Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - The Big Five Personality Traits: Conscientiousness Part 1

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

In this episode, we continue our Big Five Personality Traits series by doing a deep dive into Conscientiousness. We'll look into studies that show how low conscientiousness increases mortality rate as well as positive aspects of high conscientiousness. We also explore the 6 domains, genetic factors, and different life stages of conscientiousness.  By listening to this episode, you can earn 1.25 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog. Link to YouTube video.

Hello and welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. I'm here to talk about getting rid of burnout, increasing job satisfaction, and feeling like an expert in what you do. One thing that created a lot of burnout and angst for me was trying to get continued medical education right at the last minute. So why not join the CME membership and do CMEE while listening to this podcast? Go to Psychiatrypodcast.com, sign up, sign in, take the test, and the certification is email to you in seconds. All right, welcome back to the psychiatry and psychotherapy podcast. This is an episode on one of the big five personality types, traits, conscientiousness. I am going to be going through with Alexis Karniff, kind of a deep dive into some of the

studies that have been done on this. It's very well studied. She is a fourth year medical student. She was also on an episode COVID-19 in the brain, delirium and viral encephalitis. And she helped write as well, the big five neurotic. Part 1 and 2. So Alexis will be here with us, and we're going to start off at the beginning of this episode having kind of a roundtable with all the medical students working with me right now. Madison Ulrich, she's a fourth year. She was also on the episode, Forensic Pedophilia and

QDs and the over-sexualization of children in our culture. She is from Point Loma Nazarene, and she's interested in child and adolescent psychiatry and adopting old dogs. I'm also going to have Matthew Hegley. He is a fourth year, and he was on a three-part series on free will. He did an amazing job. He also helped write the link between unemployment, depression, and suicide in the COVID-19 pandemic. He has an MA in bioethics from Lomalinda University, as well as a BS and bioengineering from Walla Walla. And he isn't really interested in the intersection of psychiatry, ethics, and technology, and hopes to pursue psychiatry with a fellowship in palliative medicine. And finally, for this roundtable, I will have Kyle Logan. He's a MS4. He was on the

best exercise program for depression. And Kyle holds a BS in healthcare management from Los Angeles. He's interested in non-pharmacological interventions for mental illness and is interested in child and adolescent psychiatry. So we're going to start with a discussion where we're going to go through the different domains of the big five, the domains within conscientiousness, I might specify. And I think this will really bring home what conscientiousness is. We all score differently. We all took the gold standard for this, the Neo. It's a test that you can't take online. You can take it. If you have someone like myself that you're a client of, I can run this test for you. I got the credentials to be able to do that. And so we're going to, we're going to,

going to go through our scores and we're going to talk about, you know, our surprises, maybe why we might have scored that way. And I think that will really bring home to you, you know, this aspect of the Big Five. So I'm hoping that by the end of this series, you'll have kind of like a working ability to think in terms of when patients come in, where do they fall, where is their personality, what might be some of their strengths within their personality, what jobs may they really thrive in as well. Okay, we'll start here. And so the first domain is competence. So someone who is high in competence keeps informed and makes intelligent decisions, has good judgment, and someone low acts thoughtlessly, can feel unsuccessful, comes into a situation not being fully

prepared. So maybe Alexis, let's start with you. All right. Let's see how you did on this one. Let me pull up her result here. So that once again, this was the Neo Personality Inventory 3. That's the gold standard for the big five. And you can't take this online anywhere. You have to actually take it from a professional like myself. We can administer it. Okay. So here is your competence. You scored a 65, which is to one and a half standard evasion above the mean. Yes. Any thoughts on that? I wasn't too surprised by my results. I'm surprised it's lower than the other aspects of conscientiousness for you. Yeah. Which I think probably would be more of the can feel unsuccessful, right?

Am I guessing right on that one? Okay. Which, I don't know. I think a lot of students do. Honestly, medical students are kind of beat up in the process of medical school. You don't get a lot of positive feedback, mostly negative feedback,

throughout your training. Okay, I scored 61, one standard deviation above the mean. And let's see how you guys did. So do you guys have any thoughts on my score? Not surprised. Let's see here. Maddie scored 67, so that's one and a half standard deviation above the mean.

I did. And Kyle scored a one and a half standard deviation below the mean. Wow, Kyle. I'm really surprised by that. I don't feel very successful. and I don't know. When I start these projects, I'm like all over the place for a few hours. I have to like orient myself to do some good work.

I think this is a good illustration for Kyle. If you look at his other scores, not as low. I think you may sell yourself short with that one. Yeah, I think that's a good point for the test is that it's a self-test. Like we answer the questions ourselves. So I do wonder with like your self-confidence how that plays into it because sometimes I had to like think about that when I was answering questions. You know like what am I actually versus how do I feel today? Which like I know that ties into like people with depression when they take it, things like that.

Yeah. Yep. And Matt, you scored average. Yep. Some things are good. Some things aren't. Most of the time get things done. but definitely not perfect in that regard.

Yeah. Okay. Next domain. Do you want to break down order for us? Yeah. So like we've talked about with order, people that score high like things exactly in their place. They're picky about how job should be done, whereas people that are low scores aren't orderly or methodical. They can't really seem to get organized and they spend time looking for misplaced items.

Yeah. So order versus disorder. And start here with, uh, see, this is my score. I scored average. What do you guys think? Would you score me average on that? Maddie's like nodding. Yeah. I've seen, I've seen your office. My office. Yeah. It's like, it's like a, a video office. right now, so it doesn't really matter. No one, everything's Zoom calls, so it doesn't really matter that there's Legos on the ground for my son when he comes on the weekend.

I like the Legos, though. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not surprised by you scoring average. I think if you took the time to really organize everything, I don't think you would feel like you were effectively using your time. You're like right in the middle of practical organization and, you know. Just getting stuff done. Yeah.

Teetering on the... There is like the teetering of like chaos and control, right? Where it's like if I was too orderly, there would be like one episode every two months. Right? But I kind of embrace the chaos sometimes. Okay. Let's see. Wow.

Alexis, you scored very high. Two standard deviations above the main. Yeah, I'm not surprised. Nope. Me neither. I'm not surprised. She, like, went off. It did, like, 80 pages on conscientiousness.

Yeah, my house is very organized, too. It's honestly a problem. Like, if a spoon is in a fork area, that bothers you. It really bothers me. Okay. And you say that not with disgust, but with pride. There's a micro expression of pride there.

Macro expression. All right, let's see. Let's see where Maddie lined up here. 66. Yeah, Alexis and I are on the same page. So you like things, like, very organized. There's a place where everything, if it's not there, it needs to be. Maddie has her lunchbox.

Everything is in little particular containers, very thought out. Well, what else would you do? Just like throw in it in there. What else would you do? The greatest thing is when she bought. I messed it up. The little thing of breechies. Mini breechies.

A little mini breechies. Hashtag Trader Joe's. I was like, oh my gosh. That's nothing to do with conscientiousness. It's just the fact that I like cheese. But it is prepackaged, so like it doesn't touch anything else. It's orderly. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Kyle, you were average? Yeah. Okay. He's teetering too. Healthily. Yeah.

And then Matt, you were. one stand deviation below the mean. A little bit surprised by that. Yeah, my laundry's a mess. Typically, all my electronics have their own little compartment. All the charging cables are organized, but in general it'll take me a couple months to clean. Things will just pile up,

and then I do a deep clean, and it builds up again. So Matt was the one who did the three-part series on Freewell, and it was a very orderly document. It did take us some back and forth to get it to that point. I don't know. So it seems like there's aspects where you're able to kind of like

create structure. Yeah, I think there's certain things that I put more time and effort into with that. Selective order. I think most people can. It's just like, what are you comfortable with? Like, what do you do at baseline?

Do you guys have selective order, Manny, Alexis? No. It depends. For me, everything is ordered. Otherwise. How about when you get, How about when you get like burned out? Are you still orderly?

No. Is that when the order goes away? Yes, but it creates a lot of stress. A lot of internal. Yep. Stress. Okay. Maddie, you're thinking?

I don't know. When you're stressed out, do you like to order more? Yes. Okay. Yeah, if you get me, if you push me into like, so there's a psychological defense of like reaction formation. So instead of getting angry at someone, like you just go clean. I have that one.

So there will be times where like all clean for like three or four hours. It doesn't happen very often, guys. But when it does, it's like, you know, it's a deep clean. It's a deep clean. Okay. Let's look at the next one. Dutyfulness. Okay.

So like we've kind of discussed before, people that Scott score high in dutyfulness attend work in school even when feeling under the weather. They pay their debts quickly. they do jobs very carefully and they perform tasks conscientiously. Whereas those who tend to be on the lower end of the scale struggle with dependability and reliability and they ignore small rules. Yeah. Okay.

Let's see where I lined up on this one. I was high. I was listening to this, but that's what I did back then. I probably do ignore small rules at times. I think about who made the rule, if the rule is important. How did you do, Alexis? Any thoughts on, are you shocked that I'm a standard deviation above the mean? Would you put me there?

Not really. You're not shocked? Okay. Yeah, maybe part of my dutifulness is trying to get you guys to get all your projects done before ERIS is submitted. Yeah. So there's some dutifulness there. We appreciate it. Four months ago, I wasn't too worried about that.

that, but now I'm like, okay. It's go time. So if you're out there wondering why I'm producing so many episodes, there you go. It's my one standard deviation voting mean dutifulness. Okay. Alexis, you are a good one and a half standard aviation to be able to mean. So you're very high. I'm very methodical and meticulous about different tasks that I do.

So when I get IKEA furniture, I don't even open the box until I've read the instructions like three times. Don't even open the box. No. Okay. Okay. I don't know if that's a good thing. I don't know if that's dutifulness though. Is it not?

It's like doing jobs carefully, they tell you not to open a box. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Performs tasks conscientiously. Doing a job carefully. Does job carefully.

Okay. And it's her own set of principles that she's following. You don't open the box until you read the directions. I just start doing it until I get stuck. That's super interesting. Like I've done this really weird thing ever since I was a kid, whenever I get new clothes for school, my brother would rip off the tags and start wearing them before the first week. I folded them and kept them in a very special drawer until the

first day. Yeah. That's cool. Let's see, uh, let's see how you did, Maddie. Two standard evisions above the main, very high. Alexis and I are, I think, the same for like the rest of these. I'm not surprised. Yeah. I have to like, warn. medical students who are too dutiful that like hey you can say no you know and usually after you submit your applications i just realize like the dutifulness drops that's okay yeah ask me in a month i'll look for the next third year that's hungry okay uh kyle you scored low wow once standard division blow the mean i'll break small rules Okay.

I'm surprised. I think you, I think, I'm surprised by this. Because you, Kyle's been showing up to the gym, so he's getting the full. I did miss one workout. You did. There's that one standard degradation. I think you were intimidated by that one workout. I've been having him jump on the rowing machine doing these like sprints and it's painful.

Yeah, the rowing is, I'm used to lifting the rowing. Yeah, I'm not used to that at all. The funny thing was like the first time he did it, it was like 200,000. meters, which it takes about 30 seconds. But I was watching him go off, like, right at the beginning, like, so hard. And I knew he was just going to, like, I knew he was going to hit a wall. But I was like, I'm just going to watch this. I'm just going to watch this.

Yeah, I don't know. I think this goes into your sort of like, I would like to get a significant other to take this test for you and to compare results. Yeah. See, and that's where, like, I think there's a little bit of nuance when you look get someone scores, you know, because it's like how much of this is accurate, you know? So I think like when I meet with people, patients after I go through their big five and I talk them through it, you know, at times I'll pick out like, oh, this doesn't, I don't know if this

really makes sense and we'll talk through it. Okay, Matt, you scored average. Yep. I'd like to think of myself as reliable, but I like to think of reliability as like a big picture things, so small rules, little details aren't as important to me. Okay. Okay. All right, let's look at achievement striving. Okay, so if you're high in achievement striving, you're going to strive to achieve and be excellent in everything that you do. You work hard towards goals in an orderly way, and you're very clear and succinct about the goals that you have. Whereas if you're low on this scale, you're not really driven to get ahead. You may not stick with self-improvement plans or you don't really consider yourself ambitious. Yeah. I like that consider. Do you consider yourself

ambitious? So clear goals, achievements striving, works hard towards those goals. So I'm pretty sure if you're in medical school, you have to have a certain higher degree than normal of achievement striving. So let's see how we did. And I would say any long professional journey, right? Yeah. Okay, so this is... They're not all very high.

I scored 73, so that's almost two and a half standard deviations above the main, which is, yeah, I think it's a subdued achievement striving. So it's not like an outwardly, like, I don't know. Would you have assumed this? Yeah, that's actually something that I think I didn't understand about you for a while, is all the extra things you do outside of your practice. Because I would always look and be like, oh, if I was in that place in my practice, I wouldn't do any of those outside things.

I'm happy doing that's my accomplishment. And so I had a hard time really understanding your approach to all these additional projects. Yeah. Yeah, you have this very, you have this way of looking at problems. where you want to get the best solution possible so that you can automate it and like incorporate it into your life. And so with the lifting, with the retirement stuff, I'm not surprised by this at all. Yeah, me, we're working, me and Kyle are working on a retirement episode for financial, a financial one. And I've spent, I've spent some hours thinking about it.

And so we're just going to kind of put it all together. and I'm hoping it really blesses you guys who are listening to this to really think through like you work so hard right we work so hard in our jobs we really do it's not easy to sit with a really suicidal person or a number of them all day long and so you want to think wisely about investing and you want your money to work for you you know so once I figured out the best way I just executed it. I didn't think twice about it ever again. And it's so like the cognitive load of that problem has been solved.

And so you can move on and do other things. Yeah, interesting. Any thoughts on this one for me? Would you put me there? I would definitely say the same thing. I mean, I remember when I actually didn't know who you were, but I followed you on Instagram. And you were even just so particular about the cups that you made for the

podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think about coffee quite a bit. No, there's like, yeah, there's this, there's this really nice coffee shop, which is, which has been shut down because of a complicated union battle. So you're not talking about steles. I'm not talking about steles. And they use, they use really nice cups and I've always liked their cups. So I like track down. Did you find them? I found the company that made the cups. And so if you're a Patreon fan, Patreon supporter, you can get a cup. We'll send them out to you. And they're like, I think they're the nicest cup you could drink coffee from.

Other than maybe like one of those cups that like heats your coffee to a very exact temperature. Okay. So achievement striving. I'm high in that two and a half of standard invasions above the mean, which is probably why you have this podcast brought to you. And let's see. see how you did, Alexis. You also scored two and a half standard deviations of the mean,

and I'm not surprised at all either. So Alexis, like, not only did she connect with me to do extra projects before her, you know, application season, but she connected pretty much with everyone else in our department. Yeah.

Oh, man. You're like the patient I need to try to help slow down, you know? Yeah. We're like, let's focus on sleeping. Let's get some, let's do some personal time to take care of yourself. There's one of my buddies who's so high in achievement striving that like he doesn't know how to slow down.

He's going a mile. He's like 120 hour week is like his average week. You know, like he just goes, right? He wakes up early. He wakes about like four. And so for him, it's like getting him to realize that investing time into other things other than work is actually a part of long-term achievement, right, and wellness. So investing in your body, investing in your like family, you know, like all of that is going to help him achieve his goals. So one of the strengths of low achievements driving is maybe you value family more than work.

Yeah. Yeah, or maybe you're just relaxed enough that you're home more and present more. Yeah. You know? It's like, yeah, it's not like you're thinking achievement oriented towards your family. Right. But you're just present more because you just don't care as much. Yeah.

Okay, let's take a look at your other scores. Maddie, you scored one and a half standard of the mean. So pretty high. I'm not surprised. It got me here. Got you here. Yep. Yep.

And then Kyle, you scored one half standard deviation above the main. So a little bit higher than the other parts of conscientious is for you. I think your girlfriend would probably score you higher. Yeah, I want to hear what she has to say about all of these. You're like showing up to, like, jihitsu, you're like training extra with your brother. Yeah. I just always feel like I can do more. That's achievement striving

But no, that's his I think that's like something else doubting This is like self-doubt I see what you're saying, yeah I get you do some therapy Get that self-doubt Matt, you scored

average You're not average Matt I'm sorry You're just not We'll see, I don't know Maybe I'm wrong Maybe like when you're out You know

you'll be like just relaxed. Like I have my Kaiser job or my VA job. I have my county job and I'm just, I go home and I'm happy being home. Is that kind of the dream? That is the dream. There you go. That is the dream. So you kind of have to play the game to get to that place, right?

Yep. It's about getting there. And yeah, yeah. My fiance is actually very happy with that score. She was glad I didn't want to do a specialty that involved more time and longer training. And I think this is important with like counseling you. Because I think if I was counseling you on types of jobs, there are some jobs in which they're more achievement striving oriented, you know.

And there's some jobs that are like, yeah, you can have that balance. And that's good. And that might be where you want to stay for a majority of your life, right? With that sort of lifestyle where you can be content. Okay. And the last one, self-discipline. Okay, so if you score high in self-discipline, you're able to pace yourself in order to meet deadlines. So this is if you have a huge project, like a dissertation, where you have a year or two years to kind of really map out what you need to have done when.

And this possesses, you know, a lot of self-tracking, a lot of anticipation of deadlines and kind of take. into account your skill set. Whereas if you're low and self-discipline, you might have trouble with internal motivation. So you can't really sit down to write this dissertation or you kind of stay away from pre-planning and just hope that you can fit it in a smaller amount of time. You can get overwhelmed with unfinished projects or you're inclined to start new ones before finishing an old one and you might waste some time before focusing and buckling down on your work. I see a lot of ADHD in this specific domain. A lot of my clients with ADHD probably are lower on this.

Or it just takes a lot to get them to a place where they're activated. Yeah. They, you know, procrastination probably is the opposite of this component. So let's see, how did I do? I got 55, so one-half standard deviation above the mean. Surprising? Not surprising? Surprising?

I'm surprised. I think your self-discipline is higher. I mean, you know, the numbers you've been putting up on squat consistently, your coach. I think if you had your coach take this for you, he would score your self-discipline higher. He described you as a very self-motivated person. Yeah. Yeah, I think about there's some projects that are really, really hard for me to finish, but some of that are not as hard.

So I don't know, maybe there's like a meaning or like the overall, like, there's a lot of factors that probably go into that. Do you start new projects before you finish projects a lot? I have so many projects going. I feel like that's something that you do. I don't think it overwhelms me though. Right. Like I have like about 70 folders of future content.

that I just kind of add to from time to time. You're gardening too, right? Yeah. Yeah, I'm gardening. Planning some berries and stuff. There's some self-discipline there. Yeah, I planted some avocados years ago. Yep.

They're producing good fruit now. So self-discipline. Wow, Alexis, 75. That's two and a half standard invasions, what would mean? I'm not too surprised. Honestly. Yeah. I think the question for you is going to be how do we get you to take some breaks here from time to time? Let's see. Are you surprised? You're kind of like... No.

No. You're not. Okay. Let's see. Maddie, you did 73. Yeah. That's two and a half standard deviations above the mean. So these are T scores, by the way, when I give the score. So 50 is average and then every 10 points is. is one standard deviation about the means. So it gives you a pretty quick idea where they're at. And yeah, wow, okay. I'm not surprised, Maddie. I enjoy working with people with high, self-discipline, achievement, striving,

dutfulness. We've gotten a lot of podcasts done in three weeks. We've done a lot, yeah. And then, Kyle, conscientiousness. Wow, look at this. Self-discipline 30, two standard deviations above below the mean. I don't see it, dude. Yeah.

Yeah, I think I was definitely being too hard on myself with these. I just always feel like I should be more disciplined. And like, I forget the questions, but I just always, I'm like, I could have been more. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I feel like it's a good point, though, for when you're, like you said, when you're looking at your patients after they take this,

because if you have a patient that doesn't have, like a good grasp of their true self. Like you said before, they might not answer this correctly. Yeah. And I think also I'm wondering with Kyle, like, I bet community really helps you strive on if you're by yourself. More stuck in COVID. Is it different? Yeah, totally.

I always do better working with a group, I would say. Yep. Yeah, okay. And then Matt, you scored 44. one half standard of vision below the mean yeah scheduling is is difficult for me i also really would rather jump on new projects because everything's exciting at the beginning and i have a bad tendency with that okay all right oh we have one last one just kidding about saying it was the last one so deliberation Alexis tell me about deliberation all right so in terms of deliberation if you score high you rarely make

decisions and haste. You always consider consequences. You plan trips carefully. You think twice about answering. Whereas if you're low on the scale, you kind of do things on a whim. You might be really sporadic. You might just blurt something out with really not really taking into account how that could be perceived or the consequences of that. And you can be quick to act before thinking about consequences. Okay. And so, you know, I was just kind of jumping back to my self-discipline. And I think I may actually sell myself short a little bit, like what you were saying.

Kyle, like, I think like, even though I'm like doing this strength program, I've been pretty consistent about doing it for three years, like I feel like I'm not doing enough often, which is kind of an odd internal thought. Yeah, that's interesting. I agree. I mean, you know, you're paying someone to look at your form on every last set. You take it very seriously, you know. So I think you're definitely.

Yeah. Part of that also is actually to create the structure, the environment that would allow me to keep doing it. Because I think I got to a place at the beginning of COVID where it was just really hard for me to do it at all. Like even once a week was hard coming out, squatting once a week. so I decided to kind of create this external structure, which has been helpful for me. Okay, deliberation though, getting back to deliberation. So rarely makes decisions in haste, always considers consequences, plans, trips carefully, thinks twice before answering, thinks things through before making a decision.

So let's see where I scored on that. I scored 43, so one half standard deviation below the main, almost one standard evasion below the mean. What do you guys think? Looking at those questions, does that make? Is that a surprise? Kyle's surprised. I'm not surprised.

I'm not. Why? I'm not surprised. I have a very specific memory. Okay. That helps my point here. So when we were on our psychiatry clerkship and you came and talked to us as a group, you just immediately looked around the room and you said, oh, man, I can literally tell what

specialty you're all going to go into. And then everybody started like berating you as to like what they fit in and who they were. And you're like, no, I shouldn't have said that. Never mind. Okay. Back to my lecture. Yeah. I think I called a couple of people out once or a while I do. Yeah. Yeah. I've hit it pretty accurate sometimes. Yes. It's like the person who's very reflective, like I'll say something and I'll see their brain lighting up in a very similar way. I think they're going to probably go into Peds or psychiatry or some more humanitarian like family medicine. That's just a generalization.

I also think that with the choices being more spur of the moment, I've definitely noticed maybe they're not spur of the moment, but it sort of feels like that like, hey, we're going to do a podcast now. Come, come do the podcast. We're just do that now. Or like got an email one time at like, I don't know, maybe it was 8 o'clock saying that you were going to have like a Zoom meeting at 9 o'clock that evening to talk about something with the team. And it's just like, oh, okay, well, cool. So.

Yeah, that's true. Or like, hey, I'm going to lunch. Wait, do you want to go here? You should come to lunch with me. Yeah. Take the whole team out to get some food. Yeah, I'm very spontaneous. I like spontaneity.

has done stupid things, maybe jumping off bridges when I was younger, stuff like that, can act before thinking. Probably, yeah, sometimes. Maybe make spur of the moment choices all the time. And it's carefree fun goes with the flow. Sometimes. I don't know. What do you guys think?

Yeah. I've seen your TikToks. I would say there's some... TikTok. There's some things that I'm very... Like, I plan and I'm very organized, and there's some things that I don't. Do you plan out your TikToks?

No. Are you to do that? No. I'm getting so tired of TikTok. Plans trips carefully. No. I'll go. I flew up to Vancouver,

rode my bike down the coast. All I had was a book on like, the general map of where you go coming down the coast. Got to California, got into med school. True story. Alexis is like frowning. She's like, that's a horrible.

That's horrible. Horrible. Okay. Here's the thing though, Alexis. You don't know. I was going to do it in South America with a friend. But he bail out. So I'm like, I don't know, doing that by myself, tights, bike, big white guy.

going through little villages, maybe dirt trails at times, probably should stick to Canada. Okay. Let's look at Alexis's score. I think it's going to be high. Very high. When I have standard of you should have to mean. That's why she, I think this is kind of like in the Byersburg.

It's J versus P almost. It sounds like a really heavy J. Yeah. But it kind of depends, though, because if I'm separate from my emotions, I can be extremely deliberate. But as soon as I get angry or I get really excited or I get an overwhelming emotion, that will immediately lead me and I don't think about it anymore. That's what happened in the debates. They were trying to push each other into that sort of non-rational illogical space. If you look at how they were coming out of the gate towards each other.

especially Trump. Okay, deliberation, very high. And here we go. Maddie, you scored two standard deviations above the mean. I'm not surprised. Very thoughtful. You would have a hard time working with me like years on it. A couple months, okay.

We'll get stuff done as long as you're productive. Yeah. I don't know. What do you laugh at? It's just funny. It's probably true. I can give you an example. Like when I was planning my honeymoon, I probably spent like 50 hours looking at where we should go and what we should do and like what the best place was and how much we were going to spend.

Okay. Yeah. I can actually be very, very high when I'm purchasing like a big thing. Yeah. Like I'm thinking about like I got a bow. I watched probably 100 hours of YouTube videos on like compound bows. So I could be, for some things, I could be very sort of deliberate. But then like today when I had to decide what coffee to get, it took me 20 minutes.

20 minutes? Yeah. Where were you? I decided to get it when we got there so I could sit in the car and think about it. Oh. Yeah, I push you to make a quick decision. I'm like, come on, tell me. Okay.

Kyle, where are you at? You're at one standard evasion below the mean. So, okay. I feel like, you know, there's something that I like to be deliberate in, but I also enjoy being impulsive sometimes, too. You're a P. Yeah.

Yeah. Me and Kyle are on that P wavelength together. You girls are like total jays. Okay. And Matt, you are a little... Matt's with us. Matt's a little bit higher. One half a half a lot.

Sanity vision above the mean. Okay. Yeah, pretty much any purchase will be like five or six hours of research first. I need to know I have the best of whatever it is I'm put my money towards. Yep. Right now it's like rowboats for me. I want to get like a boat, like a single. It's a big purchase.

Expensive. It's like I'm going to do my research. But plus it's like the dopamine. Oh yeah, it's fun. It's fun to watch the videos. Oh, yeah. I know guys, though, who will spend like half their life thinking about what car they want before they actually get it, you know? Some attendings continue to spend hours a day thinking about that.

Those are like a strong S. Okay. So that gave you kind of a glimpse into conscientiousness. We're going to pause here and then me and Alexis are going to start. we're going to go through some more data on like conscientiousness. We're going to break it down, guys. I mean, this is something that I really want you to walk away at the end of the day and understand this construct better than you can get from any textbook.

Okay, closer to the data. So we're not just like giving you little factoids here and there. We're telling you how linked they are, how not linked they are to different things. We're talking about the actual papers. And then you can go back and you can go on my website. you can go into the resource library and you can get them down. And if you're high conscientiousness, high orderliness, you know, you can create a nice folder on your desktop and you can have the different Big Five personality type articles.

And you can go through it. And, you know, it's kind of like at first learning the chess pieces. Like where do the chest pieces move? What do they mean? Okay, this horse goes two up, one over. Okay. So at first you're just kind of getting this idea of like, okay, here's the big five, here's what they are, here's what they do. And then after a while, it's like, oh, okay, here's how they work together. So I'm hoping this provides the foundation for that for you to understand. So, all right, we're going to take a transition here. And we're going to go back to just me and Alexis kind of, and we're going to go through kind of the history of the big five. We're going to go through what are the big five once again. We're going to go. to talk about some of the studies that have been done on, you know, genetics and heritability

and how this plays out in families. And all of this, by the way, is on the website, psychiatrypodcast.com. And I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it. If you send a message when you sign it for the resource library, just, you know, tell me what your thoughts are on this series. I'd really like to hear. All right, here we go. We've been working on different personality types, the big five, and today we're going to do a deep dive on one of them called conscientiousness. And on the way in, Alexis says to me, I have four projects going right now, and I'm doing my sub-eye. And I said, it looks like your conscientiousness has gotten the best of you. It really has.

I've definitely learned the importance of the word no, still trying to perform. affect it, but at least introducing it. You know, conscientiousness is associated with high guilt, and so it's really hard to say now. Yeah. When you want to create, when you have a lot of achievement striving, I'm looking at your level of achievement striving right here. It's like almost pathological. It's really bad.

It's two and half standard deviations above the mean. Self-discipline, two and half standard deviations above the mean, pretty much all the other components of consciousness. Competence, order, dutyfulness, deliberation, all of those about two standard deviations above the mean. And I am, let's see, I'll tell you what I am, guys. Okay. Competence, one standard deviation above the mean.

Order, I'm average on the mean. Dutyfulness, one standard deviation above the mean. Achievement striving, two and a half, standard deviations above the mean. Self-discipline, one-half standard deviation above the mean. and deliberation. I'm actually a little bit low, like one half standard deviation below the mean deliberation. So we are going to be diving into conscientiousness. And it's something I use actually in my clinical practice. I do some marriage therapy and I do some individual therapy and all in my like little private practice that I do, a little telepsychiatry now, now that we're all doing telehealth.

And in the coaching I do, some of the coaching. So sometimes, I'll take them through this. It's the Neo PIR 3. That's the gold standard. And this is pretty cool stuff. So let's get into this. So tell me a little bit about the definition. Okay. So as far as the big five personality types, which is pretty much going to be this next podcast series, right? Yep. Yeah. Well, there's probably going to be episodes in between, but we will get through. Like all the big five, yeah. Cool.

Perfect. Okay. So a lot of people are more familiar with Myers-Briggs, but the Big Five personality types is pretty much up there in terms of popularity. So when we talk about Big Five, we're talking about kind of five different aspects of personality. It's either going to be like extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness.

I really like conscientiousness just because it's a very prevalent part of my life. So when we talk about conscientiousness, we're talking somebody that's orderly, industrial. It's been shown to be a great predictor of long-term success, especially in academic attainment. These type of people show super great attention to detail and responsibility. Industriousness. Yeah. It's like these people execute, you know, they move forward, they're disciplined. It's hard to get into medical school without having this, right? Yeah. Yeah. So let me just give my pitch for why the Big Five matters, okay? Because it's the most studied. It's like incredibly studied. Like there are so many articles on the Big Five. Myers-Brig, there's like not as many, not near as much. Because the Big Five is, it's got such good predictive value. It was created so clearly. The research on it initially was done very.

well. So we're going to get into all the details. But just real quick, extraversion is like how outgoing, gregarious, enthusiastic, assertive someone is. So it's a little bit different than like an extrovert. That's extraversion. I know someone who's high in extroversion. They could go from one party to the next and it just energizes them. They're incredibly enthusiastic. charismatic, that's extroversion. Neuroticism is negative emotional, you know, components. So there's like anger, irritability, impulsiveness, all these different features that are kind of chronic, right? So these are, that's what neuroticism is.

And next episode on neuroticism, we'll go in kind of a deep dive into that. We'll talk about how they've actually tried to treat neuroticism with medications, you know, people who have different psychiatric issues are higher in neuroticism. Then there's agreeableness, which people who are agreeable are compassionate, polite, maternal-oriented, you know, they care about others more than themselves, sometimes to their own detriment, right? So I have some agreeable patients who they need to learn how to, they need to learn to not be so agreeable because they don't stand up for themselves.

They're very cooperative, but they don't know how to like have a voice sometimes. Very warm, likable, kind of like the golden retriever would be high in agreeableness. Then there's openness to experience. Think about this as like ideas and ideation and kind of fantasy life, like internal fantasy life, not as concrete. They're not like they're able to live in their brain a little bit more. The fantasy novels, those kind of things like really pull them in. Yeah, just people that are in love with philosophy for philosophy. philosophy's sake. Yeah, and not like a stoic concrete philosophy, like more of a ethereal, like poetry.

Like I have one patient who's like three standard deviations above the mean on this and her husband is two standard deviation below the mean. So she, you know, is like poetry and all this. He's very practical and, you know, this is where a lot of their conflict comes. So this is why it's really important to know this stuff because then it's not like this is a good or bad thing. this is just how you guys are and how do we get you guys connected in the midst of this, right? So finally, conscientiousness and we're going to get into that. So those are the big five. So tell me a little bit about a brief history into how this was made, where this came from. Okay. So there's been a lot of studies about this dating pretty much back to when the dictionary was first made. And so when we talk about big five, we're talking about studies.

of trait descriptive adjectives drawn from what's called the lexicon. And this is basically the most widely used classification system for personality traits. And from this lexicon of basically a lot of words that are describing personality, we're talking about thousands of words. These kind of fixed identification of the five broad domain systems of personality, which basically we just talked about. So it's basically the lexicon approach to personality proposes that people naturally create terms for common traits so that they can describe and discuss them like we are right now. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so there's kind of like this history of looking at all the adjectives used to describe people and then how do those sort of group together through factor

analysis, which is kind of a cool idea about, you know, how do we describe people and their behaviors and their personalities. Yeah, anything else you want to say on that? There's a lot of of details here. I know. We did pretty extensive research on all of this. So it's just really hard to find what's most important because it's all super cool. I think the big idea is that they looked at words that they didn't come to this with a theoretical sort of construct. Like personality is this way. And then I'm going to look for that, right? They just looked for all of the adjectives to describe people and then they saw which ones grouped together. Yeah. I think at the end of it, they ended up listing about 18,000 terms. So we're dealing with a huge number here.

Yeah, a list of 40,000 potential trait descriptive terms, right? And then they started to sort of take out ones that were archaic and obsolete, you know, and they came down to like 2,797. And then they slowly reduced that further and further, right? Through factor analysis. So factor analysis is like, you have a bunch of questions and which of the questions are like imagine all the questions are like fish which of the groups of fish are swimming together because they're not all swimming like one direction or the other we're like in 3D space so all these questions are moving away from each other as different people kind of have different characteristics that group together so that's how they came up with this and then we want to talk about the Neo PIR, right, or the revised Neo.

So tell me a little bit about that. Okay, so Dr. Peter and I both took it upon ourselves to take the NEO form. The P.I.3, it's the long form. Yeah, the long form. And it was pretty long. It was probably over 200 questions on a computer where you had to just sit and really think about on a leakage scale of 1 to 5, how much that question matched you. So there is some pretty interesting questions,

such as, you know, how long do you think about a fight after you've had it? And let me just state, like, this is not something you can just go online and take. Yeah. Like, you have to actually have to have someone with a credential who has a license to be able to give this. I went through the process to get that.

So I was able to give this thing. And it's usually for purpose of, you know, helping someone, right? helping someone understand their talents, their abilities, where their strengths are, where their weaknesses are, certain jobs fall into certain categories of these things, stuff like that. Yep. So we went through a 240 question, basically, assessment, where you just kind of had to really sit down and think about how all this applied to you. And when I was taking it, I kept thinking, wow, I would have never even thought this about myself. So it's just really cool to see how the people that made this form get to the point of assessing these different domains

that we've talked about like neuroticism, extroversion, openness, and things like that. Yeah, yeah. The other thing is there seem to be increases in conscientious are related to increased achievement behavior, such as encouraging skills that lead to success, such as being responsible, paying attention in class, class, resisting impulses, and schools are rewarding students to modify their motivation's goals and behaviors.

The end result is spending a significant amount of time immersed in environments that promote changes in behavior that lead to enduring prolonged changes in one's identity and ultimately conscientiousness. Yeah. So there was a recent study by Brandt done in 2018 that found that positive student teacher relationships, positive peers, parents who were involved in school. positive feelings about school, finding school and classes engaging, putting effort into one's schoolwork, all those things were associated with increases in conscientiousness, which is really interesting

because you think about different levels of education and schooling. And it's just like how does a lower socioeconomic school in the Chicago suburbs kind of compare to, you know, Lomelinda Academy? I don't know. Of course there's a difference. I actually, when I was in college, I would go into some interesting. city schools, volunteer, and the energy level of the kids was so high. The first thing I thought, you know, we'd take them out, we'd play football, we'd run them around, and then the teacher would say, like, the hour after you guys did that, they were able to sit and focus and concentrate. A lot of kinesthetic learners, right, early on little kids, high energy. But yeah, I think having,

look, look, all those domains, the teacher value in education, the family, value in it, how active is the family member in the education? It's very important, very important. So, but it's what really caught me, caught my attention about this study is that it seemed like the right environments can sort of positively develop conscientiousness. And I feel like I've grown in this actually going through college, going through medical school going through my different sports i think really improve this it kind of like gives you that like i can achieve something i can like push myself i can strive so that's kind of like the side of the

environment right and then the environment moving into the choices where i'm making choices to strive making choices to move ahead interestingly we thought about the marshmallow experiment and we thought about it because this is like an early experiment of can i delay gratification? Can I, you know, put off for 15 minutes eating this marshmallow? So the child has a marshmallow in front of them. Can they hold off eating it and get that second marshmallow? This actually was a pretty viral experiment that was going on lately. I mean, people that are really into social media, there's that really popular video of Kylie Jenner, and she has a bowl of M&Ms in front of her little girl stormy. And a lot of parents are recording their kids and saying, hey, wait till I come back.

I'm going to go cook something. I'm going to go grab something. Wait till I come back. And they record their kids. And it's really funny because some kids wait. They sing to themselves. They count their fingers. And they're able to put it off until mom or dad comes back. And there's other kids. As soon as mom leaves the room, they're in that bowl, which is a handful of M&Ms. Yeah. And they're like, and then when mom comes back, they're like, your mama waiting for you. You know, their mouth is still full of M&M's. Oh, dear. I think it's good to learn how to wait for kids.

Like, Amazon Prime has made it really hard to order something from somewhere else in my mind. Yeah. Because you have to wait, right? And, like, so we're waiting for, like, these Legos to arrive from the Lego store. It's like, they're waiting for a week, okay, or more. You know, the interesting thing about these things is, the correlation with the SAT score, the verbal score was 0.42 from some of these early studies and 0.57 with the quantitative scores, math scores. That's pretty high correlation.

From way back when these little kids were doing this marshmallow study all the way till taking the SAT, it's pretty high. Yeah. So that's interesting. And it's the math. And it's the math is a little bit higher than the verbal. And so we'll talk about that a little bit. There's been a lot of studies where they actually looked at this, like the ability to delay gratification, self-imposed, and how that related to a lot of different other things. And so, for example, things like, is verbally fluent? Can't express ideas well in language. That's correlated. 0.45 with the ability to. delay uses and responds to reason.

0.47 is attentive, able to concentrate. 0.46 is planful things ahead. So you can see a lot of those conscientious types of questions, planning, following through, focusing, competence on this sort of delay, gratification. That's what I got from that study. And so there was this other study that I pulled out. I'm going to jump down to this 2014 one, where they looked at what that self-regulation early in life might inform. And they looked at how it informs academic motivation, commitment, compliance to internal standards,

responsibility, self-control, industrious, orderliness later in life. So that self-regulation, this one article, it's called conscientious origins in change. childhood, 2014. And they found that conscientiousness starts in childhood with self-regulation, and then that moves into commitment, compliance with internalized standards, academic motivation. And then later on, the adult facets are more of what we've already described. So I found that really helpful. And then finally, adulthood, how does conscientiousnesses?

to show up. I think as people get older, up to the age of 60, conscientiousness tends to increase. So, you know, there's a big jump up in the 20s as that frontal lobe fully comes online, right? When I think of consciousness, I think of like that dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, the planning part of your brain, there's other parts, of course, but that's one of the big parts. And, you know, we know that that continues to grow up into the 30s. But interestingly, consciousness continues to grow even up to the age of 60. And this is why insurance is more expensive for when you're in your 20s compared to when you're later in life.

So facets of self-control and responsibility increase in young adulthood and continue to increase with old age. And, you know, it's not unusual to find patients or people who have been, were more reckless, you know, in their 20s than they are in their 30s or. 40s. And there's a lot of things that happen during this time period that also kind of influences the fact of whether you're able to culture more conscientious, right? Because during senior year of high school, you're getting ready to apply to college if that's what you choose. And you have to put out applications. You have to write a personal statement. You have to make sure that you study for the

SAT if you want to be really competitive. There's that kind of experience that could cultivate conscientiousness. Also, you know, when you're in college, just the fact that you're away from your parents and it's up to you to make sure that you stick up with your studies. Or if you don't go to college and you get your first job, that's also a huge opportunity to grow your conscientious level, right? Because all of a sudden you're dealing with working with peers, you're meeting deadlines, you're making sure that you're fulfilling your job appropriately. So all these new changes with kind of where your life is going, depending on which road you want to take, set you. you up to just grow this facet.

Yep. And I think part of that is like, it's like people, you start realizing the importance of, like having a good trail of places you've worked at, having happy bosses that can write your letters of recommendation. You know, there's all those kind of facets of, like, how work and culture sort of pushes you towards growing conscientiousness. If people who are high in conscientious as they get older, they tend to take care of themselves more, go to doctors' appointments, preventative appointments, eat healthy, drive safely, exercise

more. And so it plays an important role in maintaining health as well. Okay. Interestingly, children whose parents are affectionate. with them tend to score higher on conscientious scales. That was an interesting link that I did not see coming. And I think it has something to do with like the self-regulation. It's like emotional regulation to some degree and is informing this at a young age.

Right. It's like, is it safe for me to go the extra mile? Is that am I even comfortable at baseline to try the next thing or to challenge myself with this new idea? I like how you put that. Yeah. It's like attachment venturing out. Do I feel safe to venture out?

You know, can I get refueled emotionally and then jump back into the fray? Right. Jump back into something that's challenging. Kids like to be at a place where they're optimally challenged, where they're like at that place where they can kind of be right at the cusp of something that they're the unknown and the known, you know? So it's kind of like finding that. sweet spot, but they do that within the context of a secure attachment. So, you know, we're going to put all this data.

So if there's something that jumps out to you an article, please refer to the blog. There'll be a nice 66, so right now it's 66 pages of notes that we conscientiously put together. And Zane has been helping as well. So shout out to Zane in the room here. Okay. Interestingly, the father has an impact and the mother has an impact, right? Both the father and the mother's affection have a small correlation with how conscientious the adult child is.

Yeah, so as far as the father's impact on the child, more loving fathers had a 0.1 correlation with higher conscientiousness seen in adults. whereas interestingly enough, kind of highlighting the loving, more demanding fathers also had a point one correlation with higher conscious adult children. So it seems, you know, from this data that you could have a different type of dad that would still play into a higher conscientiousness level in their kid. Well, I mean, these are very small correlations, right? Point one is very small. And highlights the mother's love, right? You know, I wonder what this would look like if the father did the, like I have some friends who like the dad is the one who's going to stay home because the mom works. Like it'd probably be more correlated with how loving the father is at that point, you know?

So it's probably just like who spends the most time with this person. Yeah. We're not talking about a big amount here, but there is some environmental effect here. Okay. let's talk a little bit about genetics so what we have found from genetics and this will be good because you know there's an idea out there that conscientiousness is completely genetic 100% and if you're low conscientious that probably is very soothing to your ego right i'm not i don't really have a choice you know it's kind of like um as the u.s has gotten more obese it's like oh

obesity is genetic. You know? Unfortunately, the people who are obese are not having babies at a higher rate as the skinny people. So it's not like a culture shifting more obese because of genetics, right? So in the same way, genetics was not as highly linked as I thought it was going to be. Yeah. So there was a study by Jang in 1993, a little bit of an older study, but it's still held

through because there hasn't been one to replace it, but two samples were examined. So twins that were reared apart from each other and then twins that were living together while this study was going on. And the monozygotic twins or the identical twins were compared to the dysgotic or the fraternal twins. And it was found that for the monosigotic, conscientiousness was 0.15 correlated. And for the ones that were dysgotic, and for the ones that were dyszygotic, and it was psychotic, the correlation was 0.03.03. Very small, like infinite and negative. That, that was a little bit mind-blowing to me, that low of a score. So you have two genetically, you know, at birth genetically identical. Of course, epigenetics occurs, right? And they're in

the same womb, which has, which has an impact, an epigenetic impact. And then you rear them apart and look at that correlation how small it is. 0.15. 0.15 for monozygotic twins. And if you put those monosagotic twins and you rear them together, now the conscientiousness jumps to 0.41. 0.41. So for conscientiousness, monozegotic is 0.41.

Dezegotic is 0.23. and that shows me that a lot of this is an environment. Even within the same family, even within disigotic or monosagotic twins, like a lot of the strength of correlation is from being reared by the same parents. So not a total genetic influence, not at all. There were a couple other studies that came after this. And interestingly, you know, they show correlations of these. monosoligotics out of like 0.42.

But this first study, I think, really was the treasure. Because the 0.42 is in the context of these two kids were raised in the same household. Okay, there's been a couple newer studies. One was from 2015. And it was looking at heritability of personality. It was a meta-analysis. And they looked at 134 primary studies.

And the big takeaway from it was that 39% of individual differences and personality were due to genetics, and 61% could be due to environment. So leaning a little bit towards the environment, right? And then another study, 2018, called the genetics of human personality, we're looking at genetic links, and they were looking at S&Ps, groups of DNA that are similar between certain personality types, right? They're looking at all of the genes, and they're seeing out of all the genes, someone who's high in consciousness, do they have something in common? And they did find that this one gene, catnol-2, which is involved in neurodevelopment, neuromigration, axonal growth, dendritic pruning was implicated in conscientiousness.

So they found one link. And when we get to neuroticism, we'll talk about the links that they found there a little bit. stronger with neuroticism. Okay, there is one other study that I wanted to go over. So we've talked about the environment a little bit. We've talked about genetics. And I think there's that third thing, which is like how our choice influences how conscientious we are.

And so I don't think we can purely say that it's just our upbringing or it's just our genes that influence us, right? Yeah, that seems pretty predetermined. Right. It's very determinous. And if you listen to my three-part episode on free will and free will belief, you'll learn that we're not purely in a deterministic place. Like, we actually have choice, and we can decide and make choices and make small steps

towards becoming, I think, more conscientious, if that's what we want. And so although there's an aspect of this that is, probably epigenetic, and so like our wiring early on is going to carry through, I think that we can actually make small choices and those small choices build on it, other small choices to become more conscientious. So we're looking at this and we thought, what are some of the questions from the actual like gold standard that seem to be things that you could choose to do?

Right. So listen to some of these like incompetence. I sometimes act thoughtlessly. I sometimes act thoughtlessly. So you could choose to act thoughtlessly or you could choose to go against that and start to act with thoughts, right? Or here's another one.

I often come into situations without being fully prepared. So it's true, you could come into a situation often without being fully prepared or you could start to make choices to be more prepared. In order, I keep my belongings neat and clean. I know a number of people who are very messy people who have decided to start to clean their room. And that's something that they commit to. They go to the army.

And all of a sudden, after the army, they're very neat and orderly with how they make their bed, you know. And when they get out of the army, they can choose to continue that or they can choose not to. What do they value? So sometimes it's the values that change with that. dutyfulness. I ignore a lot of silly little rules. So it seems to be like a choice. Could you learn to look at the rules that are out there and to consider, you know, if they are meaningful or not? Right. I see that happened with so many medical students.

A lot of people, they get on medicine for the first time and they're looking at, you know, a list of 50 lab reports and they report two or three to the attending. and the attending is like, no, I need all of them. And through this process of being 10 weeks on a service where attention to detail is extremely important to patient care, you kind of end up realizing that what you think before isn't what actually ends up happening and what actually isn't or is important because of somebody else's explanation of why. Yeah. So maybe you, if you're a good medical student, what you do is, you do is.

you learn how to closely approximate the way that you're attending or resident thinks. And that's like how you learn. Like what's important, what's not important? I'm not, there's some things that I, like, if you look at like 100 lab results and you're a patient and you're like, one result, your liver function is like double what it should be, it's like, I look at that and that doesn't mean anything to me because it's not a hundred times what it should be. Right?

So just because like there's one little thing that's wrong, it may or may not mean anything, right? So it's like there's patterns and pattern recognition. And so if you're a good medical student, you learn kind of like how the different doctors think and what they're looking for and what they care about, what they don't care about. And at first,

they know that you don't know what they care about. And so they may have you report everything. Later on, you know, when you're a resident and you've worked with them for a couple years and they trust you, you can give a three-sentence definition of what's going on, and that's enough. Right. And they know exactly what to do or what happened, right?

So, and self-discipline. I waste a lot of time before setting down to work. So you could be like that, and you could decide that you don't want to do that anymore. Maybe. I know, you know, if you, like, think about procrastination and think about, like, helping people overcome procrastination.

It's like sometimes it's through coaching, people can overcome that. And so I look at some of these questions and I think to myself, you could potentially make decisions to change the way you do some of these things or you could choose to change some of the environmental factors in your life to help change the way that you do these things. so by like maybe you get a coach or you get a therapist and you work on things that you feel like you'd like to improve and I think you could go the other way too like I've seen some people through therapy learn to value their family more than their work I've one patient now who I like

I'm surprised that he values his family so much more than his work because for so many years his work was like everything. That's where he put his meaning. It's where he put his purpose and values. Some difficult things happened in his family. Some people got sick. Some people got ill. And all of a sudden, it's like he had this like wake up call.

Like, what do I value? You know, I really just work is kind of like a way to provide for the family. What do I really value? Really value the family. So, you know, different people can move. And maybe he takes his conscientious now to how he like deals with his family. It's like, okay, I'm going to follow through. I'm going to like be organized.

I'm going to be consistent. I don't know. I don't want to say that all conscientious people won't value family though. Because I think you could be conscientious and value family, but this person had their, had that meaning maybe the way that they sort of discipline themselves more towards work and they moved it more towards the family structure. Okay. So this is the end of part one of this series on the big five conscientious is part one. and in this episode, I hope that you had some takeaways

of kind of understanding the construct of conscientiousness on like a deep level. You know the components, you know kind of how the environment affects it a little bit, what it looks like throughout the life course, some of the studies. You hopefully understand that this is something that is not maybe as rigid as we thought, right?

And we can make choices maybe to improve our conscientious. You can decide I want to be a little bit more orderly. This year my wife has decided she was so motivated and she started going through our cabinets, putting things in bins, labeling the bins. And it all came from, you know, seeing a friend who did it well. And, you know, you could get motivated to be more orderly, to be more conscientious. And the other thing is like you can learn how to maybe let it down sometimes.

So this year I've learned how to vacation. If for a couple weeks you don't see an episode, I probably went on a vacation. One of my friends who's very, very conscious, said, you take more vacations than anyone I know. It's like three weeks so far, okay, it's not that much. But one of my goals this year is to take more vacations, spend more time with the kids like that. So I hope you can join me in that. If you liked this episode, you know, I appreciate a nice iTunes review. If you send me a DM on Instagram or something, I'll pass it on to Alexis.

show her your gratitude and check out the blog that goes with this episode because it will be very detailed you can go over all the details you can go over all the studies you can kind of further cement your knowledge of this concept and i'm hoping that as we go through all five components as you do a deep dive into it by the end of it you can start to sort of see this in your patience or in yourself and you can start to understand how you you might actually use this knowledge to better treat certain clients. For example, if someone's high conscientious and you recommend for them to do a partial program, a day treatment program, stop using a certain food or stop using a certain drug or something,

they're probably going to follow through with it. They're probably going to do it right away. I'm sometimes surprised when a highly conscientious person comes back and has executed exactly the plan that I told them. You know, it's like you're not used to it. oh, you actually did your CBT homework or oh, you actually read that book I recommended. So, yeah, it's helpful to know. I think it's good to know.

And I hope this has been helpful for you. Let me know if you have any questions. You can reach out to me on my website. You can send me a message. If you want to get tested yourself, you can inquire about that. And I hope you're doing well. Have a great day.