How to Change Your Personality with Olga Khazan
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Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.

We tend to think of our personality as something that's relatively fixed. You're either extroverted or introverted. You're the type A who plans the group outing or the type B who's along for the ride. You're confident or you're anxious. But this idea that personality is simply who we are can be a real problem for people because almost everyone has something about themselves they would like to change. So are we just stuck with the parts of ourselves we don't like? Or

Or is there something we can actually do about any of this? So today we're going to be exploring that question with Olga Hassan, a journalist at The Atlantic and the author of the new book, Me But Better, The Science and Promise of Personality Change. So Olga, thanks for joining me today. How are you doing? Yeah, good. Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to have you here.

in large part because we talk about a lot of the stuff that you've actually tried on the podcast. So you're kind of this incredible test case for us here. You talk about meditation in the book, a lot of therapeutic approaches, stuff from ACT, which we talk about pretty regularly, even psychedelics. So your experience is really like a great test case here for us, and it was so cool to read about it. Let's start kind of at the beginning here. How changeable is our personality?

Our personalities are pretty changeable. Most of us change throughout our lives, even if we don't try to change. So you probably are not the same person you were in high school or in college. You know, if you're now like a parent or something like that, you probably notice changes.

that have happened in the intervening years that you'll probably continue to change as you get older. But also what my book is really about is about research that shows that you can actually change your personality even more by taking consistent action and by changing your daily behaviors.

So what were some of the things that you actually tried on through this process? I did a lot. I was mostly working on the personality traits of agreeableness, extroversion, and neuroticism. To give a brief run through, and we can dive deeper into each of these, but for extroversion, I just went out and talked to people a ton. I had an amazing social life. I did improv and sailing and meetup hikes and a bunch of other stuff just with and around other people.

For neuroticism, I mostly meditated, which is unfortunately one of the main ways that is suggested that you reduce your neuroticism. And for agreeableness, I did a bunch of different things, including an anger management class, a conversation workshop, and some volunteering.

So you were drawn to do this for a whole bunch of different reasons out of Malachan. One of the big ones I know is that you were interested in potentially becoming a mom, which has since happened. So congratulations for that. Thanks. But also you were just having a lot of day-to-day experiences that I think are pretty well illustrated by a story that you tell early on in the book. You were going to take some professional photos for an article of some kind. The whole experience went sideways, and this culminated with you going home to your boyfriend and

And to quote, saying something to him along the lines of,

I poured wine to the brim of a glass and gulped hard between sobs. So was that like representative of your kind of everyday experience going through this sort of a process? Was that a particularly bad moment? That was a particularly bad moment. But I think what that moment really underscored for me was that though I said my life is nothing but stress and torture, actually, like no torture had taken place that day. So I tended to let everything

And stressors and frustrations really build up and build up and build up and make me really frustrated and kind of create these stories in my mind. My life was bad. Nothing good would ever happen to me. I was like doomed and just like really contributed to my unhappiness. Like I kind of really, really sweated the small stuff, if that makes sense.

And that is basically just trademark neuroticism, one of the big five personality traits. It's basically just depression and anxiety. And it's really just someone who you have a day, nothing, you know, maybe some kind of unfortunate stuff happens, but you just can't let go of it. It affects you more than it would someone else. You can't bounce back from it. You can't stop thinking about it.

You may be even making it worse with like substances like I was. So that was really like indicative of the kind of thought pattern that I wanted to change. Did you think of yourself as being just a neurotic person before this whole process? Yeah. So I definitely felt like I was more anxious than most people. I mean, maybe not with that technical language of neuroticism, but you know. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, I was like, yeah, I'm like anxious a lot. Like this stuff makes me anxious. I also kind of got the sense that I was not

I didn't have that bless this mess attitude of like moms on Instagram. And that was kind of one of the things that was keeping me from one of the things that was keeping me from having a baby. And then I kind of was like, is that really true? Like, do I want to wall myself off from these life experiences by embracing being this negative Nelly and just embracing

embracing being unhappy all the time? Or is this something that I could actually change? And so that's kind of what got me thinking about it. So you're, I think, pretty close to me in age. I'm 37. We tend to think about personality change as something that happens pretty early on in life. If it happens at all, it happens when you're developing, you're a kid. There's some really interesting research on this, though, that's actually from Brent Roberts, who you quote a couple of times in the book.

He's a prominent personality psychologist at the University of Illinois. His research suggests that while personality trait change is concentrated between the ages of 20 and 40, it actually continues into middle and even old age. And there's some research, I think, that shows that certain personality traits actually change the most as we get older and older in life. Was this something that you were aware of before you were trying to go through this whole process, or did you learn that along the way?

When I actually started trying to change my own personality, that's when I really dove deep and saw all of those interesting studies about how personality changes over the course of a lifetime. And some traits do change more in old age than they do even in college. You know, but all of us...

looking at our own lives. If you want to see personality change, just go on Facebook to a status that you posted in 2009 or whatever and like read that status to yourself and think like, would I really say that today? And like probably not, right? Because we all change all the time. You approach this process with a real journalistic kind of scientific mindset. And I think that's a great way to approach it.

As you were digging into it and learning more about the way that personality works or the ways that we can change it, was there anything that you learned that really surprised you as part of the process?

Yes. So one of the like pushbacks that I get is I don't want to be more extroverted because I'm an introvert and that's just who I am. And that's what makes me happiest. And introversion is like what I need. And that's I'm introverted, introverted. That's that's it. And I'm like, OK, there was a study where they told introverts go and act like an extrovert for a few minutes, go socialize with someone basically.

And then they came back and they were like, how do you feel? They felt happier than they normally do. And they also felt more true to themselves. Yeah, that last one's interesting. So sometimes these things that you think are like, this will make me happy. This is what I need. This is what I want. This is who I am. It's like, it's not actually quite right. Like sometimes you need something else and you might not be aware of it.

Yeah, something we've been talking about a lot on the show recently is self-concept. So how the views that you have about yourself shape the person that you are.

And I don't know if that was something that you talked about kind of overtly inside of the book. I can't remember reading it. But you talked a lot generally about these views that you had about yourself, how you always thought of yourself as being exactly like you're saying, kind of an introverted person. And so your behavior would flow pretty naturally from your beliefs. As you went through this process, did you actually work on those beliefs directly deliberately, or did that just kind of happen as part of the process?

Yeah, so I think this can happen in a number of ways. But the way it happened for me is I really saw the behaviors changing because I was making my behavior change. And then I updated my self-concept as a result. So a good example of that is improv. So when I started taking improv classes...

Sort of a story I had told myself about me is that I am not theatrical or good at performing or good at public speaking. This is something that people do not want from me. They don't find me funny. They don't find me entertaining and that I should not do this. Right. And so I go to improv and I'm like, OK, well, improv is like twisting my arm like everyone in the class has to participate. You can't just like not do it.

So I'm like, okay, I'm improvising and I'm like doing it. And like every so often people are like laughing or they're like great scene or great idea or whatever. And I'm like enjoying it and I'm going back more and more and I'm getting better and better at it. And I'm doing all this improv and suddenly it's like, wait, am I not bad at improv? Like, wait, am I actually like kind of okay at performing? And it started to kind of update this

idea that I had about myself that I should kind of be in the background and not draw attention to myself because I kind of started to see that actually I can do this and I have been doing it. Yeah, the way to change your personality fundamentally is to start trying to be who you want to become. In other words, you're faking it till you make it, right? You are acting like a extroverted improviser until you start becoming more of an extroverted improviser. Were you impressed by yourself as this was happening?

Like did you start developing more of a positive internal model based on these new experiences? That's interesting. That sounds so egotistical to me. I'm trying to think of a

I asked it in a very deliberately that way kind of way. But so to maybe take you behind what I'm kind of doing internally, my experience, I do a little bit of coaching work with people and also I've just talked to a lot of psychologists. Unconditional positive regard is like the basis of humanistic psychology. It's Carl Rogers, all that literature. And I think that in a way we do kind of develop more of an unconditionally positive sense of ourselves.

as we go through this process. And a lot of people are really supported by that. But I do think it's really in conflict with the, if you're a self-aware person, the sort of model that we have of like, you don't want to praise yourself too much. You don't want to be like too unconditionally self-positive, kind of all of that, that you're bumping into right now. So I do, okay. I will say that there was something going on as I was doing, especially the stuff in the book that I turned out to be better than I expected at, like improv or even like some of these

where I was interacting with large groups of strangers, which is something that I had always dreaded and hated, but it turned out to be not so bad. I was sort of like, it's kind of like getting reps in at the gym kind of, you know, and you lift something like a really heavy weight and you're like, yeah, I did it. You do have this feeling of like wanting to high five yourself a little bit. Yeah, totally. When you've like accomplished these seemingly impossible new things that you thought you would never do. Yeah.

My sort of theory as part of this is that that positive experience that you were having along the way was probably a big part of a how you were able to keep on doing it because we don't want to repeat things that are painful, but we're generally up for repeating things that like feel kind of good.

And then also, it's almost like a self-efficacy thing where you develop more of the sense of yourself as somebody who can do hard things and can try on hard things. Was that something that built as you went through this? Yeah. So that was a big one of the kind of premises of personality change research is this idea of agency, very similar to efficacy, like Martin Seligman, sort of like people have the ability to do things, which sounds really simplistic. But when you're really

anxious or really depressed or even really socially isolated, you can start to feel like you will never get out and that you don't have the ability to do things, like you don't have the ability to

to change the way your life is headed. So I think for me, just this feeling like life doesn't have limits or that it has artificial limits that I've erected for it was kind of inspiring and empowering. And it did kind of give me fuel to keep going, even for some of the stuff that was not very fun, like meditation. That for me was a less fun chapter. And so I did kind of need that juice of like, I can do it. I can do it to keep going. Yeah.

Yeah. So there's this great line that lines up with exactly what we've been talking about so far. You use it in the book. It's from Aristotle. We become builders by building and harpists by playing the harp, right? So you can practice extroversion. You can take an improv class. But it's a little less obvious to me how you would practice not being neurotic. And you mentioned meditation and mindfulness as part of that. So how did that work?

So I will say that like a lot of the neuroticism work is internal, right? So it's like gratitude journaling, which I also did thinking about your circumstances more positively, very traditional, like CBT stuff. This thought, is it realistic? You know, is this going to really happen?

But then like the activity, there's like a lot of mindfulness meditation that's suggested as a way to reduce neuroticism. And it doesn't have to be sitting there. It can be like walking meditation or it can be like a yoga meditation.

type thing. But I caution that it is not like core power yoga or like a power walk. It's like a slow. So for people like me who are either exercising or working or sleeping, it's just it doesn't really fit with

Like slowing down in this way and like focusing on your breath doesn't really fit with the way we live our lives. And that for me was really challenging. That was that was like straight up difficult to just do nothing for 45 minutes. And I think that it was actually like a lot of my meditation teachers, Buddhism for dummies teachings that kind of kept me going through that and kept me actually that I still remind myself of in moments when I'm getting like really neurotic. Yeah.

I'm extremely interested in this because we do some Buddhism for Dummies on the podcast all the time. So were there particular aspects of that that really, really stuck with you? Like what worked? Yeah. So one of the ones that always sticks with me is she talked a lot about the concept of the double arrow. So one thing that I noticed I would always do is something would go wrong, right? I would be late to an interview, let's say, with a source because of traffic.

And that is something going wrong because then the interview starts late. I don't have as much time. Maybe the interviewee cancels.

What I would do is I would get like extremely enraged with myself in those cases. Like I would get so angry at myself. I would just berate myself internally. It was almost like a second arrow, honestly, like a second problem that I would create for myself by getting really frustrated with me. And what that class really taught me is that like bad things are going to happen. Like bad things happen to everyone. And a big part of not letting them

completely overtake your day or derail your whole life is to practice self-compassion and, you know, yeah, learn from that mistake or learn from what you could do differently next time. But to not get quite so filled with self-blame because that self-blame is actually not helping you. It's like it's like a second wound that you're causing. Was jest

bumping into that as a philosophical idea kind of enough on its own? Or were there ways that you started to apply that as more of a practice? I know it sounds so silly, but I truly think I am someone who needs phrases to go to because I- I totally get it for the record. Yeah. I am actually, so I am not religious, but I, so I don't have like a Bible or like in difficult times, I don't have like

as Jesus always says, like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, I don't have like a thing like that. And so I think I needed these silly Buddhism light phrases to like think about in difficult moments because Buddhism is for me like so much not to try to convert people or anything like that, but it is like a good way to get through modern life and its frustrations. It is like surprisingly applicable for me in a lot of ways. Yeah.

You're preaching to the choir here. We talk about this pretty regularly on the show that secular Buddhism philosophically I think is just one of the better structures that we've come up with so far for trying to figure out how to navigate modern life in a practical way because the core premise of it is that suffering comes from attachment and that if you can lighten up your attachment, you tend to experience a bit less suffering. And we see that all over the place in our lives. I would imagine you see that plenty as a parent too.

Oh, totally. I also found the idea compelling of living in the present moment, which I had always been like, what? I don't care. Like, what are you talking about? OK, everyone's always living in the present moment. What other moment are people living in? But I think what really hit home for me is that all the joy you're going to have is happening right now. There's not going to be another time that you're going to have this exact minute back.

to me, it's kind of like a good reminder to live life to the fullest as you can or as it happens rather than waiting for some magical future when you're going to be happy and like you're going to make up for all the sadness that you feel now. I don't know. That might sound even more like self-berating, but that has helped me for some reason. Yeah.

You had the Facebook status line, which I thought was a great way to think about this because I don't know if people use Facebook still. On this day, things will pop up where it'll be something that you posted like 12 years ago or whatever, and you read that and you go, wait a moment, is this even the same person? Or at least I have that experience all the time. What you just said about living in the moment,

seeking all the joy that you're going to get out of life. It's all happening right now. Is that something that you would have said five years ago? No, absolutely not. I was like, if I can just get this award, this exact award for my journalism, I will never be upset again. Please, God, that I don't believe in, please give me this. I will never be unhappy again. I'll be happy every single day. I'll

Also, maybe having a kid has just taught me that like you're on a one way train and everything that you see is all you're going to see. Yeah, I think that has been different for me. Has this felt authentic as you've been doing it? Yeah. So I try to maintain a big gap that you're describing. Right. That person five years ago, this person right now, like that person five years ago, if I look at you now, I'd be like, what the hell? Like what happened here? Right.

So I try to maintain the authenticity in the book by being really honest with the reader when I myself was kind of rolling my eyes at whatever the person was saying. Like when I was like, okay, seriously, we're not supposed to be striving at all. I don't know, having to like go through this project, see

see the difference that it made in my life, in other people's lives. I don't know. For me, it was really about noticing how much better I felt after I made some of these changes. That was really kind of like the proof in the pudding. And that's really like the case for personality change too. Like I think it has kind of a bad rep to the extent that it has a rep because it's like

Oh, I don't want to change who I am. But really, it's about changing the way you approach the world and the way you approach problems and obstacles that come up. We'll be back to the show in just a minute. But first, a word from our sponsors. Did you know that Fast Growing Trees is the biggest online nursery in the United States with thousands of different plants and over 2 million happy customers?

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Now, back to the show.

I think that a lot of this is just about building a more open and flexible view of who you are as a person. You're not not the person that you were 10 years ago or 15 years ago or whatever. You're carrying that with you to varying degrees, but life changes us, right? Things happen. You go from not being a mom to being a mom. You're going to want to have a more flexible sense of identity.

Otherwise, you're going to kind of get into a lot of trouble in life broadly, right? Because stuff is going to come up that you're not well equipped for, who doesn't fit the person that you are right now. And if you're not able to change with it, then you're just going to be kind of stuck and you're going to experience a lot more friction that way.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, one of the ways that I tried to capture this. So for people who are less comfortable with like the idea of like permanent personality change, there's also this this concept of free trait theory, which is sort of this this idea that like you are who you are, but you can try on different traits in order to.

basically like take on challenges or take on new obstacles that, that, you know, come up for you. So one example of this is like, if you have a job where suddenly like you're up for a promotion, but to get to the promotion, you have to give a big speech for like a bunch of big corporate execs, you know, that's a very extroverted job.

that they're making of you. Like they're asking you to be an extrovert for that period of time. And what you don't want to do is like tell yourself, oh no, I'm not going to do that because I'm an introvert. Or that's not me. I'm too introverted to do that. Or I could never be a leader because I'm too introverted. You want to have enough flexibility in your sense of self to say like, you know, I am pretty introverted. Like when I get home for the day, I do like to kick back with Netflix and like, you know, a bubble bath. But I can do this challenge because I have it within me to do it.

to kind of try on extraversion, basically.

Yeah, I think a big place where this comes up for people is in some of the ACTI stuff, so acceptance and commitment therapy, where there's this big balance and tension between accepting yourself on the one hand and then changing on the other. And people tend to view this as being a sort of opposite process. You either accept yourself or you change. They don't really think about it so much in terms of acceptance fueling change. I know that you talked to Steve. Steve Hayes is part of the book, and we've interviewed him on the show a couple of times. How was that? How did you like learning about ACTI?

So I thought ACT was really a great way, as you said, to balance the challenge of changing yourself. And how do you change yourself but stay...

stay happy or like stay like, I don't know. Okay. Yeah. Positive sense of self. You're not changing it just from a purely negative motivation. Right. Exactly. And, and also how do you deal with the negative emotions that are going to come up whenever you try things that are hard? Because all of us, when we try new things, things that are hard are going to struggle. Like we're going to, we're going to experience stress and anxiety just by trying new things. So for me, it was really a

helpful framework for how to think about, you know, accepting, you know, the feelings of challenge that might come up whenever you are giving a public speech or talk as an extrovert or as an introvert. You're going to feel those jitters and that anxiety committing to doing it anyway and taking action and actually doing it. So I don't know. I really liked Steve was kind of a trip.

He is kind of a trip. I love Steve and he is kind of a trip. Yeah. But I actually found that people did really use this method in order to like deal with the challenge, I guess, of personality change. Totally. I'm curious about

the role of your understood identity, how you thought about yourself through this process. Because it's great to say, well, just try on all of these things or just cultivate more of a growth mindset or something like that. But you need to have a fundamental something that is preceding that moment of action, right? So you had something inside of you

that let you try an improv class that somebody else might not have. And that's the piece of it. We're also in therapy. It's a major question for clinicians working with people. How do you develop the preceding beliefs

that lets somebody kind of cascade into action. Do you feel like you just kind of had that in you intrinsically or was that something that you had to actually like build up as part of this? Oh, that's interesting. So I will say my two strengths that I had at the start of this and that I still have. So I was working on all this other stuff, but the two things I really had going for me were conscientiousness

which is like this get her done kind of like being on time, you know, getting there, doing it. And also openness to experiences, which is very much what it sounds like. It's like sort of like, yeah, let's go there. Let's go to the EDM show. Like, let's, you know, let's do it. Let's go to the abstract art exhibit. So I think those two things combined, I was like,

I'm going to go to improv and like check that off my checklist. And like, I don't know, I think I just am the kind of person who tries new things. Did you have the experience throughout this of having some things that you really did not want to do, but finding a way to kind of rev up around them anyways? Or were you sort of 50% in the pool already with most of this stuff? I feel so bad talking about this, but maybe I just should talk about it.

The place where I volunteered, it was really challenging to get myself excited to go to that place. Not because I didn't like volunteering. I actually liked interacting with the clients. It was a homeless shelter and we were serving lunch to the homeless. And I actually liked the serving lunch part and interacting with the homeless people. It was honestly just the place was so poorly run and organized.

Oh, the bureaucracy. And it was. Yes. Yeah. Yes. And so I would get there and like I'm very organized and like a very efficient and like I would get there. There would be like not enough people or like way too many people and like not everyone fit in the little like kitchen area. And so like one person's job would be just to like hand everyone a spoon and like.

The shifts would be like way too long, like three hours long, even though the lunch rush was only like an hour and a half long. So there was an hour and a half where I was just standing there. I know this sounds so minor, but like I would so much rather have been like directly helping people for that hour and a half than just standing around. Yeah. And was that something that you were doing out of more of a that was an extroversion test?

That was an agreeableness. So a lot of the tasks for agreeableness were volunteer, like donating to charity, volunteering, doing things for others. But I find that like in our society, it's like hard to find ways to help other people that are, well,

Well, if that's not some great cultural commentary, I don't know what is. Yeah. Like, have you noticed that? Like, I just, first of all, it took me a really long time to find that opportunity, that volunteer opportunity. And then like, once it started, I was like, this is not well managed because there needs, there have to be people to manage all these do-gooders versus like, I actually think I could be helpful in other ways, but there's not organized ways to make it happen. You know, I think I could like tutor kids in reading, for example, but like,

There's not just like a neighborhood tutoring place, you know, I mean, there's schools, but they don't need randoms coming in and helping people. So it's, yeah. You might be surprised these days, Olga. You might be surprised. But no, I mean, the broader point that you're making, I have a really good friend and now a housemate who works on crisis response.

in the state of California. And he's a therapist. He does serious, serious work with people. And his biggest complaint is not about the populations of people he's working with who he absolutely loves. It's the associated bureaucracy, lack of support, lack of systemic support particularly, lack of money in the system, which is when most of this ultimately comes back to is that somebody is not getting paid to perform the tasks that you're describing. So and

Yeah, I know. This is a big issue in the mental health world and just in the broader desire to support people world. Yeah, yeah. So I have a friend going through homelessness right now, and I have noticed that it is... First of all, there's no help for her that's structured in any real way. It's very catch-as-catch-can whenever she's in the hospital. There might be a social worker available to help her.

I'm like, I don't even know how to help. I'm not in the same state as her. I don't know. It's like sending money that would only get her a night in a hotel, for example. I don't know. There's not enough sober living spaces. It's chaotic out there. It's very Sisyphusian. Yes. Yeah. It's not well organized for a do-gooder. This gets to a whole other podcast that maybe we could do sometime on poverty traps and et cetera, but that's a lot of what you're describing, how it is this kind of endless cycle for people and

even if people want to support people who are in those kinds of situations, the verticals and avenues that we have to do that are pretty limited by and large. And your heart can really be in the right place about a lot of this. And even still, the avenue to express that is sometimes really not available. And that's something you felt like you bumped into in general when you were trying to work on the agreeableness aspect?

Yeah. So in the studies on personality change, it's interesting. Not a lot of people want to become more agreeable. Like it's a very uncommon. That's unfortunate. I know. Yeah. Like like no one picks it as like everyone wants to be more conscientious, more extroverted and less neurotic. Those are the three that everyone picks.

People would probably pick openness more if they knew more about it, but it's a little bit confusing. No one picks agreeableness. They understand what it is and they do not want it because it's basically being nice to people and people do not care about that. And so I picked it and all the researchers that I talked to were like, that's interesting that you picked that one. Yeah.

You are the first person in the history of this study to do that. They're like leafing through the pages. Wow, I don't really know how to help you with that one. Yeah, yeah. So I was sort of like on my own with that. But I did find that like it is just, and then all the studies like come to the same conclusion, which is like,

In conclusion, agreeableness is a very hard trait to change because as we just said, there is not like a do-gooder emporium that you can go to and like easily make a positive change in the world. So a big part of being agreeable is having firm boundaries so that people don't try to walk all over you and you're like kind of kinder state. So making sure that you tell people like what you will and will not do. Those often come off as rude because really it's more accepted and it's a

society to kind of fade back or like kind of be passive aggressive or like not really state overly what your boundaries are. So you kind of start sometimes when you're being agreeable, people perceive you as less agreeable, actually. Yeah. So it was that one was really challenging. I was like, wow, the world is not well set up for agreeableness. Yeah.

Maybe to backtrack from some of this, as people who listen to the podcast are probably aware of, we've been talking about the ocean traits throughout the episode so far. So this is openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism are the five of them. Very nice. Very good. Thank you. And as you were saying, some of them are kind of more well understood by people generally than others. And there's actually a pretty impressive body of research on this point about

Yeah. So to be clear, I did some of my own stuff. Like improv isn't really on any of the lists. I just...

It just makes sense. Included that one. It just, yeah, that one was one that I wanted to do and made sense for me. It's like in line with the types of activities that you would do to increase extroversion, but it's not like literally off a study. The studies that have been done, so the American researcher who has done the most is Nathan Hudson at Southern Methodist University. And what he did is he sat down with a group of researchers and they

came up with behaviors essentially or mindset shifts that are associated with a certain personality trait or that research suggests help increase a certain personality trait. So for like neuroticism, this is like meditating, you know, journaling, thinking differently about challenges, exercising, you know, being with friends, things like that.

So I did a combination of what Nate suggested in his studies and kind of my own program of either things that I found in my own research or just things that were available in my corner of Northern Virginia.

One of the things we were just spending a little bit of time talking about there is how agreeableness is not necessarily a priority for people most of the time when they're getting into this or how verticals in our culture for practicing agreeableness are pretty limited. One of the things you bumped into as you were going through this process was how the big five, as it's called, is mostly relevant for people who are living in Western industrialized countries. Would you mind talking about that a little bit? I just wanted to caution people that

Though this is sort of the best we got, like the big five, the ocean traits are what we think personality consists of for most people operating in Western societies. There are other cultures where these traits are not...

Really the ones that like show up most prominently and in particular in some cultures openness to experiences isn't really as big of a deal or doesn't really like emerge when you interview people about like what types of personalities do people here have openness is sort of things like creativity verbal intelligence.

Sort of like tolerance for novelty, things like that. And that's just like not a value that some cultures have. Meanwhile, some cultures have other values that we don't prioritize as much, which is so, for example, things like honesty emerge kind of more prominently in other cultures, but not in American culture.

I do wonder also just about the individualism, collectivism aspect of the whole thing. We have a very individualistic culture. I wonder how that shows up in terms of how we think about personality. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I think this whole thing is very individualistic, right? Just the idea that there are different personalities and which kind are you? I think

You know, and I get into this a little bit with like historically, like one of the big hurdles with personality research was sort of that we went through centuries and centuries of human experience where there was this idea that there were like good people and bad people. And you wanted to be a good person, like a good and honorable person and have like character. And so people talked about having like a good character. And that just meant like

upholding the values of the society at the time and not like, well, that guy is like so quirky. And so it was only very kind of recently, like I would say, like post almost like World War II, that this idea that people are all different and that, you know, we should be like embraced in our differences became like a thing.

So personality change at the state level is about doing stuff, right? Like anybody can practice going to an improv class. I mean, assuming you've got the courage, obviously, it's like very courageous to do that. But anybody can do that for a day.

But there's a difference between doing something for a day, like trying it on, and feeling like you've actually changed at the trait level, like trait extroversion, trait conscientiousness, whatever it is. Through this process, do you feel like you've become more extroverted, more agreeable, less neurotic at that trait level? Or do you feel like you're still kind of like performing it to some extent?

Oh, that's interesting. I think for the most part it is at the trait level. So the way that researchers think that this happens, like the switch from the state to the trait, is basically like you see yourself doing all these tasks. You see yourself like...

whatever, doing improv and really enjoying it. And then you kind of like reflect that back on yourself and you're like, I must be an extrovert. Yeah. Yeah. And you're kind of like you start to change your concept of yourself. For me, this happened like a lot earlier in my life with conscientiousness where I actually did not used to be very organized or conscientious at all. And it

changed really rapidly, like in my early 20s. And I now would definitely see myself as a like trait conscientious person. You know, I think that for me, extroversion has definitely become like more of a trait.

With neuroticism, I think it's more of like a mindset change and this feeling of like I can talk myself down out of this spiral of anxiety that I get into and that that's not like a must do. Like that it's I don't have to have the anxiety spiral. I can just feel the feeling and like do what I need to do and move on.

And that I'm still hesitant to even say like I'm not an anxious person because I think I do still get anxious. But it's like I snap out of it faster, if that makes sense. This is actually a great articulational guy. I think of how this works for people in practice. People have a vision a lot of the time, also when they start going to therapy, that they will transform from being an anxious person into being not an anxious person or from being a neurotic person into being not a neurotic person. Most of the time, that is not how it works.

most of the time what you become is you become a neurotic person who is better at coping with their neuroticism. And that's really what we're trying to become through a lot of this kind of work, right? Where you still have the moment of tendency, but you've scaffolded all of these skills or all of this knowledge on top of it that then helps you deal with that so much more effectively.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that is, is true. Like, I think I just have maybe more skills, more perspective and more experience with resolving negative emotions or just coping with them that I now, I also just don't feel as afraid of negative emotions. Like I, I feel the

I feel anxiety a lot like in my stomach. Like I get like the butterflies and like kind of just like stomach flu feeling from anxiety. And I it's almost like now I still get that feeling, but I'm just like, oh, there it is again. It's OK. Like it's going to pass. You know, like I kind of just I can like ride the waves a little bit. What are some of the things that you tried that you're still doing? And what are some of the things that you were like? Yeah, I'm good. I'm going to leave that one at the door. Yeah.

Oh, that's interesting. I would love to get back to a meditation practice. I really jumped off when the baby was born and I just life became crazy. But like, I'm really trying to get back to normal. Yeah, I'm trying to get back to some version of that. I still feel like the extra version is really with me. Like I really, really prioritize reaching out to people, meeting up with people, having some semblance of social connection every single week.

Like, even though it sounds very rote, I really like if I look at my calendar and there's nothing for the week of like me interacting with people, I definitely make sure to schedule something. I try not to like fall off with human interaction. Yeah, and that's interesting because I think that the that introversion extroversion is maybe the trait that people think of as being the most innate core to who you are, unchangeable, all of that.

I found that one to be one of the easier ones. I found agreeableness to be very challenging, but I found that introversion, I think it's all about finding the balance where you're not pushing yourself so hard into extroversion or into the wrong kinds of extroverted situations.

where you then feel burned out and you feel like I'm never going out again or I'm never going to a party again. I'm never doing that again. You don't want to get to that point. You want to leave the party while you still got juice in your tank. You know what I mean? For sure. So yeah, I don't know. Maybe that's it. So there's that. Yeah, and something I'm happy to never do. Oh, sorry.

So Judd Brewer, I think, is really smart. And I think he has a lot of good ideas. He's helped a lot of people. We've had Judd on the podcast. I love Judd. I'm sorry. What did he recommend that you didn't like? Noting. I really hated noting. Not the noting practice? Okay. I really hated noting. Because you're not supposed to be like... Poor Judd. I'm sorry. Could you describe noting to people real quick, by the way? Noting is when you get anxious, you're supposed to be thinking...

clenching, tingling. You're supposed to describe what's going on in your body with individual little words. And I find it weird. I don't see the utility and I just never got anything out of it. And I was like, as soon as that chapter was over, I was like, goodbye, noting forever. Sorry. I'm sure Jed will take it with a lot of inner security as well. He should because he's done some great work. Yeah. The kind of principle behind it that I'm

kind of generally aware of is that particularly for people who are sort of divorced from their experience, a lot of judge's work has come out of habit formation work, like working with smokers, working with people who struggle with different kinds of consumption issues. And sometimes people who are so habitual about that have essentially become totally disconnected from whatever it is, the behavior that they're doing. So just that kind of simple like, oh, this tastes like

fill in the blank, this behavior is what I'm doing right now, can be helpful for people. But I think that some of these interventions are developed for people who have a big issue around something, not for somebody who's trying to go from the 30th percentile in neuroticism to the 80th percentile in neuroticism, you know what I mean? So I do kind of wonder occasionally about the interventions that we develop in terms of how they scale to people who are at different points on the spectrum.

Yeah. So I will say that I think Judd's program works really well for people with panic attacks, which is like not primarily my form of anxiety. Like for better or worse, like I get anxious and then it's just sort of like, what if this happens? What if that happens? What if this happens? Like, and it's sort of all cognitive. It's not like a...

full panic where I like in the few times that I have had that kind of panic, some of the noting and other stuff from from unwinding anxiety, Judd's program that has been helpful. So one of the things that people will try is.

in the pursuit of changing their personality is psychedelics. People have been talking about them a lot. A lot of prominent podcasters talking about their toad medicine adventure or their psilocybin trips or whatever else. In the book, you talk about taking a relatively small amount of psilocybin, if I'm remembering correctly, and having kind of a cool experience with it. But that was sort of the end of the road for you. What was that like?

Yeah, so this was actually not quote unquote for the book. Like I did it like years and years ago. And it was basically just I wanted to see what it was like and open to experiences. And so I took it was a small, very small dose. And I did. I don't even know if you call it hallucinate. It's more just nature and colors and like the world seem more vibrant. Yeah. Kind of almost like kind of throbby or like pulsating.

Like as I as I passed flowers, like they seem to like kind of just really like bloom like just for me. And I was like, oh, that's cool. And I like really enjoyed being in nature for like a couple hours. And then but then it kind of faded and I didn't really have any lasting impact anymore.

And sometimes I should say that like for some of these psychedelics, it is a placebo, but it actually still works or it could be a placebo. Like we don't totally know, but for some forms of them or for some doses, it could be that the person's experiencing a placebo of

feeling like their trauma is healed. But I mean, to me, like that's kind of fine. Like if you psyched yourself out. Yeah, I'm right there with you. Yeah. Like if you're like if you convince yourself that you're feeling happy, then good for you. Like a lot of people like really try hard to do that. So you could argue that half of the therapeutic approaches that we have are like trying to talk somebody into feeling a different way about themselves. Yeah.

Right, exactly. What's the difference here, really? Yeah. So why didn't you try anything else?

Oh, a bigger dose. Or whatever else. Yeah. It's just really hard to do good psychedelic studies and research. Yeah. Starting with it's illegal is like a reasonable place to start. Yeah. Like it's illegal. Like it's impossible to get anywhere. You would have to. I don't know. And I just to me personally, like the element of it being illegal and like not monitored in any way, like adds to it.

around it rather than like lack of oversight. Yeah. Yeah. It makes it feel less cool and like safe healing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Just just broadly. I mean, if you feel if you're trying to work on your on your anxiety and you're engaging with an activity that feels anxiety provoking, that's probably not the way to go necessarily. Yeah. Yeah. But I did talk to someone who was part of an MDMA study and did experience a lot of healing from that. And she had a lot of trauma. So it's definitely something that like

to the limited extent that it's available. Like I think people, especially if they've tried other things could explore.

One of the pieces of your book that I got the most excited around was some of the back-of-the-neck, pick-in Buddhism pieces of it, and particularly the exploration of not-self as part of the work that you were doing. Because throughout this conversation, I've sort of nudged us toward the like, "Hey, how did you change your self-concept?" aspect of this whole thing, in part because it's a personal curiosity of mine and we've been talking about it on the show. And also, I do think it's really the crux for people.

Like the being-proceeds-becoming aspect of this, that kind of like existential investigation that people do. Was there something that you learned through that process that really helped move the needle for you about any of this or just created more like openness inside of yourself? You know, I think I just started to realize that a lot of who I thought I was was based on...

Based on what exactly? So it was like stuff that quote unquote important people had told me about myself. And it was like important to me at the time. Honestly, a lot of it was like people from past relationships I was in like that had said I was or was not a certain way. And I'm not even in those relationships anymore. Like I was like, why am I still defining myself by myself?

these things that I was told by like guys who didn't care about me then and who I don't even talk to anymore. Yeah, we're so infected by the people that we spend time with. Absolutely. Yeah. Like I just I just felt like I was carrying around or like stuff that my parents had said to me over the years and like,

I was sort of like, is some of this even true? Was it ever true? And is it still true? So I got to ask you, I don't mean to cut you off. What triggered that process of you asking yourself, wait, is this really true? Because I think that question of like, is this really true is the crux question for so many people. And so the question then becomes like, how do we get them to that? Like, what helped you begin that investigation of going back through and kind of going, wait a second, huh?

Because like I was facing all of these scary challenges. You know, I had a book contract, so I had to like do things. Yeah, sure. Totally. You had a good idea for a book. Right, right. Okay, great. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, so you have to go to improv. And then like the immediate thought I would have is like, I can't do improv because I'm blah, blah, blah. Like insert story that I...

had from my past. And then I had to sort of be like, okay, it's true that someone who is totally not funny and not cool and not chill and not a performer probably can't do improv very well. But is that true about me? Is it true that I'm not funny and not cool and not chill? You know what I mean? Or who decided that? And what is the evidence that I have that that's still the case? I don't know. And so for me, it was a lot of sort of...

I'm very analytical. And so I was like, as I was facing these challenges, I had to like investigate whether it was true that I wouldn't like it or wouldn't be able to do it. And if so, why did I think that was true? So you had a natural curiosity and a natural, I mean, you're a journalist. Makes sense, right? And so you kind of turned that lens on yourself and that really helped you explore some of these questions is to kind of say it back to you what I'm hearing.

Yeah. And so the same thing happened when I was thinking about becoming a mom. And like one of the things that was scaring me was like, I was like, I don't think I'm a baby person. Right. And because I had decided that baby person equals like chipper, high pitched voice, always like cuddly and cooey. You had a model. Yeah. Yeah. Like I was like, a baby person is is like this. People say I'm not like this. People say that I am like this.

mean, straightforward, too blunt, not emotional, you know? And I'm like, well, but is that, am I really like that? You know? And then honestly, like after my son was born, all I ever did was like coo at him and cuddle him and use a high pitched voice and like,

do all that stuff anyway, because like other people bring things out in you that you didn't know that you had. Like you face these social roles and you kind of step into them and you rise to the occasion. So you don't necessarily even have to have all that stuff, even if you think that you don't. Yeah. You're describing a kind of beginner's mind, basically. Yeah. Like you were willing to say, oh, I have this belief, but is that belief true? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And

You know, if during this interview we could come up with the answer to how you get people to that moment of going, "But is this belief true?" That would be like a breakthrough experience and I doubt we're going to get there because I just think that that's the secret hub of the wheel for so many people through this kind of a process because we're carrying around all of these assumptions that we have about who we are, how the world works,

you know, what a mom looks like, whatever it is. And so a huge part of the process for people is getting to them to a point where they're comfortable questioning those assumptions. And that was a huge part of my own journey with the personal change that I've gone through in the last decade or so. I had all of these assumptions about myself or about other people. And eventually somewhere in there, I just became more willing to question them and to kind of doubt myself, but in a positive way.

Yeah, I mean, the other people that I interviewed who had a personality change

also started to question. Yeah. Doubt themselves in a positive way is like exactly the way that I would put it is like, it's like, do I need to be drinking a case of beer every night? If so, why do I need to be doing that? Like what is going on for me that I feel that I need to be doing that? You know what I mean? I don't know how you get, I think like that was just like the pandemic started and he had more time to like sit around questioning this person that I'm talking about who was doing that. But like,

I don't know how you get people because he didn't really hit like rock bottom. He was still functioning in its sense. But I don't know. I think sometimes you just have to reach that point of what if I do things differently? We'll be right back to the show in just a moment.

Now, back to the show.

As you're going through this, you're probably grappling to some extent with the nature part of this whole equation. So we know that personality is based on a variety of complicated things. As near as we can tell, it's 50-50-ish, 60-40-ish nurture nature, depending on where you want to kind of draw the lines in this whole thing.

And I think that people really wrestle with the aspects of who they are that they feel like they can't change. Like, I'm just stuck with this thing. And man, I so see, you know, my mom or my dad in this aspect of my personality. And I just, I don't love it, but I feel like it's part of who I am. Was that a piece of it for you at all? Yes. So both my parents are very, very anxious and depressed. And I think what makes that especially interesting

is like exactly what you said, which is like you see elements of your parents in something that you do that you don't like. And it's like an extra like, oh, I can never change this. Like it's from my father. Like, you know what I mean? Like it's like this, it feels like this epic thing that you're stuck with, right? Because like... This legacy of whatever and it's, you know, now it has arrived on your doorstep. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's like the inheritance. And like...

And like, you know, it's like two people who are five feet tall are not going to have, you know, a seven foot child. We all know how heredity works, you know. But at the same time, people are malleable and the human mind is malleable. And they might not have a child who's 70, but they might have a child who's five, five, you know, or like.

whatever, like some other height that's not their exact height. And I think that's really where you have to keep the focus is with that 50% that is within your power. Because even that kind of a

amount is a pretty significant amount that can make you feel pretty different from day to day or can at least help you cope with problems that come up differently than, you know, your parents did. You know, if we all just like replayed our parents' exact lives, there would be like no new people, right? Like people would never do new things. No one would invent the iPhone. Like,

You know what I mean? So like we all have the capacity to do things slightly differently than the previous generation, even if you still struggle with certain things that you inherited. Plus, you also like inherited some good things from your parents. Like almost everyone did. And now you're on the other side of that equation as a new mom. Exactly. Yeah. And now I see stuff in my own kid that I don't like about myself. And I'm like, ooh, sorry for that, man. I am so sorry. Yeah.

So you wrote an article fairly recently about becoming a mom and having it just kick off this whole other possibility phase of personality change in your life. How's that? How's that been for you? Well, I would say

I would say that it has even more fully decreased my neuroticism because it really does give you perspective. I feel like there is nothing new to be said about being a parent. Like, I feel like everyone has said everything that there ever will be. I think you're probably right. Like, there's just no new thoughts. You could fill so many libraries with just books on parenting. I know. Like, it's just like everyone has said the exact same thing. Like, it's like the most unusual or like unlike any love you'll ever know. Like,

So this is not a new thought, but I really do think it gives your problems perspective and it gives your life perspective. And you, I don't know, you do kind of feel like this incredible joy moment to moment. That's not like what you felt before. And I, I like a big part of, of, uh,

emotional stability, which is the opposite of neuroticism, is like positive affect. It's like, do you do you have positive things in your life? Kids are are positive things in our lives like they they do help you see the world differently. And I don't know. I think that that has been unexpected for me because I was very anxious throughout my pregnancy and also during postpartum.

like those early months. So for me, that's been kind of an unexpected and positive thing. Have you seen some of the fruits of the work that you've done on personality change in your ability to be a parent?

Yeah. So I would say I was really concerned about my agreeableness. Like I basically was like, I don't want to ever yell at my like hypothetical kid. I don't want to, you know, ever like I don't want to have like an angry home. Basically, I was really concerned about that. And I think for me, the yelling has like not really come up yet because he's like not old enough yet.

I'm a little bit. I know I'm like a little bit concerned that like as he gets older, the first time I like really yell at him, I'm going to be like, whoa, I feel so bad. You know what I mean? Because I know it's going to happen. But also like a big part of agreeableness is apologizing.

The self-awareness that you're describing, I think, is a huge piece of the puzzle already. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like, you know, the mending is like a big part of agreeableness. I'm like happy that I went through like learning about that so that I can apply it in the future when I do eventually yell at him for something.

Yeah. I think the biggest insight from most of the research that we have on functional relationships, a lot of this comes from John and Julie Gottman, but there are a million other relationship researchers as well. They're just kind of the very famous ones, is that essentially conflict is inevitable. There's nothing you can do about it. You're going to yell at your kid. You're going to get mad at your partner. It is what it is. The question is what happens afterwards. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I

I think that was like very important for me to learn. So you mentioned the neuroticism going down as part of becoming a mom. Is there anything else that you feel has just like really shifted an aspect of how you experience yourself in this? Extroversion for me has continued to stay really high. Like I especially really like to connect with other moms. Not just for like, is this poop a normal color? But like...

I don't know. It's like such a unique experience that I really, really...

I don't know. I like to... I'm getting a glimpse into a possible future for myself here. You don't have kids? I don't have kids. It's a lot of Googling the poop. I'm sorry to tell you. I'm just going to tell you right now. Thank you for setting my expectations appropriately. Yeah, I just, I gotta warn you. Yeah, I have a long-time partner and we don't yet have kids, but we're thinking about it. But, you know, having the community appearance is really important. And it's another trite thing, like everyone says, but like,

To me, that has been a big game changer as far as my willingness and my eagerness to build a community of other moms. What have you learned about yourself through this whole process as you've not come to the end of it? Obviously, you're kind of at the beginning of being a mom, but come to the end of this whole investigation of personality change. Okay. I'm going to say something positive because I feel like my whole book is very self-deprecating. Okay.

like I can do hard things like I can take on things that feel like insurmountable and that has been like very edifying I guess or like it's been yeah it's been it's been like jet fuel and in a lot of ways and I like but I think that's true of so many people and I think so many people don't appreciate that about themselves.

That would be like when both both through the book and through motherhood, especially like I I really, really thought like everyone else can handle a motherhood. Everyone else can handle it, but I can't. And for me, like learning that I can handle it has been has been pretty significant.

I think that's a great lesson. I really appreciate you doing this with me today, Olga. This has been a ton of fun to talk with you. I've really enjoyed it. Is there anything that you would like people to know at the end here about where to find you, where to find your work? You can find my book, Me But Better, wherever books are sold. And you can find my newsletter at olgahazan.substack.com. And I'm a writer at theatlantic.com. Thanks so much for doing this. Really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

I had a great time talking today with Olga Hazan. She's the author of the new book, Me But Better, The Science and Promise of Personality Change, and she's a journalist for The Atlantic. And we started by talking about how changeable our personality is. For most of the history of psychology, or of what you could kind of generally refer to as things related to psychology in the West, the general view is that personality couldn't really change that much.

William James, the godfather of American psychology, wrote in The Principles of Psychology in 1918, in most of us by the age of 30, the character has set like plaster and will never soften again. And that view that your personality pops out a certain kind of way

changes a little bit, and then establishes itself by your mid-20s or so and doesn't really change much from there, really was the dominant idea in Western psychology for most of the past hundred years.

These days we know that the brain continues to grow and develop until at least around the age of 25 or so, and it retains some degree of plasticity throughout the rest of your life. And there's research that suggests that certain personality traits actually change the most later on in life, particularly the trait of agreeableness that we talked about quite a bit throughout the show. That changes the most between the ages of 30 and 60, while openness tends to decrease as a person ages.

As near as we can tell, about 30 to 50% of our personality traits are genetic, and the rest is based on some combination of nurture, environment, your experiences, the people you surround yourself with.

All of that. The traits that Olga focused on in the book were the big five personality traits. This is the most research-driven perspective on aspects of personality that you'll find in Western psychology, and it's the acronym OCEAN. That's openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. And at the beginning of the book, Olga scored quite low in three of those. She was pretty low on extroversion. She was more of an introvert.

She was pretty low on agreeableness, and she was pretty high on neuroticism. And that combination of traits, high neuroticism, low agreeableness, low extroversion, is pretty closely correlated to the least functional, least happy people. And so Olga was very motivated to change those traits in part because she wanted to become a mom, and she was concerned about the impact that some of those traits might have on her future kid. One of the themes that emerged throughout our conversation was how the ways that we think about ourselves.

The ways that we frame our internal model affect how we show up in the world. They affect how we act. There's this great section in the book where she writes, "I had always felt unusually neurotic, introverted, and disagreeable. Over time, I stuck those labels to myself proudly, and I mostly lived by them, even when doing so made me miserable. I avoided anything that didn't suit my personality perfectly.

For instance, for years I almost reflexively declined to socialize. Rich, that's her now husband, had to invite me to his happy hour group a dozen times before I agreed to make an appearance. You're an introvert, remember? I'd tell myself as I watched TV alone again.

These are what we call core beliefs. This is the framework that she's carrying around about what kind of a person that she is. And what we see a lot of the time is that our behavior flows naturally from those beliefs. This is a bit of a problem because the way that we change personality is by adopting new behaviors that can then plausibly lead to new beliefs. So we've got maybe a little bit of a catch-22 here. We have behavior that flows from the beliefs that we currently have.

Well, we change those beliefs by changing our behavior. Well, then how do you change your behavior if your beliefs about yourself are stagnant, right? And this was a question that came up a couple of times during the conversation. And I kept asking Olga in different ways about, okay, what kind of preceded that moment for you? What helped you do that?

And what she mostly pointed to was her openness. This was a pretty high score for her. She was doing well on openness. She was pretty interested in the world. She had that journalistic mindset, and she was able to kind of turn it on herself. Critically, she started asking, "Wait a moment. Where does this belief come from? Why do I feel this way about myself? Is this actually deeply true about me?

Or is this just a belief? And importantly, is this just a belief that was kind of given to me by other people, by that boyfriend that I had a decade or two ago, something my parents said to me when I was younger? Wait, is that really me?

Or is that just an assumption that I've started to make about myself? And I've reinforced that assumption through my behavior over and over again. And wait a moment, maybe if I start just kind of feeling a little differently about myself, thinking a little differently about myself, and then taking on some behaviors that maybe would support those differences, wow, at the end of that process, I could really radically change my sense of who I am.

To simplify this, Olga had beginner's mind. She had a curiosity about herself and uncertainty if the views that she had were really actually fully true or not. And she was able to turn that light on herself in a way that allowed her to explore who she actually was underneath it all.

So, okay, we have to practice a new way of being in order to have that way land in us as stable personality change. So what are we actually practicing? What are we doing? Well, you can practice extroversion by going to an improv theater class, which she writes about quite a bit in the book. It's fun to read about. You can practice agreeableness by volunteering in different ways. We talked about some of the systemic issues that Olga encountered in the process of trying to do that.

But practicing not being neurotic feels a little tricky. And the advice that she mostly got about that was to adopt meditation and to experiment with some aspects of kind of secular Buddhist psychology or secular Buddhist philosophy. And Olga actually got a lot of mileage out of that whole process, which was very gratifying for me personally as somebody who leans that way myself and has also gotten a lot of mileage out of it. And I also thought it was really nice how...

An extremely rational, very thoughtful, science-minded person like Olga came to a moment where she went, you know what? It's just kind of nice for me to have some of those philosophical, almost fortune cookie-esque phrases bouncing around my head that I can refer to when I'm having a moment where I'm getting down on myself.

that it's actually really helpful to have an understanding of what you could call the double arrow. We'll call it like the two darts, the first dart and the second dart on the podcast. Sometimes this idea that we add all of these pains to the inevitable suffering that we encounter in everyday life. Just knowing that, just having that kind of philosophical perspective bouncing around my head is itself helpful. That can sometimes be enough on its own.

having a sort of underlying sense of the philosophy behind not-self experiences, around there not being some kind of stable, coherent internal model that

is inherently true and authentic, and it instead being this kind of swirling, collected mass of experiences, and we can go out and have different experiences and allow that to change that swirling, connected, unstable mass, that that's really a much more authentic version of the person that we are.

and how that view itself creates more flexibility, creates more openness, creates the possibility for change. Whereas the view that we're just this sort of coherent, stable entity moving through time, inside of that, there's really not a lot of opportunity for change.

We talked a bit during the conversation about some of the different things that Olga tried. She talked about ACT and talking to Steve Hayes. She talked about noting Judd Brewer's work, which comes from Unwinding Anxiety and some of his related research. Shout out to Judd and Steve. It was fun to hear her talk about those experiences because we've talked to both of them on the podcast in the past. Then at the end of the conversation, we talked about motherhood. Olga became a mom pretty recently. She has a young child and how that process has, if anything,

just accelerated everything that she's done with personality change.

And I actually thought there was this really beautiful arc to the whole conversation that we had culminating in what you said at the very end, with this feeling of you can do it. This feeling of a kind of self-belief that had been cultivated over time for her. Because we started at the very beginning with me asking her a question along the lines of like, "Wow, did you impress yourself? Or are you proud of the work that you've done? Or how do you feel about yourself based on all of this?"

And she started very understandably kind of self-effacing and sort of like, "I don't want to come across as very aggrandizing in this process." But I actually think that that inner sense of yourself as being somebody who can do this stuff

is so core to this whole process. And that's really what we're trying to build up in a person a lot of the time, particularly in therapy through different kinds of therapeutic work with people. We want to develop the sense inside of somebody that they're the kind of person who can solve their problems, that they're the kind of person who can go out into the world, try something new, do hard things, and not be destroyed by this whole experience.

That's actually this really essential part of the process. And I think it's sort of unfortunate that we've developed this cultural view that anytime you say like, "Yeah, I was proud of myself for that," or "Oh yeah, I did feel like I was good at that," you're supposed to be bombarded by shame or just really be maximally self-effacing. We're all supposed to be kind of nonchalant and disinterested. Nobody is ever supposed to actually feel good about something that they did. And man, what an upside down way

to think about yourself and to think about other people when the truth is that the most important resource to develop in life or one of the most important ones to develop is the sense that you are a person who can do what you need to do to get where you want to go.

I hope you had a good time listening to this one. I had a great time talking to Olga. Again, her book is Me But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change. And as a quick note, you spell her last name K-H-A-Z-A-N if you're looking for her work online. If you've been listening to the podcast for a little while and you haven't subscribed to us yet, please subscribe. We would really appreciate that. And you can also find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com/beingwellpodcast.

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