Olga Khazan
speaker
118 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Olga Khazan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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But let's say you're a functional person who's living a basically normal life, it's going to be a lot easier to change your reactions to the things that happen to you than it is to make every single thing in the world go your way. That's why I looked inward. Personality does encompass a lot of those things that you mentioned. Um, Buddhism has a lot to say about depression and anxiety.
Um, uh, and you know, as far as like lifestyle, that was really more extroversion. Like I, I wanted to become more extroverted. Um, and that was a big part. Uh, lifestyle was a big part of that is, is sort of, uh, how often do you go out to socialize and do you make an effort to do that?
You know, not just like, do you sit, sit by the phone and wait for people to contact you, but do you make connections? Do you try to get out there? Um, so those, those are things that I did. Um, but I called it personality change because personality includes all that.
yeah so people are not going to be thrilled to hear this but the happiest people are like high in all the traits except for neuroticism um so so there's five traits um i will just briefly say what they are it's so openness to experience happy people are high in that because that's like
yeah spiritual but not religious like creative imaginative um uh conscientiousness which is like getting stuff done um so it's like uh being places on time and being like healthy and exercising happy people tend to be high in that um extroversion extroverts are happier that's like a really consistent finding in psychology unfortunately i i was i'm an introvert and i was not thrilled to hear that
Agreeableness, agreeable people are happier. They're always like making friends and going to baby showers and what have you. And then neuroticism is the one that's correlated with unhappiness. And so the opposite of it is emotional stability. That's what it's called. And people who are high in that are happier.
Yeah, I know. I know.
um at what age do you think we really feel like stuck in who we are yeah so i would say there's not an age at which we we start to stick in who we are so that used to be the thinking um this like influential psychologist named william james um had this infamous sort of quote that like uh the character is set like plaster by the age of 30
um and uh which is relevant for your podcast for people in their 20s um so i mean even he said like in your 20s you can still change but um but uh kind of more recent research has found that that's not really true that people kind of continue to change throughout their lives even naturally even if you don't really do anything to try to change your personality is gonna
kind of shift from decade to decade.
You're going to be a different person, you know, when you have kids and like a job than you were in college, than you were in high school, you know, and that is like freeing and it's kind of scary, but it's also kind of nice that like, you're not going to be like, if you're not crazy about something, you know, about yourself or about your life, you're not stuck with it forever.
Yeah. So there's two kind of branches of evidence to the contrary. So first, your frontal lobe being fully formed doesn't really mean anything about your personality because we don't have like a lobe in our brain that is where the personality lives. So like even if they study like brain changes or, you know, like those like fMRI studies where it's like brains lighting up
Those don't necessarily correlate perfectly with personality necessarily. So there's kind of two elements to this. The first is that when researchers have followed people, you know, and given them personality tests over and over across the years, they do find that people change. You know, they tend to change in certain ways. ways over time.
So like you mentioned that people become kind of mentally healthier in old age. Neuroticism does go down naturally across your life. So if you feel like you're very anxious and depressed, usually in older age, people become less so. So that sort of just naturally happens. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to like take any Lexapro. That naturally happens for most people.
The other element of this is that if you actually try to change, it can happen even faster. So there's been studies that show that people who get therapy, for example, become less neurotic. And in a short period of time, they become a lot less neurotic than you would expect them to having just like naturally, you know, decline in neuroticism.
And the same with some of the studies that I cover in my book. Researchers who have given people these like challenges, you know, people will say, I'd really like to become more extroverted. I'd like to make more friends. And they're like, okay, every day for – or whatever, every week for a month, reach out to someone new and have coffee with them or have –
you know, lunch with them or whatever, and they do maybe like five to ten challenges like that over a period of time, they actually find that they do grow in extroversion based on personality tests that they take at the beginning and the end. So not only do you naturally change, you can also change through effort.
Yeah. So it's both. So genetics is responsible for about 40 to 60% of our personality. And even then it's not like direct. Like if you think about either of your parents, you're probably not exactly like either of them, right? You're probably like you have like elements of them, but you're not like they're twin.
Like you kind of, most people are, I mean, usually people are relieved to hear this, like not exactly like either parent, right? So you get a little bit, like you get some ingredients. So I have like a natural proclivity toward anxiety because both my parents are very anxious, right?
But at the same time, there's other, there's like this, you know, 40 to 60 other percent of personality that we don't really know where specifically it comes from. It's not necessarily like the way your parents raised you. It's like, it's like kind of that, but it's also like your friends. It's like, did you go to college? What kind of job do you have?
Showing 61–80 of 118 · page 4 of 6
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