Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Is It Possible To Improve Your Personality The Science Says Yes Heres How To Do It Olga Khazan

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Plus other intriguing questions answered such as: should you change your personality? What exactly is a personality anyway?   Olga Khazan is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her new book is called Me, But Better.  In this episode we talk about: The definition of personality  The so-called big 5 aspects of personality and Olga's attempts to work on them How to spice up your social life  The concept of conscientiousness, and how to get better at it An antidote to procrastination  Tips for reducing neuroticism  The role of psychedelics  Practical ways to make reasonable changes in the midst of a busy life Join Dan's online community here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing? Today, we are going to examine a pretty intriguing set of questions. Can you change your personality? Should you change your personality? And what exactly is a personality anyway? The science says you can change your personality and that there are evidence-based ways to do it. So today we're going to be a journalist who took on this very project and came back with some hilarious stories and also some very concrete takeaways. Olga Hazan is a staff writer for the Atlantic. Her new book is called Me But Better. Great title. In this conversation, we cover the definition of personality, the so-called big five aspects of personality and her attempts to work on each of them,

how to spice up your social life, the concept of conscientiousness and how to get better at it, and antidote to procrastination, tips for reducing neuroticism, the role of psychedelics, and practical, and this is incredibly helpful, practical ways to make reasonable, marginal, but meaningful changes in the middle of your very busy life. By the way, if you're looking to turn down the volume on your own pension for procrastination, we have a custom meditation for you, specifically designed as a companion to this episode. That meditation comes from our teacher of the month, Don Maricio. It's available for paying subscribers over in Dan Harris.com. Paid subscribers also get regular live video sessions where I do. do a guided meditation and answer your questions.

In fact, there's one with me and Dawn today at Four Eastern. Join the party over at Dan Harris.com. We'll get started with Olga Hazan right after this. Olga Hazan, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. We've only spoken on the phone one time before this. Yes.

But I liked your personality. And so I'm trying to figure out why you were so hell-bent on changing your personality. I will just say, this is a bit of a digression, but just to give people a sense of what I liked about your personality, aside from being smart and curious, is you wrote a long piece in the Atlantic and you quoted me talking about doing loving, kindness, meditation, and then you called me a pussy, which I thought was the funniest thing. I laughed about that for weeks, like the distinction of having been called that by a woman in the Atlantic was awesome. Well, yes. So I was reading your book, and I came across the passage where you were talking about crying during loving kindness meditation. And this is before I had started doing any kind of meditation. Yeah, I did think you were a pussy. But then I started doing loving kindness meditation and I started crying during it. So it turns out that everyone who does loving kindness meditation reveals themselves to be a pussy. So that's the explanation there. Got it, got it. Well, having said that, I still liked your personality, both on the page and in our brief interaction on the phone. So I'm just curious, like, what was really driving you to reexamine the whole thing and try to change it? Yeah. So I kind of just noticed that I was not happy, and it wasn't because of any of the fundamentals of my life. So I had an interesting job, same job that I have now. I had a place to live. I had a partner. I really. all my needs were met. The big meltdown that prompted me to try to change my personality

happened when I was in Miami in the wintertime. I just sort of noticed that I would let small frustrations kind of overwhelm me. It would be sort of all I would think about. Like I would have this perfectly fine day, but then a few small things would happen. And I would just focus on those and dwell on those. Or I would worry about them. I would worry about what had happened. What's going to happen next? I literally was never in the present moment. I didn't even understand what that meant. It was just dragging me down. I mean, later I learned that this was all related to this personality trait called neuroticism. And then there were just other things in my life that I didn't like that personality change turned out to be kind of a tool to help with.

Sounds to me like you had kind of like a classic awakening experience in the sense that you realize that everything in your life by any objective measure, at least on the outside, was fine, if not great. Like, you had a partner, an interesting job. You were in Miami in the middle of the winter, so you weren't suffering from a climate standpoint. And yet you were consistently unhappy. Yeah, basically.

And I was not very socially connected. I didn't have a lot of friends. And there was no real reason for that. I mean, it was true before COVID for me. And I just sort of was like, why is my life like this if it doesn't have to be? To me, that makes complete sense. And I think many people have that experience and don't do anything about it. And it's awesome that you did. Okay, so let me ask you a foundational kind of definitional question. What is a personality? Personality is the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that come most instinctively or naturally to us. One of the researchers, Nate Hudson, that I kind of followed for the book, he would add on to this definition that personality is a tool.

that helps you get what you want. So more so than just describing what we like or what we are like, it actually allows you to achieve your goals. So if you want to make more friends, agreeableness can help you get there. If you want to get better at public speaking, extroversion can help you do that. In a way, it's sort of like a yes and to the original definition of personality. That's interesting. I want to maybe dig in on that. Just to say, Olga is naming several of what are often known as the big five aspects of personality, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, neuroticism, and extroversion. We'll go deep on all of those. The two definitions, which you described as yes and, strike me a little bit as yes, but,

because the first part of that is like the thoughts and behaviors that come naturally to you seems to describe a default mode. And then the second part of that is, well, actually, this is the stuff you do in order to get what you want. I see the connection there. And I can also see how much of this is just hardwired. You come out of the womb, preferring dogs to cats, preferring chocolate to vanilla, being an introvert or an extrovert, et cetera, et cetera. So the idea that these are things you do to get what you want, there seems to be more agency implied in that. Yeah.

I think the kind of missing link between those two. definitions is this idea of volitional personality change. So you're right, we do come out of the womb with at least part of our personality sort of programmed in. So about 30 to 50% is genetic. So if both of your parents were really big extroverts, couldn't get enough of talking to people, you will probably be at least somewhat extroverted. Likewise, if they were really big introverts. But there is still a role for environment, and that kind of includes, both how you were raised, but also what kind of job you have, whether you're married, where you live, who your friends are, and some of these techniques that you can use in order to actually shape your own personality. And so it's really in that environment component that you have some wiggle room and you can actually at least adopt or influence the personality traits that you'd like to have.

Okay, so in answer to the question, is personality changeable? The answer is to a certain extent, yes, and there are some aspects of the personality that are pretty hardwired and set. Like, I will never prefer chocolate to vanilla. I will never prefer dogs to cats. And that's just the kind of the way it is. Yeah, I wouldn't say that there's like certain traits that are completely hardwired and will never change. It's just that you might have like a specific set. point or like kind of natural inclination towards something, but that doesn't mean that that particular thing can never be changed. So Carol Dweck, one of the researchers that I interviewed, made the point that heritability isn't the same as malleability. So even if, you know, let's say your parents are both very disagreeable, you might have a lot of disagreeableness kind of in you and you kind of might reflexively snap toward disagreeableness, but that doesn't mean that you can never be agreeable. Right. So there are proclivities that are pretty strong, and there is wiggle room that is really important and powerful for us to know. That's a good way of putting it.

Yeah, we all have like a little, I don't know, magnet that is our heredity and our genes kind of pulling us toward one end or the other of these traits, but you can also kind of pull against that magnet and shape your traits. So I was thinking this is not some brilliant idea on my part, but I was thinking that we might go through the big five and your attempts to work on each of them. Does that sound like a good way to proceed from here? Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. Where do you want to start?

I was thinking extroversion. Yeah, we could do extroversion first. So we all know what extroversion is. You probably met an extrovert or two in your life. A lot of people identify as introverts because of their negative reaction to the those extroverts. So extroverts are people who are really friendly, really cheerful, love to talk to people, love parties. They just like a lot of activity in general. For me, I scored very low on this starting out. I scored, I think, in the 23rd percentile.

This is one where it's controversial with introverts because it's become kind of an identity and a point of pride. Like, I'm an introvert. That's just who I am. The world needs to accept that. That's true to some extent. But for me, introversion was really keeping me from, I don't know, how I don't put this? It was honestly keeping me from being happy because I was spending so much time on my own. I was getting way too much time by myself to recharge. And really the research shows that you do need some human connection in order to feel your best in order to optimize well-being, as the scientists put it. So that for me was really the impotent. for tackling extroversion was that I felt like having more and more me time was not really

helping anything. Because I know most of the people in my life are introverts, I'm actually a raging extrovert, but my wife and almost everybody on my team, I've actually run this survey. Almost everyone is an introvert. So I can imagine introverts feeling defensive, having heard this, even though you yourself are one of them. Tell me if this sounds right. I can imagine that if Susan Kane, author of the.

seminal book, Quiet and two-time guests on this show, if she were here right now, she would probably say, we should recognize there are many, many great parts of being an introvert that have been undervalued by the culture. And all human beings need human interaction, including introverts. We, and now I'm speaking for her here, we just need less of it. So you, Olga, were just kind of overdoing the alone time, the recharge time. But there's nothing wrong with you, Olga, not needing as much as I Dan do. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, even extroverts also need alone time to recharge, but introverts, you know, they probably need more of it, but that's not all they need. And I actually spoke with Sonia Lubamirski, who has studied

this a lot. And the way she kind of squares these two is that if you're an introvert and you feel that need for social connection, but you find that your social battery runs out really quickly, you could attend something and listen more than you talk, and that is still a form of extroversion that isn't quite so draining for introverts. So you could go to a book club and like hear everyone else's view on the book without weighing in yourself. That still counts as quote unquote extroversion. It's funny. I was, I'm such a ridiculous extrovert that I have like maybe five recurring meals with different groups of people. that we schedule every like two months.

And I was at one of these last night with three other guys, so I love. And one of the guys at the table rarely speaks. And I sometimes wonder, is he not having a good time? But then when he does speak, I realize, no, he's delighted. I just think he doesn't need to speak as much as the rest of us. And I think he's pursuing this strategy you are describing. Yeah, yeah. I know someone like that, too, who, like, actually is the organizer of a lot of groups that I'm in.

and he, like, brings everyone together to happy hour and make sure that, like, everything is all set up and there's a table ready and all that stuff. And then we'll all gather, and he won't say anything the whole time. And I just realized that that's his socializing. That's, like, what his deal is. Right. It's almost a fetish. How did you attack this? So for me, I really had to sign up for stuff that I couldn't back out of because if I just said, okay, I'm going to reach out to people more.

going to get drinks more with people. I would just never do that. Like, I would always find a reason not to go. So I signed up for improv, sailing club, and a bunch of meetup groups that were mostly based around hiking. Okay, so basically you picked stuff you liked. So the inertia was a little bit easier to overcome and pursued those. Not quite. I actually did not like improv, and I am not sure if I do still, even though I did it for like a year. Fair enough, fair enough. Okay, so let me rephrase that and we can keep this in. So improv was the, now I'm projecting as a writer myself.

If I were you, improv would be the thing I picked because it would make good copy but sound torturous. And even as an extrovert, it sounds torturous to me. But sailing and hiking, that is shit you like to do anyway. And so it was a little bit easier to sign up for. I actually had never sailed before, but it seemed pleasurable. Whereas improv sounded like torture and was torture for the most part. But I think I still got a lot out of improv, even though it was really, really hard for me.

I want to read a quote from you, and I will do this occasionally. This is a quote from the book about improv. I detected something that floored me. I was smiling, wide, without meaning to. Something about the whole exercise, even though I didn't condone it logically or frankly comedically was just so fun. Yeah, it was just like so strange to have time in your day when you're just having fun and it's not for any particular purpose. I mean, especially before I had kids. Like this was just something I never did.

So torture with its little moments of insight, is this something you would recommend to other introverts as a way to stretch? So people have asked like, what's the difference between just not having fun at something and feeling like it's helping. you grow as a person, right? Like, it's difficult, but it's helping you grow. And I would say that to really pay attention to that end stage feeling. So for me, it was a pretty consistent pattern with improv. On the way there, I was really nervous, really hoping class would be canceled. Even when I was there, and before, you know, we would kind of catch up pleasantries or whatever, and then they would say, like, everyone get up and we would play a game. That moment when they said, everyone get up, I just felt like everyone could hear my heart beating. Like it was so nerve-wracking. I really hated all the

games. It made me so deeply uncomfortable. But then it was sort of like, so it was a long class. It was two and a half hours. And toward the end, I started to like relax into it a little bit. And then almost every single time on the drive home, I felt the way that in that quote that you just read, which is like this kind of like lightness or just kind of, I don't know, happy. kind of giggly, kind of chuckling to myself about something that happened. And to me, that was really the thing that made it feel like a worthwhile personality-changing activity as opposed to just like a weird stunt. Because I did feel like my mood changed afterward, even though I was nervous about it. Was part of that that you had pushed yourself and survived? Maybe, but I mean, I push myself and survive a lot.

You know, I mean like a high stakes interview or some like performance review or I don't know. Like there's a lot of stuff that I do that is stressful that I kind of barely get through. But this was more like I really do think there is something to having like a period of creativity or like fun and just play in your life. Especially if you basically just work all the time. Makes complete sense. And you know, something I've been thinking about as I've been listening to is extraversion. is such a key vector or aspect of happy life. And again, by extroversion, I'm using it, and I think correctly in this context,

meaning like having social connection in your life is super, super important, whether you're naturally an introvert or an extrovert. And I think there are also plenty of extroverts who, because of the way our culture is set up right now, aren't getting enough social interaction. And this is, in my opinion, you know, my, somewhat informed opinion, one of the major contributing factors to the rise of anxiety and depression in our society. And so it seems like this is a thing that all of us should be thinking about

whether we're introverts or not. Yeah, I did a story recently about people saying that they felt like they had enough friends, but that also that they never saw their friends. And I think that's partly because we just don't have a lot of forums, I guess, for connecting with our friends in a low-stakes way that doesn't require a ton of planning. I'm not going to say that everyone needs to go to church again or whatever, but there just aren't these community groups or places where people naturally go every single week or even every month

and see kind of the same group of people regularly. That does make it harder to have good social connections in your life. Yeah, I think the term for that is third spaces. Yeah, exactly, yeah. You know, I was actually having dinner with the, I do have a lot of dinner with friends, which I want to get back to actually in a second. But at a dinner I was at the other night, a pretty popular podcaster, I know, was saying that he, actually his fiancé was telling me that if you want to find this guy,

there's a bar that he goes to Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. He just goes, either with his fiance or by himself. He doesn't know who's going to be there, but he knows he will know a bunch of people, and he just goes there. But I think that's quite a rare thing. And other societies, particularly in Europe, do a lot better at this, where there are places that you can just show up and you are habitually going there with your family, et cetera, et cetera, often intergenerational or multi-generational.

And we really don't have that in our society. And so that kind of, I'm going to venture a piece of advice that I might take back. But in that study that you referenced before where people say, well, I have a lot of friends, but I never see them. In my life, I've just learned after many years of being an extrovert who wasn't getting enough social connection because I was a workaholic and still probably a workaholic, but I've fixed this aspect of it. I just got off my ass and just a few years ago and just started being super intentional

about setting things up, even though it's a pain in the ass. And honestly, that is what I would recommend to other people. You know more about this. Do you think I'm on the right track? Yeah, I think you can be intentional about setting things up. And one of the things that I really had to get over for this project, but also just in life, is I used to get really in my head about, well, I've reached out to this person twice. They haven't reached back out, you know, or I set up the last two drinks and they didn't reciprocate.

So that must mean that they don't like me. So I'm not going to reach out until they reach out. And I would just completely ignore all of that. I mean, read the room. And if you're like totally bugging someone who doesn't like you, don't do that. But I mean, there's people who I hang out with pretty regularly that I'm always the one who breaches out first. And I think that's fine. Absolutely.

Yes, we have the caveat that read the room. Many of the groups that I'm part of, I'm the guy every time saying, hey, hey, hey, when are we going to do this? Coming up, Olga Hazan talks about how to spice up your social life. We work our way through the Big Five, and she has some advice from a friendship expert. Okay, so is it true? And I may be remembering this. This may be a hallucination in my own large language model internally. But is extroversion viewed as the most important of the Big Five in terms of having a happy life?

I would say neuroticism or emotional stability, which is the opposite of neuroticism, kind of edges it out. version is up there, but neuroticism is probably more important. Okay, we'll get to neuroticism. I'm sure I would ace that test. I feel really, really confident about that. It's one of the few things I feel confident about. Just on a practical tip, for anybody, introvert or extrovert, who's not socializing enough, what practical recommendations do you have in this lonely era? So if you just want more small talk in your life, I would just start honestly chatting with the people that you run into. in the course of your every day. So the barista, the librarian, and, you know, the Amazon guy, whoever it may be. And I would actually make a statement rather than ask questions. So instead of being like, hey, how's your day going? I would just remark on something that's going on outside or something that happened to you that day. That can often be a better opener than interrogating someone, which is news to journalists. Just to jump in on this, because I know you're in the middle of a list, but I'm not saying anything you don't know, but just to the audience called micro interactions and how having these little interactions throughout the course of your day can have a measurable impact on your well-being.

Just by way of illustrative anecdote, I'm recording this at a studio in New York City where we regularly record when I'm not at my home studio. and I have really bad claustrophobia and the elevators here are really small. I didn't need it today, but sometimes I need Barry, the security guy, to ride me up in the elevator. And I saw Barry when I came in today. We caught up and he, he, like, stopped what he was doing. He was getting ready to ride me up in the elevator and he didn't need to today, but we had a nice conversation. And for me, that's just like an excellent example of how awesome it can be. And I was terrible at this.

I was such a frosty. I'm still naturally, my personality is naturally Frosty New Englander, but over time, I've, you know, in part through hearing the evidence and in part by getting some feedback, I've really tried to turn this around. So anyway, yes, you were listing a bunch of things we could do to be more extroverted and you started with the lowest hanging fruit. What else is on the list? For increasing kind of the more deep social connections in your life, I would sign up for something that recurs regularly with the same group of people. and that it's hard to get out of. So it doesn't have to be improv. It doesn't have to be some crazy sport.

Meetup is great because generally the same people show up on the same types of groups or same types of events. So I would just commit to something that has some sort of cadence where you can kind of plan to see the same group of faces over time. Because otherwise it's hard to get a good quasi-fanship going if you're kind of just like chatting a little bit here, chatting a little bit there. This reminds me a little bit of the work of Renee Brown, who talks a lot about vulnerability, which I never, at some point in the culture, vulnerability went from being a bad thing to being a good thing. But anyway, another word would just be like openness or realness. And I would argue, and I'd be curious to see what you think about this, that it's not just the quantity of social interactions. It's the quality of social interactions.

and I'm not trying to make what I'm about to say happen all the time, but sometimes I track how many times somebody will say, well, I've never really talked about this before. I don't know why I'm saying, I'm saying too much, but to me when I know, like, all right, yeah, we're in real territory. Oh, totally. And this is something where I noticed when I was going on all these meetup hikes, the worst ones was where I was hiking with someone for hours,

and we were like, what do you do for work? I do this. What movies have you seen? I've seen this. Where do you like to eat? I like to eat at this place and this place. And the best ones that I still remember, honestly, with other Eastern Europeans who have no filter, who were like, yeah, here are all the problems in my life. Here's how much I hate my mother-in-law and why. Here's why I think my son is wasting his life away. Here's like why I divorce my husband. Like just in the first 15 minutes. And I prefer that. Like I would rather do that than small talk. So if you seek out those people who like to do the level of deep talk that you do. You know, it's so interesting because that also speaks to an interesting dynamic that I actually don't know much about and haven't done enough research into. But we are naturally drawn to people who are like us. If I'm honest, I really have cultivated a wide social network.

But many of the closest male friends I have are almost identical to my brother. And they're just like Enchi Jewish guys. That's not entirely true. There are other people in the inner circle who completely do not fit that profile. But I am drawn to that type of person for, I think, some pretty good defensible reasons. I love my brother. And they're also like my dad. So it's easier to be vulnerable with people who are like you.

And there's a real crackle that I love of being around people who I have nothing in common with. Barry, the guy who rides me up in the elevator is from West Africa. I mean, so we have like nothing in common, we have a great time catching up. I wonder if you have any thoughts about that in terms of how to spice up your social life. Oh, that's interesting. It's going to depend on every person, whether you tend to like people who are exactly like you or people who are pretty different from you. I will say that most of the research shows that friends are quite similar. They're similar on 86% of various, like, qualities.

and traits and preferences and things. So most people end up making friends with people who are quite similar to them. I will say that in the course of writing this book, I made a really good friend who is much, much, much more agreeable and thoughtful than me. And that has been really interesting because she's also taught me a lot about agreeableness and thoughtfulness, that a disagreeable person like myself, I wouldn't have thought of it. I'm like really grateful to her because I'm like, oh, this, you're doing this and it makes me feel good. I should also do this for other people, including you. So that kind of thing can be helpful, too. Okay, well, let's go to agreeableness then as we work our way through the big five here.

I just want to say at the beginning, like, your crankiness, it's not just a bug. It's also a feature. You know, like the fact that you call me the P word and a very prominent publication was hilarious to me. And the fact that you write with a wry sense of humor and are kind of judgmental and, like, So I wouldn't want you to like sand down all those edges. And I wouldn't want anybody else to either. So nobody wants to be more agreeable. Like I'm like the only person on earth who's ever tried to be more agreeable. In the studies on personality change, people generally don't pick agreeableness as the trait

that they want to change. They usually pick extroversion and conscientiousness. And I was a little bit nervous about it too because, you know, as a journalist, you have to be skeptical. You can't just be like, oh my God, you're right. and, you know, concede to whatever everyone's saying. So I was a little bit like, is this going to make me into some softy who's gullible? And it kind of didn't. Like, I think it helped me manage my anger, especially at my husband, then boyfriend. That part of it was really good. And it also helped me learn how to manage my friendships a little bit better. And not necessarily just by agreeing to whatever they wanted to do. There's like a balance there with a where you don't want to become a pushover, but true agreeableness, I would say, is not being a pushover.

Technically agreeable means not just that you agree with everybody, but that your warmth and empathy quotients are high. Yes. And also that you trust people, which was the one for me that was really, really low. I actually was really high on empathy, but my trust was so rock bottom that I actually scored low on agreeable. All right, well, let's just set trust aside for a second because that seems like something we should come back to. But I just want to get back to your notion about true agreeability is not being a doormat because I actually have spent a decent amount of time in my life working on my agreeability because of the aforementioned frosty New Englander propensities.

And it does not mean, in my understanding at all, does not mean being a pushover to quote Brunay Brown again. who I admire. Clear is kind. So in your communication with people, giving clear feedback, another thing I struggled to do, even though I was also snippy, so it was a wonderful combination. And I don't want to use the past tense too much here because I'm sure this shit still happens. But giving people clear feedback, which could scan as disagreeable, but doing it in a warm and empathetic way, that's true agreeability.

Would you agree? I would agree. So there's definitely like an element of disagreeableness where you try to get along. And so you're like, yeah, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine. And then it builds and builds and builds. And then you get snippy. I was prone to that one as well. So one thing I learned in the course of this, it was from this like therapist who specializes in friends. All my friendships were falling apart kind of during this time or right before I started working on the book. And I was like, what is going on here? What do I do about this? So at one point I had had this friend who texted me and she's like, I need you to text me every week or else we can't be friends anymore. I need you to text me to check on me every week. I was like, I don't like texting that much. Like I don't really text very often unless it's like, let's meet here at this time. I also don't like checking in on people if it's not clear that there's something wrong with them. Like if they're fine, I don't really feel like I need to check in on them, even if they're not fine. Like, they should just tell me and then we can talk about it. So I was just very kind of annoyed by

this request. And I was like, but I thought that being a good friend meant saying, okay. So I just said, oh, sure, of course. Yeah. Can this count as well? So she didn't react well to that. The whole thing just really, it did not go over well. So I reached out to Miriam Kirameyer, this friendship expert, and I'm like, what should I have done in this situation? And she really pointed out that this is where boundaries are really helpful, where you can tell someone, hey, I'm so sorry that, you know, you feel like I've been ignoring you or I haven't been in touch as much. I am honestly not a big texter. Is there another way that we can keep in touch? And I did not do that because, again, I thought agreeableness meant agreeing. Like, boundaries are kind of the way to keep agreeableness

from just turning into everyone walks all over you. Yes. That is so important. To me, and now I'm wandering into territory where I'm going to seem like I'm virtue signaling, so please excuse me. There does seem to be a gender component here. I was reading, and I was trying to find this quote in preparation for this interview, and I couldn't find it so I don't remember who said it. But it was something to the effect of, and this was by a mental health professional, her advice was to women, be less agreeable.

And I think she was using like a narrow definition of agreeable. like meaning stop just agreeing to everybody, stop agreeing to be a pushover. And she was citing massive disproportionality and like autoimmune diseases among women and stress-related diseases because women are being overly agreeable. So this this boundary piece seems key. And also having a capacious proper understanding of what agreeability is seems key, given that it can be and has been weaponized against certain population groups. Yeah, and, you know, I was sensitive to that, that women are kind of expected to be agreeable,

but I think the kind of pernicious version of agreeableness that is often expected of women is, is that kind of go along to get along, but sure, I'll text you as often as you want, you know, or I'll do it, I'll volunteer, you know, I really don't think that's what it's saying. Like, I think the good parts of this trait are kind of standing up for yourself, but also doing it in a kind way and with empathy for whoever you're talking to. And also, honestly, I would say that doing what you described, you did for a long time and many people, perhaps even my wife, do this, which is like, fine, fine, fuck you forever. Yes.

So that's not actually agreeability, right? So it's socially imposed, culturally imposed going along to get along. You know, you're gritting your teeth the whole time. And the person on the other side, who may or may not be me, might not even know that you're stepping over the line. Yeah. So that's like passive aggression. And agreeableness really is more like assertiveness, I would say. Yes.

A warm, clear kind assertiveness. You can set boundaries and be really clear. You can do, I mean, this comes up for me a lot when people are asking me like, how do I survive in the modern political era? and I often argue, you know, like hatred, I understand it and anger too. And it's not the cleanest burning fuel. It's better to like tap into what you care about as a motivator, including yourself, vulnerable populations you want to protect. And even to a certain extent the people you disagree with, but you can take really firm action from that place.

You could do all the shit you would otherwise have done. You're just not doing it with all of this toxicity running things. through your veins. Does all that track for you? Yeah, I think so. And I mean, the fact that the country is so fractured and at odds came up a lot for me and the work on agreeableness. I mean, my parents, like, watch Russian TV 24-7 and are huge supporters of Vladimir Putin. And then I'm from Texas. So a lot of people I know are Trump supporters. Some people from my hometown are like actual J-6ers. There's not a way for me to like just never talk to those people again, right?

They're going to be a part of my life because anytime I go back to Texas, I'm going to interact with Trump supporters and or my parents. I kind of had to figure out a way to have those people be in my life to interact with them and not to have everything turn into either a fight or me like agreeing with January 6th, which I don't. Right, right, right. Yeah, that's why I think this agreeable. thing like it's got a PR problem yes but properly understood and this is why it's in the big

five like warmth and empathy it's a kind of enlightened self-interest like it improves your relationships which makes you happier but again it's not about saying yes to she you shouldn't say yes to okay but you also said part of agreeability is trust yes and so that's actually an area where I'm actually less confident because how wise is it to trust other people and how often should you do that? Yeah, I mean, that's a really tough question. I don't know. I mean, honestly, like, trust but verify is probably the smart way to go on this. But what helped about this chapter that I was working on and kind of the whole book is that I was just in all of these programs and groups and clubs with other people. And a lot of them did involve a lot of like

sharing personal struggles and like personal challenges. You know, in my meditation group, there was like someone with chronic pain and like people like dealing with job stuff and there's like a new parent. So I just got to know a lot of people with a lot of different challenges that were similar to mine, maybe different in degree. And I think that did kind of increase my trust in humanity in a weird way, even though technically for my job, I'm not really allowed to trust anymore. Right. Right. Okay. Maybe that's why I was getting hung up on this, too, because I have a background as a journalist. But you know, as you're speaking, I realize actually one spin on this that lands for me is, well, a couple actually. One is that,

you were in these groups and people were being vulnerable and there's a certain amount of trust involved in opening up in that way and it is worth taking a risk once in a while to have the trust that you can say something that's revelatory to somebody and you don't know how it's going to be received so running that kind of experiment once in a while which can pay off really because it can deepen your relationships that involves a kind of trust similarly there's a great phrase that I heard from Becky Kennedy, the popular podcaster and social media personality. He talks a lot about parenting. There's LGI and MGI, the least generous interpretation and the most generous interpretation. And so this isn't about blind trust, but like just

running the thought experiment when somebody pisses you off or you're questioning their motives, like, what would be the most generous interpretation of this? It's not to say that you should take it on faith, but just to at least open your mind to it. That's what's coming up for me as I'm listening to you talk about trust. How does that go down with you? Yeah, I think that's right. And as a reporter, you see a lot of the worst of humanity. Like you do, I mean, you do interact with people who are lying to you. You are reporting on bad things and bad people. You do get a lot of evidence that some people are not trustworthy. And I think for me, what was interesting about this was that I sort of gathered a lot of evidence that people are trustworthy. So I don't go to church or I'm not

religious, as might be obvious at this point. I'm not part of any community groups or anything like that. So I actually, like, I realized that I never interacted with people in a positive way. Like it was all just my immediate friends and we would get drinks together, my coworkers, and we would talk on Slack. And that was it. And so to kind of have this experience of like most people are just kind of bumbling through sometimes they make mistakes and sometimes they say things that are kind of stupid or not correct, but most people are just kind of trying to get through the day. I think that was kind of an important realization for me. Yeah, and I will say something that's maybe not going to be popular with my own audience, but like I can apply that to the Jan Sixers from your neighborhood.

Like they live in an information environment in which they thought they were taking a patriotic act. I don't agree. And I can have compassion for it. I can do both of those things simultaneously, and that's okay. Yeah, that's kind of where I landed with the Jan 6th first from my hometown. Honestly, like, if you do talk to them, they thought President Trump wanted them to do that, and they really like him. And that was the conclusion that they came to. I don't, like, excuse it now, or I'm not like, oh, you shouldn't face any consequences. But I don't know, it made me see people kind of more as whole people, I guess.

Absolutely. And I think that's the key. Nobody's saying no consequences, no boundaries. We're just saying that you can impose consequences and set boundaries without vilifying people and putting them in the bad bucket forever. It's just not seeing the whole thing. Coming up, Olga, talks about conscientiousness and some things that may surprise you, an antidote to procrastination, how these tips that we've been talking about apply.

to neurodivergent people, the most important of the big five, some tips for reducing neuroticism. We talk about psychedelics, and we pull all the way back and talk about practical ways to make reasonable changes on all of this stuff in the middle of your busy life. All right, so we've gone through two of the big five, the big five aspects of personality and your attempts to change your scores on each of these. Let's go to conscientiousness. What is that and what did you do to boost your own conscientiousness? So conscientiousness is just getting shit done. It is being super organized, being on time to everything, being

really productive, staying on task, not prioritizing. These folks get up really early. Their houses are super clean. These are those kinds of people who are super annoying and who also are never running late for meeting or anything like that. And I was actually really high on this trait starting out and I'm still high. So I mostly interviewed other people who increased unconsciousness. Well, I'm very high on conscientiousness. I actually dragged my ass out of bed at 6 in the morning and went to a crazy workout group this morning. So I'm super tired as we're having this conversation. And I have a deep suspicion that our high marks on conscientiousness are pretty deeply linked to our high marks on neuroticism.

Okay, so I have asked this question of so many personality psychologists. There's no correlation there. Really? Yeah, people who are high on neuroticism are not high on conscientiousness. I think a bunch of journalists are just high on both, and they're like, they must be related. Like, it's my secret. But, no, there's, like scientifically, there's no link there.

Okay. We'll get to neuroticism in a second. But let me just stay with conscientiousness. You ended up speaking to a lot of folks who were less conscientious, even though you were doing okay in this category. What can one do to boost one's conscientiousness if this is an area of struggle? Conscientiousness is really almost kind of one of the simplest ones to grow on because what you really have to do is like make the Google Calendar and make the to-do list and check it and leave 15 minutes early and put your keys in the same spot all the time. So none of this stuff is that mind blowing.

But the issue that the people that I interviewed ran into is that they didn't kind of naturally notice. to do this stuff, it kind of didn't occur to them because they had never done it before. It was like one of those things where if you've never done it, you kind of don't know how to do it or why you should. And something that really seemed to play a role for all the folks that I talk to is this concept called episodic future thinking, which kind of just is like a fancy term for like visualizing very specifically the outcome that you want. And maybe not even like the outcome, but just like the scenario that you're setting yourself up for. So if it's like getting some presentation for work done, it would be like visualizing yourself delivering the presentation, everyone kind of

clapping at the end, ordering from the deli afterward, you know, what outfit are you going to wear, like how nice it will feel to like finally be done and have your boss be pleased with you. So having these kinds of like big picture visions of a positive future, Or actually even a negative future, like what'll happen if you don't do it, that can really motivate you to take those incremental steps of conscientiousness because actually, like, most of conscientiousness is really tedious. It's not very fun. And that tends to be why people don't like to do it. So this episodic future thinking is kind of the antidote to procrastination? Yeah, exactly. Because really no one, like, wants to make the PowerPoint slides and no one wants to read. more pages of the law textbook and no one like wants to go jogging at 530 a.m.

But having kind of a broader goal that you're working toward that you can link those micro tasks to is something that a lot of people I talk to found motivating. What about ADHD and the neurospicy? Those are folks who have challenges, deep neurological challenges with executive function. Does this advice work for people? in that category? It's actually like especially for people in that category. So a lot of ADHD is just like a very, very low conscientiousness. Very, very severe levels, maybe not, but low conscientiousness and ADHD are kind of very similar. And a lot of the strategies to help people with ADHD are

basically just versions of the advice that you would give someone for conscientiousness. Interesting. I have a very close friend, a meditation teacher, Jeff Warren, who has pretty severe ADHD, and he's always kind of finding ways to, like, bolster his prefrontal cortex by, like, either having a technological fix or hiring the right person to sort of outsource, either outsource or support some of the weaknesses in his own brain functioning.

Does that sound like it lines up with what you learned in this area of your research? Oh, totally. And that's, like, completely allowed. I mean, most people use technical. to help them stay on task. This one woman, Julia, that I interviewed, she really wanted to start her own business and did not know how to get there. So what she really did is, I mean, I think she uses a to-do list, which is like a to-do list app. She uses a calendar. She has like a whiteboard

with everything written on it. She time boxes stuff. I mean, she uses a lot of different tools to kind of stay on task. And that's not not conscientiousness. That is itself a form of conscientiousness. All right. Let's move on to neuroticism, which apparently, as you established before, is the most important of the big five in terms of, like, its impact on the quality of your life. And this is where I haven't taken a personality test, but this is where you say you scored very high, and I'm really confident this is like the one test I can ace.

What is neuroticism? Let's just start there. What is neuroticism technically? Neuroticism is depression and anxiety. It is feeling negative, negative thought spirals, worrying, being labile in scientific terms. So just kind of like small things happen and you really fall to pieces, anything under that category. How was this showing up in your life beyond ruining trips to Miami? It was ruining my whole life. I mean, it was just sort of worrying all day, not sleeping at night because I was. like waking up and worrying. I couldn't decide whether to have a baby or not because I was so nervous about the postpartum period in particular. I thought I would be a bad mom and that it would

just be like so terrible. So inability to make decisions, crippling insomnia, constant worry. And then just like when good things did happen, I never savored them. It was just like on to the next thing. I remember seeing you on Twitter sort of publicly ringing your hands about like, like whether I have a baby. I mean, you really, you really wrestled with it. You now have one or two? I have one. Congratulations.

That's awesome. Thanks. Okay, so what did you do about this? So the answer, as you know, is basically mindfulness in all of its forms. Yeah, I know. Every article that's like the one trick you can use to feel happier and it's always meditation. So say more about it. Okay.

So I really did not want to meditate because I, every, anxious person hates meditation starting out. So I started with a bunch of stuff. Like I was kind of doing like self-guided stuff. I did, I used your app a little bit, a particular Sharon Salzberg's meditations. And I would try to meditate kind of on my own. I went to like one of those like sensory deprivation tanks. That was kind of a bust. I tried to work through this app called unwinding anxiety that is mindfulness but without meditation. That's Dr. Judd Brewer who's been on this show many times. Yeah. Yeah. That like kind of worked, but mostly just for panic attacks for me, which panic attacks were like one small drop in the neuroticism bucket for me. So finally I signed up

for MBSR, which is you are probably familiar with, right? Yeah, but let the people know. Sure. Okay. So M mindfulness based stress reduction. And this is a, I think, 10 week class where you meditate for 45 minutes a day and then every week there's a two and a half hour class about kind of like Buddhism light concepts. Yeah. I can imagine people listening. I mean, my audience has a lot of meditators, but I think also a lot of aspiring meditators or I feel shitty that I'm not meditating type of folks. And so that's a big commitment, 45 minutes a day. And then you go to the class on top of it. Yeah, it was a huge commitment. I think the first day of the class, people were like, I can't do this.

Like, I have kids. I have a job. I can't do 45 minutes a day. And the teacher was just like, yeah, 45 minutes. Yeah. Yeah, just respect feeling overwhelmed. That's actually not a bad example of a firm agreeability. Yeah.

Yeah, there was always just like, if you didn't like something, it was like, yeah. Yeah, you don't like it. Yeah, that's a feeling that you're having. So did you actually do 45 minutes a day? I did. And has it created an abiding habit for you? Okay, so I would say created an abiding habit until I had a baby. Okay, yes, totally. I have to be honest. And I know that you write in your book that not having time is not a good excuse, but after Evan was born, I really just did not have time to do anything and meditation fell off. It showed.

But I really, my anxiety went back up and I kind of fell off the wagon. Can I just clarify that for a second? Not having enough time is an excuse. And it is a good excuse and it is very common. And you can do just a little bit once in a while in order to keep your head in the game. So like a minute daily-ish. I think that the biggest exception to this is new mothers. because, you know, I've lived with a new mother.

It is just so, and, you know, new fathers too, but let's be honest, the bulk of it often falls on the mom. So I have so much empathy or maybe compassion would be the better word for that situation. And I would just say, like, if you don't have enough time, first of all, give yourself a break and, like, that's cool. Like, maybe now's just not the time. And you can also just do little bits every once in a while, you know, like, those moments where you're feeding the baby or walking the baby, you can still tune into like whatever the raw data of your sensations and mentation and then every time you get distracted start again. So does that sound a little bit more user friendly? Yeah. And you know, I think a lot of

spending time with the baby is kind of meditative for me because we don't really like look at our phones when we're with him because the second we look down, he's like going to go eat the garbage or something. And so we spend a lot of time just kind of like watching him do stuff or just like kind of like gazing at him. That is like kind of the closest to meditation that I get these days. But it is sometimes kind of a little bit meditative, I would say. And then last night I was actually, I was reading him a book about taking deep breaths when you get mad. And I was like showing him how to breathe deeply. And I was like, he kind of did it too. So he kind of like, like did a little breath work together at bedtime anyway.

Many people say X or Y activity is meditative and I sort of give them a break on that. But in the back of my mind, I'm like, well, you know, from a mindfulness perspective, if you're not like paying attention, you know, in a quite deliberate way and then every time you get distracted, you start again, you may be achieving flow or you may be in a state of peace and calm, but it's not. necessarily meditative the way a Buddhist would describe it. But what you describe of like, actually, I'm gazing at my child and I remember those feelings. I still do it to the extent that he'll let me gaze at him ever as a 10-year-old boy. Actually, you are in your senses in those

moments. You're in your visual senses and your feelings of whatever feelings of warmth or annoyance are coming up. That, to me, scans actually as genuinely meditative. Well, that's good. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of as close as I get. I'm trying to get back into some of the types of mindfulness that I enjoyed, like yoga and like walking and things. And now that he's getting a little bit older and I'm not breastfeeding anymore, which is like the key thing keeping me from being able to do anything. Yeah. I get it. As a neurotic person, having done a significant amount of research on how one can improve in this regard, what would you say to the listeners about how they can reduce their neuroticism?

So I'm just the kind of person who I need like mantras. Like I need like kind of little phrases to go to whenever I'm getting really in a spiral. And some of the most helpful elements of this actually came from that weird little class where she taught us like little Buddhist concepts. So something that I had noticed, well, my whole life is that I would get really angry at myself when things didn't go quote unquote right. if some work assignment didn't go well or a bad performance review or a story didn't get very much traffic or these are all work ones, but I don't know. I had a party at my house and it seemed like people didn't have fun. But it was smaller stuff too. Like I got stuck in traffic and was slightly late meeting someone for coffee or something like that. I would have this like a lot of anger at

myself and kind of a lot of self-blame. And actually a lot of the concepts from Buddhism helped me overcome that or just to accept that there is a lot of uncertainty in life and that you can't take responsibility for every single thing that happens. And it was actually something from your book that was really helpful. And it was a quote from David Axelrod. Oh yeah. I love the quote. The political consultant, which is all we can do is everything we can do. And And I actually tell myself that a lot because to me, it is such a good way of accepting the fact that, like, you have to work really hard. Like in this industry, in a lot of different industries, there's just no way to stop striving and be a Buddha and just sit on a mountain all day. You have to, like, really put in the hours and work super duper hard.

But at a certain point, that's all you can do. You cannot make certain things happen, even if you really put in the hours. And to me, that was like, I know it sounds dumb, but that was, like, kind of mind. blowing. It blew my mind, too. There's a reason why I put it in the book and I emailed him and asked for permission to use it because he had said it in an off-the-record session. There's another articulation of the same sentiment, often attributed to Teddy Roosevelt. And I'm not going to get the words exactly right, but it's something like, do what you can with whatever you've got, wherever you are. And it's amazingly helpful professionally, but also, again, in turbulent political

times when people feel so helpless and hopeless. Like, there's something you can do. It may not even be related to the problem, but there's some action you can take. Here's another related slogan that would fit in the same category, which is action absorbs anxiety, that you can, knowing you've done what you can do will help you sleep at night, whatever's worrying you. Yeah, that's actually Tracy Dennis Tawari, another anxiety researcher that I talked to, she kind of made the point that like anxiety, you know, it's going to come up. You're going to feel anxious sometimes. But it's kind of what you do with that anxiety that matters. So she's like, yeah, by all means, like, make a to do list of everything that you're worried about and what you're going to do in order to address it. And then

put it away and go back to sleep. Like you don't need to, you know, stay awake dwelling on these same anxieties, but use it to take action toward the outcome that you want and then acknowledge that at a certain point you can't control everything. I want to make a quick point before we move to the fifth of the big five. The point I want to make is that many of the other things that we've discussed already, like working on other aspects of the big five, I think, and in my experience, can help a person and have helped me reduce my neuroticism, most especially working on the quality of my relationships. And so I'll give you another slogan that I love that is also not mine, which is never worry alone. And this is deeply consonant with how we evolved. And so working on

extroversion and agreeableness, again, properly understood, can really help ease the nervous system. Okay. Final of the big five, openness. What does that mean specifically? Openness is this nebulous trait that has a bunch of stuff that writers and creative people really like. It includes both creativity and verbal fluency. So I feel like being good with words. It includes kind of imagination, liking kind of abstract art and unusual music and movies, liking to travel, liking anything kind of new and avant-garde, just being kind of down for whatever. So being down for whatever in terms of new experiences, in terms of radical, interesting ideas, that's what you're referring to specifically. Yeah, all of the above, new ideas, new experiences, and even actually political liberalism, like, is correlated with this trait. Because if you think about it, like, liberals have historically been the group that are more like okay with new changes in society and kind of new ways of living. Although it's interesting. I was listening to it like a center-right podcast today and they were talking about how there's a decoupling happening between conservatism and being right-wing because actually there's so much that's happening on the right wing these days that is not conservative. It's radical and new and disruptive. Yeah, I take that point. I think that some of those studies were probably done in like the Clinton era. So yeah, that's probably true.

Let's give those Jan Sixers their respect. They were definitely open to new ideas. Yes. All right. So what did you do to boost your openness? And were you open? So I was already really high on openness when this started. And you actually don't want to be too too high on openness because the people who are like way on the far end of openness actually can kind of veer into kind of psychosis.

Because if you think about it, like if everything could be true, right, then like nothing is not true. And so it's, you can see how it could cross over into some mental health stuff. But the big thing that has been found to increase openness is psychedelics. I mean, obviously not advocating that people do psychedelics. Please like do it in a controlled way with, you know, doctors and stuff. But that is, I mean, according to studies, the way that consistently boosts. openness. I want to get practical in the end here. We've been pretty practical throughout, but I can imagine people at this point in the conversation are thinking, all right, well, Olga had a book contract and was very committed to doing all of these things. How do I make changes in like a reasonable way, given my busy life? Yeah. So you definitely don't have to become an improvisational actor and go surfing and do all the stuff that I did. And, in order to change your personality, I would start by either taking a big five personality test. You can do it on personality assessor.com. That's the site that I use that was created by one of

the researchers whose work I followed, or you can just find a different one on the internet, or you can just think about areas in your life where you feel like you could use a little bit of an upgrade. So do you not have that many friends? Do you feel like you have a lot of conflict with your loved ones? Do you feel like you are really anxious all the time? And then I would maybe try one or two of the activities from the book on, you know, a scale that feels manageable. So for meditation, MBSR is a huge commitment. But, you know, the people who were in my class did have jobs and kids and stuff. It has been shown to work basically as well as Lexapro. So that's one where if you really, really want to reduce neuroticism quickly, that's, you know, a good way to

go. But you could also do shorter meditations, you know, as you mentioned, five minutes, 10 minutes. loving kindness is a great one to start out with. Even though you may get called names in the paper. People will call you a pussy, but that's okay. Most of the activities that have been shown to change people's personalities in the research studies that I looked at only take a few minutes a day. They're not kind of huge commitments. It's something like gratitude journaling or exercising for a few minutes or saying

high to someone or getting coffee with someone, these aren't like super time consuming. The key is to just do them consistently over a long period of time. I have two questions I habitually ask toward the end of an interview. One is, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we haven't gotten to? Yes. There's one point that I want to make, which is that people sometimes ask me if they should change their personality so that other people will like them better. And I think it will help other people like you better, but the most important reason to change your personality is that it will make you happier. So it's a selfish thing to do. But I see that as a good thing. It's something that will enhance your life and your relationships and your happiness level

and not necessarily the people around you. Yeah. Again, to use this phrase, enlightened self-interest. Exactly. You know, yeah, the happier you get, the easier you will be to be around. Okay, great point. Final point. Can you just remind everybody of the name your book, the book you wrote before it, where we can find your work on an ongoing basis, anything else you want us to know about, et cetera, et cetera. Sure. So I'm Olga Hazan. My book is me, but better. You can find it wherever books are sold. You can find the rest of my writing at theatlantic.com, where I'm a staff writer. I also have a newsletter that's mostly about personality at olga hasan.substack.com.

And my previous book is called Weird. And that's also available wherever books are sold. Olga, great to spend time with you. Thank you for doing this. And congratulations on the new book. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thank you again to Olga Hazan. Awesome to talk to her.

Don't forget, there is a guided meditation specifically tailored to this episode. It really digs into the issue of procrastination. It comes from our teacher of the month, Don Maricio. And it's only available to paid subscribers over on Dan Harris.com. if you become a member, you'll get access to our growing library of companion podcast meditations and all the future meditations that'll be coming down the pipe. And you also get access to these live guided meditation sessions that I've been doing and that our teachers of the month are going to start doing.

In fact, we have one today at 4 Eastern over on Substack. Details at Dan Harris.com. Finally, just to say a quick thank you to everybody who works so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer.

And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.