shift,

there's a risk you might have seen your conscientiousness, it might have started to adversely affect your personality basically. Basically, it's one set. Yeah, well, what does it mean to say adversely affect our personality? Is that other preferable personality states that people should want to be in? Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit, uh, tactless to use that kind of language, but it's hard to dispute some of these links between something like conscient, because higher conscientiousness is associated

with so many preferable outcomes in life. So it's a little bit, whilst not wanting to be judgmental to people who are low in the trade, it would be hard to advocate for the conscientiousness. Because you're late to have worse health, worse career prospects. There you can go too far with conscientiousness, you know, it can potentially slip into sort of obsessive, unhealthy perfectionist tendencies.

But exactly what you're describing is these, you know, these roads that we travel down, or these situations we find ourselves in in life, they are all the time, you know, kind of feeding back and shaping us. And yeah, being aware of these influences. And I think one of the techniques I describe in the book is it's from the personality psychologist Brian Little. And he calls it personal project analysis. I think that's what he calls it. And it's all about actually taking the time, sit down, reflect on all the various personal projects you have from the really big ones, like running a nightclub, to more trivial things,

like maybe being on a diet or whatever it might be, like going through them all, checking out, like, am I making progress on this particular personal project? Is it making me feel happy? What kind of effect is it having on me? And being a little bit brutal and looking through and saying, should I drop some of these personal projects because they're not making my life any better.

So I should drop them, pivot, show something else. Sounds like that's what you did. Have you considered why having different personality types amongst humans would be adaptive on a tribal ancestral civilizational level? Oh yeah there's quite a lot of research on that kind of thing because there's animals have personalities as well. So there's a lot of, there's actually quite a personality research with animals and you can see basically, you know, like we were saying about the set point

that we kind of are a neurogenetic inheritance and so on that we begin with, our personality disposition, if you like, that we start out with, there's a little bit like our own niche or our own kind of strategy. So while there are a lot of advantages, for example, to being more extroverted, extroverts tend to be bolder. They're more likely to get the, on you know, they're more likely to get the lion share of the hunt, the kill. They're more likely to, you know, find a mate to reproduce with, that kind of thing.

There's also a niche and adaptive advantage niche for the person who is a little bit more cautious, who hangs back, who looks out for danger. more cautious who hangs back who looks out for danger. So for a lot of these things, there's usually, you can see some pros and cons depending on where you kind of where you sit on the continuum with some of these traits. And even if for the majority of people it's better to be one way, you can sometimes see, oh, there's an advantage over here for a minority of people who might be different, whether it's being a little bit more wary or whatever it might be. Especially across an entire group size of a tribe or something, I'm going to guess as well. If you've got, I learned this about psychopaths. I asked about how psychopathy sticks about.

I was like, look, if you've got a done by a number of 100 or 150 or something, why they're not all just killed. Like, and if there's a strong genetic component to this, why they're not all just killed. And the guy that I was speaking to said, well, kind of, but also, if you're a Viking tribe and you want to send a raiding party across to Linda's farm for them to go and fuck up some jordies and whatever, a 10, 100 BC, a 100 AD, it makes sense to have some psychopaths.

So it's actually adaptive. And I guess it's kind of the same here that if everybody was super conscientious and super ex-reverted and super whatever, whatever, what we would consider to be more preferable states, no one's actually going to be saying, hang on, do we actually think that this is a good idea? Maybe we should sit back, maybe we should consider this that and the other. And yeah, across an entire population, it does make sense. And then also our desire is around other people. I am more attracted to friends that are a little bit more introverted than a super extrovert.

Like, I've found it exhausting to be around people that are incredibly extroverted all of the time. I'm much more comfortable around people that are a little bit calmer, a little bit more peaceful. So, there you go. Immediately, if I'm the demand and they're the supply, like there is a demand supply problem for me to find someone that's a little bit less extroverted. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you can even take a trait like, maybe that isn't so obvious,

because there's not so much to do, like fighting and aggression and boldness. And there's something like openness to experience that which is one of the big five. So people who are more open to experience, they don't like sticking to convention and rules. They like doing things different, you know, being more...

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, on a political front, conservatives tend to score lower in openness to experience. But as you were saying, on a kind of tribal level, it's good to have a mixture because if everybody scored highly in openness to experience, which comes with many advantages, openness to experience, you know, it's related to creativity among other things. But if everybody was high in openness to experience, you would, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have anyone thrown the rules. Yeah, there'd be no order. You wouldn't have anyone throwing the rules. You wouldn't have anyone passing down the tribal conventions and respecting the hierarchy and that kind of thing.

So as you say, there's balance on a group level. It makes sense. We've used the word extraversion a bunch of times because that's one of the elements within the big five. But that's not the same as being extroverted or introverted. Can we just unpack that and how introversion and extroversion kind of manifest within personality? Because I think for a lot of people, when we talk about personality, one of the things that they might be interested in is, how do I become less anxious, some more outgoing,

and more socially confident stuff like that, especially in 2022? Yeah. So in the big five to eight theory, it's, it's extra, it's trade extra version. Basically, and it's a continuum. So we're all on it somewhere. We will score somewhere on extra version. The talking about introverts and extroverts is kind of not so scientific in a way. Because where is the cutoff point? Is a short hand for, in personality science,

a kind of a short hand for someone who scores highly on extroversion and an introvert, someone who scores a little bit lower. Sorry, I thought, is extreversion not to do with like valence to positive experience or something like that? Yeah, that's right. That's an important difference from how we use the term in kind of colloquially because yeah, colloquially we tend to think it's just about being chatty and and that kind of thing, but yeah, importantly in in scientific terms, extroverts, one key thing about extroverts is that they're very much driven to achieve reward. They're very much drawn to reward and positive emotion.

So they seek out positive emotion. It's probably one of the reasons why they are more socially active because they're looking for that reward of that social kick. They they tend to be more optimistic, extravert. So if you're a high score, a score out on extraversion, tend to be more optimistic, more active, extraverts are actually more active, they're more exploratory in a way, seeking out reward, looking for that reward.

Introverts are less responsive to positive rewards, they're less seeking stimulation. It's like they're baseline levels of arousal, they're happy with their chill seekers, you know, rather than thrill seekers. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I like that distinction.

What about, so we've spoken about the fact that we can change personality? What are the stickiest bits of personality? What are the things that are the most difficult to change? Well I would say it's all quite different. I don't think any personality change is really easy because, as I was saying earlier, it's more than just quitting some bad habits and forming some new ones. To achieve lasting personality change, I mean, personality is sticky. So you've really got to go invest for the long haul. You've got to do things. You've got to make invest for the long haul. You've got to do thing. You've got to make changes and start behaving differently. And there are various ways to do that.

We might want to cover. You've got to practice these techniques and strategies and make these changes in your life at a pretty rigorous and radical level, really. at a pretty rigorous and radical level, really. In terms of, I mean, I'm guessing, I don't actually know if some traits are harder than others, but I'm guessing neuroticism,

as in, yeah, as I was saying, that emotional instability is probably the one people struggle with the most. And I only say that because when people are asked what part of the personality they would most like to change, that is the most popular change that comes up in surveys. People wish they were not so emotionally unstable, they crave emotional stability and contentment. Yeah. Well, I mean, it makes sense that in a self-report,

the things that people struggle to change the most would be the things that would come up first. Yeah. And I also guess that there's maybe a kind of like a self-defeating element to neuroticism, the fact that having a high susceptibility to negative emotion would make downstream from that a lot of the changes that you're trying to enact more difficult. So it's kind of one of the Matthew principal problems that we mentioned earlier on. Yeah, speaking from experience, I would say, yeah, I personally personally I would say I find dealing with changing neuroticism the hardest and somebody for people to be mindful of if they kind of

embark on trying to change some of their traits is watching out for interactions because I think I I think I I found it like well you know when I was writing the book I you as you can imagine I tried to live out some of the advice, or as you should do, I guess, practices you preach. And I think things like conscientiousness, there are so many sort of practical steps you can take, things you can do,

extroversions as well. But I actually, I think you can get some interactions if you're not careful, because if you start getting, if you've got some neurotic tendencies, you know, you can start to get stressed out about, you know, some of your things you're trying to work on in other aspects of your personality. But it's worth sort of watching out for all the dynamics between the different aspects of yourself and the different trades.

Very interesting. What about the roles that we play in life and how they interact with our personality? Like if we get a new job or we join the army or we become a parent or something like that, you see people, they talk about, I'm such a different person since X, Y, Z, I got married, I had a kid, I started this new job. What's going on there? Yeah, well, exactly. It's one of the, you know, these big life changes Have a huge influence on personality. So one of the most I think robust theories is Social investment theory. This is this idea of you know that when we take on roles that are Meaningful to us that we find rewarding and

That very clearly signposts to us what is required of us. That's a very important part of it, where it's made very clear to you. This is what is required of you. And you get a feedback loop because you get rewarded when you fulfill those requirements. Then you see people increase in trait conscientiousness

and that's called social investment theory. And yeah, some of the other things you mentioned, yeah, becoming a parent, some of the findings here are kind of a little bit confusing, because you might think of all the roles in the world, becoming a parent might increase people's quanti-enthuseness, but the studies I found did not, that wasn't the result they got, and the research is speculated that that is because, you know, what I was saying about it, it being necessary that it's very clear what it's required of you. The researchers in this case,

speculated that coming a parent isn't linked with becoming more conscientious partly because it's just such a mouse term of chaos when you become a parent is actually not that clear, which required of of you it can be pretty overwhelming. So actually you tend to see at least in the very short term you know you will tend to see increases in neuroticism, self-esteem might go down surprisingly and this is short term and extroversion can go down as well. Not that surprising because you know you is much harder to socialize and get out and about that kind of thing. But yeah, relationships is another one, you know, getting married, you tend to see so, you know, people's again, extroversion goes down after getting married. That kind

of thing and just friendships and so on can influence us because I think what you know just now you were describing about the kind of people you're like hanging out with because of how they make you feel. There's this really cool concept which is pretty new. There's not a lot of research on it called affective presence and it's this idea that it's almost like another trait to be like that we so we each have a certain Effective presence which is how we tend to make other people feel So if you yeah, if you spend your time

Let's say you got a new job and your colleague who you work with every day is Particularly grouchy about tempered and boring or whatever it might be that is So they got very negative affective presence. And it brings up, you know, you imagine you're in that job for months or maybe years every day you're exposed to that influence. It's worth being mindful of these things and how they actually, yeah, it's going to shape your own personality. I can see how this would be adaptive again as well. If you get into a relationship or if you have a kid, being higher in neuroticism being more attuned to negative emotions makes sense,

because that will probably tune you into the negative emotions, perhaps, of the newborn child or your partner that you've just got into a relationship with. Reducing extraversion is going to mean that you're less outgoing, you're less sort of seeking, which is also going to be protective of you and a family. I'm going to get us maybe getting into a relationship might reduce openness to experience a little bit as well, although conversely, maybe you could say, well, now I have somebody comfortable that can back me up, which means I can afford to be more open. I don't know. My point being that, like, I can see an adaptive explanation

for a bunch of these different things. You talk about a challenge mindset and a threat mindset as well. What's that and how does that play a role here? Oh yeah, well, I think I brought that up in the book in relation to, because I have this chapter on the dark triad, you know, you mentioned psychopaths earlier. That's it, man. I want to talk about you want people to channel their inner dark triad and utilize it. Talk to me about that and then Yeah, without without fully going over to the dark side. Yeah, but still the advantages without, you know, the negatives. That's what I was trying to find ways to do that. And yet, so something that psychopaths Have did have you had Kevin Dutton on your show? I have not I had

Oh, his name's gonna escape you not Keith Campbell Keith Campbell was the guy that did narcissism. Yeah Matt Williams Michael Williams someone like that, so he I haven't had Kevin Dutton on do you think I should bring him on? Is he cool? He's a very cool. Yeah haven't had Kevin Dunton on. Do you think I should bring him on? Is he cool? He's a very cool. Yeah. I'll get an intro to him off you once we're finished. Yeah, he wrote the wisdom of psychopaths. So one of the sub-trades, so there are these kind of three sub-trades in psychopathy, and one of them is that what they call fearless dominance. You don't want the other two, the impulsivity and the emotional coldness, you don't know it's too, but the fear of this dominance can be very advantageous.

And it could explain why some people who school highly in psychopathy find themselves in successful careers, like becoming CEOs, surgeons, special forces, that kind of thing, because they got the fearless dominance, which is in a way is like very extreme extroversion, like off-the-scale extroversion and off-the-scale, low neuroticism, you know, they don't feel... I think Kevin Dustin says it's like they got ice running through their veins, kind of situation. So yeah, I'm thinking we'll be pretty cool to have more fearless dominance. I'd like some of that. And I, you know, one suggestion I had in the book is looking into this line of research, which I think kind

of comes from sports psychology, which is the, yeah, as you said, they're kind of threat mindset, challenge mindset. So try to get out of the threat mindset when you're faced with a daunting challenge to be more like a successful psychopath. Try to get out of the threat mindset because the threat mindset is about the fear of failure. It's thinking you don't have the skills to deal with this challenge.

That kind of thing. It's seeing it, you know, as I say, it's worried about the failure and the embarrassment that will come and loss of reputation and that kind of thing. Challenge mindset, instead of seeing it as a threat, see it as a challenge, see it as some of you can learn from, remind yourself of the skills that you have that are relevant, the effort, you know, the work you put in in the past that shows you can do this kind of thing, focus on what you can control because with the threat mindset you're worried about, you know, what if this goes wrong, what if that goes wrong and I can't control it. With the challenge mindset, you focus,

you deliberately focus on those things that you can control. And, and see it as a learning process, as well. See it as a learning. Don't see it as a, like, some kind of litmus test. Am I worthy? Or am I, you know, a successful person, or am I not? Don't see it like that. See it as a learning experience. What can I take from this?

If it goes badly, well, the fit, I will learn learn from that, it won't go so badly next time. Dude, I love it. I absolutely love that. That's something that I've relied on an awful lot over the last two years or so as the shows grown pretty quickly and I've had to get myself continuously into rooms with people where I go, there is no reason that I should be here. And yeah, trying to reframe things as, you know, it's either you either win or learn, look at all of the relevant experience that I've got. This is an opportunity. This is not something that I should be concerned about.

I can control the controllables. I can't control the uncontrollable, so I'll let those go. You know, all of that pile together. So it's nice to see that my bro sign solution to not shooting myself on a podcast has been born out in the literature as well. I had a guy called Vincent Haranam on the show, he writes for Kuala'at, a scientist, but just fascinating guy is insight in human nature's front, brilliant. And he came up with the dark gentleman. So he was talking about this specifically with regards to dating, but he was trying to find a way to turn the dark triad traits into a parental investment

protected provider, but still keeping some of those elements in there as well. So I think what a lot of people are doing basically is trying to find some of the value that we can see in the positive elements of either psychopathy, dark triad traits, and then trying to ameliorate those so that you don't go, you know, like full and retate and go completely off the deep end with stuff. Getting into some of the advice that you've got, obviously we've spoken about personality, we've explained the fact that it is something

which is a predisposition that doesn't necessarily predetermine. What's the fundamental understanding that people need to have when it comes to actually changing their personality? What are the most important principles that people need to keep in mind? Here is the thing, I heard that Christian guy. He said that I can make some changes to my personality. What are the principles that people need to keep in mind

whilst going through this journey? I would, I'd probably say the most important thing, and I guess I've hinted at this already, is if you really genuinely want to change, you've got to be willing to shake things up. If you carry on doing everything the same, if you stay in the same relationship, you stay in the same job,

live on the same street, hang out with the same. If you stay in the same relationship, you stay in the same job, live on the same street, hang out with the same buddies. If you don't make any, if you don't check things up at all, it's very, very unlikely you're going to change very much because we are sensitive to these external forces. So I think you've got to ask yourself how far are you willing to go. So if you're not willing to go very far, you need to be realistic about the amount of change you're going to be able to achieve. So being realistic is another important thing. If you really, really want to, you know, change yourself, take your life in a new direction, be radical about what you're willing, the steps you're willing to go to.

Some other things to bear in mind are, you're going to need help from other people. Probably it's going to be very hard, I would think it's pretty going to be very hard to do it as a entirely solo project. It's going to help if the people close to you are on board as well, partly because of these social dynamics that we were talking about. If your closest partner also aspires to similar personality traits and aspirations as you, that's going to help a lot. Because they will role model some of the change you're trying to achieve, they will positively reinforce

when you make the changes in the direction that you care about. So that's another very important factor. I would say it's an ongoing project. It's not something that's done one, you know, a job done one day. And I'm really conscious of that myself. I think, you know, it just, we never know what life's going to throw at us next, do we? So it's a constant unfolding. I think the way I put it in the book is it's like a philosophy to live by our recognizing that where I work in progress. So don't just think, you know, you're going to do a few little psychological tricks and

make a few steps and it's all going to be job done. It's more about recognizing the malleability of your underlying traits, recognizing that they're always prone to change and you've got to keep working at it. You've got to be the kind of best version of yourself, you've got to keep working at it. Maybe just the final thing is, again, I think it goes back to something we mentioned earlier. As although it, there's a good case for working on some of your personality traits to help you achieve what you want in life. I think the research on balance says,

more often personality change happens the other way around. It's more often that we're shaped by our goals and values in life. So think hard about who do you want to be, what kind of person do you want to be, what do you want to do with your life? Because once you set on that particular course, that's going to shape you a lot.

So it's worth, it really is worth reflecting on that and the path you want to take. And because that is going to feed back and actually influence your personality and the kind of person you are. That's interesting. So think about the sort of person that you want to be over the long term,

design a life that would engender that type of person to come out of you, be around people that would encourage that person, be around people that would encourage that person, have pursuits that would encourage that person, have a job living a place, be with a partner, so on and so forth. I think one of the things to pick out there that's really important is the long term perspective.

So I'm 34, right? And I still believe that the thing I'm doing now, or the habit that I'm working on now or whatever, is just it's going to be that for the rest of time My ability to do like my hyperbolic discounting is just completely fucked, right? I just have none of it My ability to be able to look at stuff over a long term really really really sucks But the difference the advantage of doing that is that when you have setbacks, because setbacks are going to come with whatever, whether it be personality change, or just starting a gym routine, or whatever change it is that you're trying to do in life.

There's going to be a period where you reset back to where you are now, and it's going to make you feel like you're back at step zero, but you haven't accounted for all of the good work you've done up into that point. And it is very much a case of like trading a stock, right? It goes up like, yes, sometimes there's pullbacks, but what is the trend over a long term? And this is something only really probably within the last year that I've been able to look at correctly myself and go the number of blips for low mood, for not hitting discipline, for not doing the things that

I know make my life good have become increasingly infrequent and the consistency of me doing the other things. But it felt like I was on this same path for four or five years before I got to the stage where I could actually reflect and see genuine tangible consistent change And I think well no surprise I was feeling demotivated Four years ago because I was doing the thing I wanted the thing and this is the expectation that you were talking about before It's like okay. What is it that you want to get out of life? What you prepared to sacrifice if there is too much of a delta between those two things You're permanently going to feel dissatisfied because you're always going to want

10 and be prepared to sacrifice enough to get 4. And the 6 is always going to hurt. And on top of that as well, I think to add in, think about the fact that 10 is going to take a lot longer to get to than 6 or 4 are going to get to. So, okay, maybe you are here, maybe that means it's going to be more blips, it's going to be more reset. And over time, the goal is to be at 10 in 10 years, not to expect that you're going to be at 10 within six months. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But there are no quick fixes. So meaningful change is going to take a lot of effort. It's also the sort of thing you're talking about, I think is another one of the principles I finish up with in the final chapter, which is about making sure you kind of monitor

your progress. Don't just assume the things that you're doing are working and it's all going to be hunky-dory. So what are those periods of reflection that you've had and kind of looking back over that longer time span, I think is very important because. Just because something sounds like it ought to be working it sounds like a positive step it might not be. And. Another thing is it might work for a while and then stop working. You know so what you know very important I think psychological attribute is psychological flexibility you know, a very important, I think, psychological attribute is psychological flexibility.

You know, it's being, being adaptive, changing, using different strategies, mental strategies, cognitive strategies, and emotional strategies, according to the circumstances and according to how you change, you know, as you get older and your circumstances change, it's a trait, the psychologist, particularly, you know, it's not one of the big five, this psychological flexibility, but it's a very popular area of research. And actually, a very, very recent study, you know, was looking at people's ability to reach their goals. And they, one of the, you know, they would, this study was trying to look at like which strategies are the most effective, you know, as like, is there one that's better than others, that kind of

thing. They didn't find that one's strategy, like kind of willpower strategy was better than another for achieving goals. What they found was most important was having lots of different strategies. That was the thing. So you can switch things up, find what works, you know, depending on the context and so on. Talk to me then, let's get specific. One of the things that most people are going to probably want is to be less idle and be more ambitious, basically increase trait contentiousness. What's a way that someone could do that? One of my favorite findings here is that it's not so much about having iron willpower. When researchers compare people who have high-trick conscientiousness with those with low,

they've done these studies where they ping them on their smartphones to find out what they're doing in different times of day, where they exerting willpower, where they're resisting temptation, what will they doing? What's the difference between these people who have this amazing consciousness and these people who are less self-disciplined? The thing is with the people who have high conscientiousness, they seem to avoid temptation in the first place. It's not that they have iron-clad wool power.

They seem to be quite strategic in the way they live their lives, so they don't expose themselves to the temptation. I'm environment design and the people that you're around and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, they don't necessarily do it consciously. Someone who is high and conscientiousness, they don't necessarily, it's not because they've read a magazine article on how to design a kitchen yeah, like, design the kitchen to put the cookies up of the top or something. But, but maybe we, if it doesn't come naturally to us, maybe we can reverse engineer that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that's, that's one thing. Um, there

are others. I don't know how many keep going., keep going man. People want to be more ambitious. Yeah. I think there's another interesting line of research again to do with willpower. I mean, willpower I think is very relevant to conscientiousness, because conscientiousness is about being more orderly and self-disciplined. So there are these findings to do with willpower

that actually people who see Willpower as the more that you expend it, it's self-perpetuating, like a dynamo on a bike, scenario, the more hard work you do, the more energized you become. People who see, think about Willpower and think about effort and those kind of terms they seem to have more willpower, they get less drained by exerting self-control. People who think of willpower as you've got a little bit in your in your tank and you know I've been working hard today. Ego depletion is setting in. Yeah, exactly.

I've been on the spreadsheets all day. So I'm not going to have any self control left. So I better go down the pub and it's self perpetuating. So it's worth thinking about your mind sets, I suppose. Dude, if you consider, I learned about that maybe three years ago, something like that, that basically your view on willpower determines your experience of willpower, that willpower depletion and the Roy Balmeister, Marshmallow-E, stuff is basically a self-fulfilling prophecy. What do you believe about willpower ends up enacting that. I learned about that a while ago, and I wonder how many people in the world

or how many man hours or productivity or happiness has been gotten rid of because of that self-fulfilling prophecy. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's definitely a danger of that. One of the studies that's come out recently that challenged that, I don't know if you came across this one,

were they tried to find evidence of ego depletion cross culturally and it didn't. They came out with no results in India. Then they tried to find out why can't we get the ego depletion in India. Then they reflected on the fact that in their culture from a very young age, children are taught about how energizing it is to do self-disciplined activities. And they're encouraged much more than in the West to do concentration based activities like reading and things like this. I think they even have this kind of, I can't remember what it's called, but it's kind of meditative type exercise they do to do a staring at a candle or something from a

young age. So they're these various kind of completely conscientious Indians. Yeah, I do that. I think that that's one of, and it ties in perfectly with our mutual friend, David Robson's work, the expectation effect, right? Like this is the expectation effect in action. This is happening in front of our faces. So if all that anybody takes away from this episode is my view on willpower determines my experience of it. If I believe myself to gain more willpower by using more willpower, that is how it will show up. And this literally is born out in the studies you get to choose. And here again, the Matthew principle coming in or whatever you want

to say, like that separation, the people that believe will power is depletive will have significantly worse results than the people that don't and over time that means that their results are going to continue to diverge. So I think that's a really a cool insight. What about emotional stability then? What about if someone wants to become more emotionally stable like everyone? Oh, there are so many different. So when it comes to this one, we can borrow from techniques that are used in psychotherapy. That's one thing we can do. So, you know, CBT, that kind of thing. So you can use cognitive reappraisal. So, I suppose it's overlapped a little bit of something we mentioned earlier, but when you're feeling you're heart racing before a scary activity, before a date or something, and you're sweating and your heart's racing, learn to interpret it as

excitement rather than fear, for example. That's just one. I mean, there's something called affective labeling, which is when we're feeling these negative emotions like anger, jealousy, most of us are not naturally inclined to be very good at identifying these emotions, like putting a label specifying it. So take a moment, Paul, when you're feeling these negative emotions, pause, think think to yourself actually say it out loud well what is it? What is that emotion that I'm feeling? This is called affective labeling and researchers have found that this dampens down the negative emotions and they think it's because by taking that moment to pause and identify and think about the granular level, what is the emotion I'm feeling?

Joa's our attention to the precursor, what led me to feel this way, we're more likely to act upon it in a constructive way. We create distance as well, right? You're distancing yourself, my friend, Cori Allen, meditation teacher calls it the mindfulness gap. Isn't it fascinating that CBT has come up with what was what was that one? Something labeling? Effective labeling. Effective labeling, but if you're doing the pass on a meditation, it would be noting, right? Yeah. Yeah. You know, and it's different perspectives on different sort of terminology, but on the same sort of element. Okay, so we have the ability for people to reframe stuff. I'm not nervous, I'm excited. My friend Bridget says that before she goes on stage, she's a comedian who's started late

and she has a mantra, I'm not nervous, I'm excited, I'm not nervous, I'm excited. The labeling, what else? Give us a final one when it comes to psychological stability and mood and stuff. Okay, well, final one a little bit different and maybe, maybe slightly less obvious is, I don't know if you know these kind of brain training like tasks. So there's one called the N back task. So if any of you listen to Google endback task, the letter NBACH. BACK. So N, N hyphen BACK. Yeah. Yeah, the endback task. Google that, there are loads of free versions online, is to do with keeping track of a train of numbers or letters and every now and again you're prompted to recall the lateral number that was N

numbers back in the sequence. So there's a kind of form of cognitive kind of brain training that trains your, you know, your cognitive ability to kind of pay attention because you can have two Jill streams so you get a kind of monitoring to it once. These exercises have been shown to reduce anxiety and researchers think that's because one cause of anxiety is a lack of mental control over our thoughts. You know, we find our mind drifting to worrisome thoughts. Brain training exercises like the end back task give us help us cultivate more mental control. So it's another way of getting a grip over your emotional regulation. That's cool. It's like adding in some extra RAM. Okay, so final one, I think, look at me just

claiming to know what everybody wants from their personal improvement. I think, look at me just claiming to know what everybody wants from their personal improvement. I think that becoming more confident and more extroverted is probably something else that a big chunk of people would like. Have you got any advice or any techniques that you like to improve that? Yeah, there's what so extroverts tend to be more optimistic, you know, when they So extroverts tend to be more optimistic when they live long. One-12, right? They have better health. I think there's some confusing research around the... Yeah, generally, I think they have better health, so they tend to live longer for that

reason, but they are also more prone to kind of risk taking behavior like jumping off or building or something. Yeah, exactly. So there's... Yeah, you get that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, they tend to be more optimistic. So that's one reason they're more willing to throw themselves into

these challenging social situations and other things. There's a whole, there's a range of interventions for increasing optimism. And one of them is called the best self exercise or something like that. It all really involves spending some time sitting down and you can repeat this, you know, each day to get into the habit of it. And imagine picturing yourself kind of five years or so, hence everything's gone as you hoped or your dreams have come true This kind of thing and it's so it's spending some I suppose you can see it's like a little meditation exercise spending some time imagining Oh best possible self. That's what's called best possible self again. If you Google it, I think it comes up So yeah, but studies have shown the regularly practicing this little exercise helps increase

Optimism and that's going to feed into your extroversion. I mean, I would say with tray extroversion more than any of the other of the big five traits, it's kind of it's the fake it to make it is actually spot on there really. I think the more you put yourself out there, you know, joiner, it sounds kind of common sense in a way, you know, go to some exercise classes, or whatever floats your boat, you know, join a debating society, debating club, whatever it might be, it's something that's going to involve interacting with other people. Practice, recalibrate, because if you're a strong introvert, you're very kind of sensitive to the stimulation. Actually, put yourself out there, make these behavioral changes in your life.

If you want to be more extroverted and you will recalibrate and you'll learn the skills of small talk, that kind of thing. Be a little bit strategic about it at first. Get up to speed on the latest sports results so you can have a chat about it. Whatever it takes, it's going to feel forced at the beginning, for sure. Of course it is, but practice does make perfect and you'll recalibrate. There's a brilliant book by Jessica Pan, something like a comment of the title of it, but she spent a year living, she's a self-described strong introvert. She challenged herself to spend a year living as an out-and-out extrovert. She joined an improvisation club,

she did stand-up comedy, she did a ton of stuff. And that's, you know, if any of you listen to Sirius about really wanting to come out of their shell, I think the more they're willing to take some of those steps, it's gonna feel uncomfortable at first, no question. But the more you do it, the easier it gets. Max Dickens was on the show recently talking about male mental health and friendships, but before that, he wrote a book about how improv basically changed his life.

And he founded a company called Hoopler, which is one of the UK's biggest improv companies. And he was talking about how important it is for people to go into improv and he basically said it's like a trial by fire of all of the things that you don't want to do. But the point is that failing in an improv class is applauded. So you get positive reinforcement when you mess up, which makes the price of messing up significantly less. And you're also watching everybody else mess up and it's kind of light. And I think that the definitely is, I know in my more introverted times, you create quite a high... There's a very high sense of pressure and a felt sense that things matter.

And if I say something and it doesn't land, then it's a big deal. Like if you say something and it doesn't land, it's really easy to go like, well that was a shit joke, wasn't it? And like that's funny. That bit's actually genuinely funny. The fact that your joke was shit is actually interesting. And so I think trying to, you know, realize that the stakes are nowhere near as high as you think they are, especially socially.

But I can't remember whose friend it was. Someone's grandmother said something like, we care far less about what other people thought of us if we realized how rarely would they do. And the fact is that most people are living inside of their own heads. When was the last time that you can remember somebody tripping over in the street or dropping a glass in a restaurant or whatever? You can probably not remember it. And the reason for that is that the fact that that exists

should give you unbelievable confidence that you can mess up on an almost daily basis and basically no one's going to remember it. Yeah, I think that's very nice advice and nice way of putting it. I don't know, there's this funny study I think which from the 70s, I don't know if you've come across it. I think they called it the spotlight effect or something where they had a student, very different students take turns to, and it go into a group, you know, like a tutorial situation and they got them to wear an embarrassing t-shirt. I can't remember.

Embarrassing t-shirt, consistent. I can't remember what it, it might be Barry Manolo or something like that. Like an uncool t-shirt, right? Very, for the time it was apparently an-call t-shirt, right? Very, I, for the time it was a very, it was apparently an on-call t-shirt, I can't remember for sure who it was and before the person put it on, you know, and went into the tutorial, obviously they asked them, what do you think, do you think, how many people do you think are going to notice the t-shirt? And of course, people would say, well, I think everyone's going to notice it's going to be excruciating and so on. And then they, you can imagine,

you know, you can guess the researchers then actually surveyed the other people in the tutor group. Did you notice someone so wearing that in Baratial T-shirt and a few of them did? So this mismatch between, yeah, we think the spotlight is on us, as you're, you know, like you're saying, but it isn't as much as we think it is. Christian Jarrett, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, the articles that you write, all the rest of it, where should they go? Oh, well I have my own website, christinjarratt.com. I domain kind of social thing, media thing I use is Twitter. I'm at PsychRiter with an underscore between the psych and the writer. My day job is I'm deputy editor of Psychie magazine, digital online global magazine where we have all those of British or cool psychology and we publish

a new guide every week written by experts on basically how to live better and that kind of thing. Unreal, Christian, I appreciate you. Thanks, man. Cheers, thanks, Chris.