New Year, New Personality: Science-Backed Tips to Actually Change Yourself

Happy 2024 Psychology Podcast listeners. It's a new year and it's time to finally change your personality. Forget the fluff-- Scott is here to bring you some science-backed tips to actually become a new you. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi guys, it's Scott. Some quick housekeeping before we start
the episode today. First of all, I'm with iHeartRadio Now.
I'm very excited about this. iHeartRadio is the number one
podcast network in the world, and I think they're going
to take the podcast to the next level. We're going
to be trying all sorts of things for you all.
Keep your brain stimulated. Also, in the realm of big news,

(00:21):
I wear glasses now, so ladies don't go too crazy. Finally,
I've decided as a New Year's resolution that this year
I want to decrease my agreeableness levels by about twenty
five percent, which means I'm not allowing any bullshit this year.
If I don't believe something is true, I'm going to
say it. Sorry, not sorry, But enough about me. Let's

(00:45):
talk about you. Happy New Year. It's a new year,
new you. Right. Well, I've got some good news and
some bad news here a few folks. The good news
is that it's a new year, a fresh start. This

(01:05):
is a great time to motivate yourself to set an
important personal goal. This is a particularly good start to
a new year since, according to the quote fresh start effect,
motivation increases after a temporal landmark, such as the beginning
of a new week, month, or year. Temporal landmarks demarcate
a time difference between when you were the imperfect you

(01:26):
and when you are the new you. Since January one
this year fell on a Monday, that means this is
a double fresh start. So yay, good news. But here's
the bad news. Even with this newfound motivation that we
all have right now, I hate to break it to you,
but you are still you. As John cabin Zen put it,
everywhere you go, there you are every new year. The

(01:48):
aspiration to change aspects of one's personality usually starts out
big and then rapidly declines once people realize that mere
aspiration isn't enough. Make no doubt, people definitely want to
change their personality. Americans spend over eleven billion dollars each
year on self help books and programs that promises to
help them change their personality and have an amazing life.

(02:10):
When asked, is there any aspect of your personality that
you would like to change? Psychological research shows that about
two thirds of people say they would like to change themselves,
and further, these desires tend to come from dissatisfaction. For instance,
people want to become more extroverted if they aren't happy
with their relationships, hobbies, or friendships. They want to become
more conscientious if they are not happy with their finances

(02:33):
or work performance. And look, don't get me wrong, it's
a good thing to want to change your personality. Personality
matters a lot. Personality traits predict important life outcomes such
as success and love and work, life, well being, health,
and longevity. But here's the question we're going to tackle today,
just how much can we change our personality. One view

(02:56):
is that personality is set in stone by adulthood and
can hard budge no matter what you do. Another view
is that personality is entirely due to your circumstances in
life and it's constantly in flux. Which one do you
think is right? Yes, a student listener, both of these
extreme views are wrong. Throughout the course of the day,
we all fluctuate in our personality traits, So yeah, context matters. However,

(03:21):
when quote whole distributions, which is the technical term that's
used in the psychological literature. When whole distributions of thinking, emotions,
and behavioral patterns are taken into consideration, there are consistent
individual differences. For instance, almost all of us crave peace
and quiet at times during the day, but on the whole,
some of us need a lot more solitude than others.

(03:44):
This new understanding of personality, which is also the correct
view of personality, means that there is no essence to
your personality. Yes, genes definitely influence your patterns of thoughts, emotions,
and behavior, but there's nothing essential about being a certain way.
With enough habitu adjustment to your patterns over time, you
really can change who you are. In other words, you

(04:05):
are who you repeatedly are. I'm proud of that statement.
I hope that made sense to you. You are who
you repeatedly are. A large body of research shows that
personality traits can and do change. So we're going to
come back to some good news here. The research literature
on personality change is really a vast and fascinating line
of research. The research literature and personality change began by

(04:29):
focusing on changes that occur during therapy and major life
events such as getting married and changing jobs. And the
research does show that personality changes, you know, through prolonged therapy,
good therapy, if you're a good therapist, it can change
in the negative direction if you have a terrible therapist. Also,
a personality can change when you are in a relationship

(04:50):
again in multitude of ways, and then when you change jobs,
you move somewhere else. So yeah, all these the personal
change literature shows that certainly environment matters. However, more recent
research which we're gonna double click on today, shows that
it's possible to intentionally change your personality traits over time.
Repeated state level changes can eventually turn into hardened trait

(05:15):
level changes. Repeated state level changes like your momentary changes
in thinking, emotion, and behaviors can eventually turn into hardened
trait level changes. That is so important to recognize. That's
actually revolutionary when you really think about it. However, there's
a big catch, and this might be the biggest catch

(05:36):
of this entire episode today beside me wearing glasses, and
that catches that it seems to require follow through, an
effort over the long run to cause long lasting changes
to your personality. That's right, it takes follow through. Psychologist
Nathan Hudson has been leading the way on designing interventions
that can create long lasting changes in personality. In one

(05:58):
seminal study, doctor Hunt and his colleagues presented people with
brief descriptions of each of the Big five traits of personality.
The big five traits are extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism which
is the opposite of emotional stability, and openness to experience
and the researchers asked people to nominate which of these

(06:19):
dimensions they would like to work on specifically to change
throughout the course of the semester. You with me so far? Okay?
People were then presented with a list of challenges that
were specific concrete actions people could take to pull their
state level thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in line with their
desired traits. A total of fifty challenges were created for

(06:41):
each of these Big five personality domeans. Each week, people
could select new challenges, and to make things even more engaging,
the researchers presented it as a game, a fun game huh,
where they can earn bronze, silver, gold, or diamond quote
metals by completing the challenge multiple times at increasingly greater frequency.
So what did the researchers find. The researchers found that

(07:04):
for most of the Big five traits, successfully completing greater
numbers of challenges predicted greater personality growth over time. According
to the researchers quote, the pattern of results seems to
suggest that taking even small but consistent steps toward pulling
one's behaviors in alignment with one's desired traits has the
potential to produce trait growth. That's huge. That is a

(07:27):
really revolutionary finding. Critically, though, the researchers found that desiring
trait change and making plans to change oneself but not
falling through in those plans backfired ront row. That's my
Scooby Doo sound rot row, as the researcher suggest. Perhaps
a reason is that people who continually accepted extroversion challenges

(07:48):
but failed them may have begun to reason, well, maybe
I am even less extroverted than I thought because I
cannot seem to complete these challenges, and this may have
led to decreases in their extraversion levels over time. Another
possibility is that sometimes the very act of declaring a
goal is construed by individuals as progress toward that goal.

(08:09):
People might think they have already done something to progress
towards their goals, and that can actually undermine their motivation
to do what it actually takes to advance the goal. Indeed,
Peter Gallwitzer and his colleagues found that merely announcing one's
intention to change publicly can give people a premature sense
of already possessing the aspire to trait or identity. So

(08:33):
following through on your newfound motivation matters. But you can
do it. I am here to encourage you today because
it's worth the effort. The latest science of personality change
suggests that you can cause long lasting changes to your
personality by repeatedly changing your habits of thinking, acting, and
reacting to the world around you. What's more, various psychologically

(08:56):
validated techniques such as implementation, intentions, self reflection, cognitive behavioral therapy,
and behavioral activation can cause personality change, not just for
those in the therapist couch, but for all of us. So,
my friends, I'm now going to leave you with this

(09:18):
episode with some science back tips for changing your personality.
I have gone through the hard work of reading lots
and lots of technical scientific papers, and I'm just going
to summarize them all and just give you some practical,
actionable steps to get you started on your journey to
actually be a new you, not just say oh, new year,
new you knew me to actually be a new you.

(09:39):
First of all, choose to embark on a new chapter
in your life. Decide it's time for a fresh start,
and look, starting today is great because it's still early
in the new year. There's still hope. Next, it's time
for goal setting. Focus on the one trait or two
traits that would mean the most to you to change.
Don't try to change everything. Let's focus on a few

(10:02):
manageable aspects of your personality that you would like to change.
As a guide, let's go through the big five traits
of personality. So the first Big five trait is extraversion.
Ask yourself, how outgoing and sociable am I? And is
that something I really want to change about myself? The
next Big five trait is conscientiousness. Ask yourself, how hard

(10:22):
working and effective am I? And reaching my goals? If
that's something that's upon self reflection you decide you want
to change, maybe that's going to be the one that
you're going to prioritize. The next Big five trait is neuroticism.
Ask yourself, how anxious and emotionally unstable am I? Not
be honest with yourself, okay, be honest If you are
an emotional mess, and you decide, you know what, I

(10:42):
don't want to be an emotional mess anymore. This is time.
This is the time for me to change. Then all
the power to you. The next one is agreeableness. Ask
yourself and reflect how well do I cooperate with others
and am I considered a highly valued social partner? Now
that could be something that you really might want to
change in direction. As I stated cheekily but honestly at

(11:03):
the beginning of this podcast, I'm trying to decrease my
agreeableness levels because I find myself agreeing too much with
people when I sometimes when I don't actually agree with them.
But for some people, they might want to increase their
agreeableness levels, like, for instance, if you actually are innately
in a colossal asshole and no one likes you and
everyone stays away from you, and then you feel lonely

(11:24):
about that and isolated, you may actually benefit from increasing
your agreeableness levels. Finally, the last dimension of the Big
five is openness to experience. Reflect how open am I
to new ideas, feelings, beautiful things, and creative ideas. That
might be something that you might want to really change
this year. You might want to be more open in
twenty twenty four. So this step is self reflection, which

(11:46):
one of these traits that I just read stands out
to you the most in need of some self adjustment. Now, look,
do not announce your intention on social media or anywhere publicly.
The research that I already mentioned suggests that might fool
you into thinking that you actually already did something toward
reaching your goal. And let's say that you have a

(12:06):
big following and you announce your intention. Here everyone, it's
a new year, it's going to be a brand new me,
and you get so many likes for that, you might
feel like you're done. I'm like, you know what, that's
all I really wanted anyway, So you might not actually
go through the work to change. Now it's time to

(12:28):
follow through create implementation intentions. Now, what is an implementation intention. Well,
implementation intentions take the format of if then plans. If
something happens, then you automatically do something else, no questions asked,
and no justification to get out of it. What you
do with implementation intentions, or sometimes researchers call them implementation plans,

(12:51):
is that you create a series of relevant if then plans,
So you don't have to think about it. Some examples
of implementation intentions include if I have to work over
or a concentrated period of time, then I switch into
flight mode, and that might be a way of increasing
your conscientiousness. Another example would be if I have no
meetings before one o'clock PM, then I will go to
the gym. Or here's another example, if you want to

(13:14):
increase your openness to experience. If I see something beautiful,
then I will take a photo and appreciate it. So
what do we do once we have our implementation intentions
well in line with mindful cognitive behavioral therapy. Become more
aware of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, notice mindfully your
usual tendencies, and try to intentionally do something different than

(13:34):
what you normally do, which takes us to the fascinating
realm of behavioral activation. So the field of behaval activation.
What you can do is you can look at a
list of challenges that researchers have come up with and
for each demean of personality, choose the challenges that pertain
to the personality demean you are working on changing and
just act, just don't think so much about it, act

(13:57):
and let your cognitions follow. Now, what I done is
a resource for you all is I've put links to
all the relevant papers and examples of the challenges, as
well as a link to the full list of fifty
challenges from the researchers in the show notes to this episode.
So as a resource to this episode, you can go
to the Psychology podcast dot com and click on the

(14:19):
show notes for the latest episode and you'll see all
the resources that I added to help you change your
personality and then choose the challenges that pertain to the
personality do mean you are working on changing? You can
also subscribe to my new substac newsletter called Beautiful Minds,
which has a whole bunch of resources as well. Next,
we want to gammify your project here of changing your personality.

(14:43):
What I mean by gamify well, you can compete with
your friends and see who can complete the most challenges
in a one month period. Let's say whoever wins has
to buy everyone else a drink or something like that.
You know, do what you can to create a little
game out of it and pick a different challenge every day.
Stay at it, be patient and kind to yourself if
you struggle with some of the challenges and also have

(15:05):
realistic expectations about the rate of growth in personality change.
Your personality won't change overnight. Be critical of any self
development book or course that claims to give you instant
or radical changes in your personality. Just as it took
many years for you to develop your habitual patterns of thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors, it will take some time to alter them

(15:26):
in the long run. The good news is that the
latest research on personality change suggests quite clearly that state
level changes that are maintained for extended periods of time
have the potential to coalesce into trait changes. And that's
what you want if you actually want to change your
personality in the long run. You want trait changes, not

(15:47):
just state changes, Folks. Over time, state level behaviors can
become learned, autumatized, and habitual, but you have to do
the work. There are no shortcuts in life, at least
when it comes to causing long lasting changes to your personality.
And finally, once you've actually changed your personality and only
then feel free to announce what you went through to
get there in public and social media, your journey when

(16:09):
inspire others. Also, people will probably notice that it's actually
a new y. I just want to end this episode
by encouraging you all and being your cheerleader here to
do the hard work required to change your personality or
at least aspects of your personality that you really want
to change, because I really believe in you all, and
I'm rooting for you all. So happy New Year, and
I'm really excited for twenty twenty four. In the psychology

(16:31):
podcast Peace