Buy ME, BUT BETTER

I’ve been taking a daily, low dose of Adderall for much of my professional life. Do I have ADHD? I’m not sure. I have trouble focusing on things that are boring or repetitive, which is an ADHD symptom, but it’s also a symptom of being human. I got a prescription for the regular, immediate-release form of Adderall from a bonafide doctor back when my job was editing endless, dry op-eds about Iran, and I continued filling it when my job became reading endless, dry scientific studies and white papers about health insurance.

Subscribe now

For a dozen or so years, I chugged along, medicated and productive. Adderall helped me slog through the more boring parts of journalism, and it also gave me more energy so I could do my job for longer stretches of time. Back when I had to write multiple articles a day, I wouldn’t get tired after the first article. I could just hop right back on the content train and do it again. I didn’t take it while I was pregnant or breastfeeding, so don’t come after me, but my dose was always low enough that I barely noticed its absence, especially when compared with all the other ways pregnancy f***s with you.

The only big side effect I noticed was that, when the drug started to wear off at 5 or 6 at night, I would sometimes get irritable. Usually, I would just get mad at and snippy with my husband, but occasionally I would snap at other people, too. It bothered me, and occasionally I would go off Adderall for a few months to see if I could just stop yelling at my husband permanently, but I’m not exactly a ray of sunshine anyway, so it never really worked and I missed being able to get work done, so I inevitably went back on. Plus, after my son was born, there was pretty much no way to do the 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. parenting; 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. paid work; 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. parenting-but-everyone-is-crying gauntlet other than being on stimulants.

When I took personality tests, including for my book, this periodic crankiness showed up as low agreeableness, the trait associated with warmth and empathy. I had to answer truthfully that I sometimes got angry and annoyed with people—I did!—and that gave me a lowish score on agreeableness. I worked hard to change this score for my book—and I ultimately did so—but it wasn’t through not taking Adderall, it was through a bunch of other activities described in the book.

I never gave much thought to this connection until earlier this year, when I had my standard appointment with my psychiatrist, and I mentioned the irritability to her.

“Have you considered extended-release Adderall?” she asked.

I had not.

“Some people find it doesn’t make them as irritable as the immediate-release kind,” she explained.

I noticed the change within days of making the switch. Extended-release Adderall is a slower burn, so instead of releasing all its juice into your blood stream in one big surge, it does so slowly throughout the day. The ER formula didn’t give me as much energy as the other variety, but it also didn’t make me nearly as short tempered. I still get in fights with my husband, but only about 20 percent as often. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that switching Adderall formulations completely changed my personality to be more agreeable.

I bring up this story because people often ask me what the “line” is between personality and mental illness or neurodivergence, and if something can be “cured” with medication, does that make it “not really” your personality, or is it still your personality but the medication is covering it up in some way?

My answer is that I don’t think it matters! All kinds of prescription drugs can change your personality in ways both good and bad. One study found that Paxil reduced peoples’ neuroticism and boosted their extroversion, over and above their change in just depression scores. Wellbutrin can make people more positive and sociable, aka extroverted. Stimulants like Adderall improve many of the behaviors that make up the personality trait of conscientiousness, which basically amounts to getting shit done. The main way that I describe people becoming more open to experiences in my book is through taking psychedelics.

If medication helps you feel better in some way, or at least better in more ways than it makes you feel worse, I think it’s worth taking (in consultation with your doctor, void where prohibited, etc.) The point of my book is that your personality is not some inborn, unchanging thing that you have to zealously protect from outside influences. It’s in some ways the result of those influences. If you feel like you have a better personality with the help of pharmacology, that’s not cheating. That’s science.

Share

Re-upping an announcement: I’m working on a new book about professional jealousy! If you’ve struggled with being professionally jealous, or you used to be and got over it, or didn’t get over it, or if the jealousy motivated you in some way, or if you’ve realized something deep about professionally jealousy that you’d like to share, please get in touch, I’d love to interview you.

Email is the best way: Olga.Khazan@gmail.com.

You CAN be anonymous and so can your current/former employers.

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

One thing about being a parent is that I’m tired all the time. This is one of those things They tell you before you have kids, and They are absolutely right about that. Good job Them.

My husband and I were recently asking each other if we want to have another kid, and I mentioned that I don’t think this is a good idea because we are already so tired, and he said, “I’m actually as tired as I can possibly be, and therefore I can’t get any more tired, so why not?” Seems like solid logic when you’re running on three hours of sleep.

We often don’t get enough sleep because our kid is sick, or we’re sick, or because we went to bed at 11 and tried to manifest him sleeping until 7:30, but he chose to wake up at 5 instead. We are tired even when we get enough sleep, though, because having a toddler is like running a marathon inside your house all day while someone yells at you. There is just something about the sequence of snacks-legos-playground-repeat that is not replenishing.

Two-plus years of constant tiredness have taken its toll on my personality, and I’m not alone. Studies have shown that sleep deprivation can change your personality, at least temporarily.

Subscribe now

Mostly, sleep deprivation reduces your positive mood and increases negative mood, which in personality terms means it increases neuroticism, the trait associated with anxiety and depression. Sleep deprivation also makes you less social, or extroverted, because it impairs the parts of your brain that help you interpret other peoples’ social intentions. And this can become a self-reinforcing cycle: In one study, people were less likely to want to engage socially with a sleep-deprived person because something about them just seemed … off. The authors of that study referred to sleep deprivation as “a social repellant,” in case your toddler wasn’t already killing your social life enough as it was.

Bizarrely, sleep-deprived people become less likely to help other people, as measured by things like charitable donations, which is scary considering how under-slept new moms are and how helpless and needy newborns are. This would imply a decline in agreeableness, the empathetic, touchy-feely trait.

Many of these findings feel true for me. Day to day, I feel less bubbly and outgoing than I did before having my son, and in general I tend to notice more problems and issues than opportunities or good things. (Though I was always sort of this way.) I still really enjoy socializing, but it’s harder to get me out of the house to do something, and my tendency to assume people don’t like me has gotten worse.

One major thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve almost completely stopped making jokes or writing in a funny way, which was a quality I thought was a big part of me up until now. The way I put this to my mom’s group when my son was a colicky 2-month-old was, “there used to be a lightness within me that’s never there anymore,” though this bleak picture has improved a lot with the end of the colic and the start of the Zoloft. Though I can still recognize funny stuff, it’s much harder for me to produce humor, I think because my brain is laser-focused on not falling asleep while standing up.

The good news is that all of this can be undone with what scientists call “recovery sleep,” which just means sleeping a bunch to undo whatever it is that four daycare viruses in a row did to you. When study subjects are allowed to sleep as much as they want after several hours of restricted sleep, they tend to regain their normal levels of cognition, social functioning, and mood.

The more “in debt,” sleep-wise, you are, the more sleep you need to get back to your normal self. But eventually, you will. And then, who knows, maybe you’ll have another kid because you’ll forget how bad it was the first time.

Finally, an announcement: I’m working on a new book about professional jealousy! If you’ve struggled with being professionally jealous, or you used to be and got over it, or didn’t get over it, or if the jealousy motivated you in some way, or if you’ve realized something deep about professionally jealousy that you’d like to share, please get in touch, I’d love to interview you.

Email is the best way: Olga.Khazan@gmail.com.

You CAN be anonymous and so can your current/former employers.

Share

ME, BUT BETTER, my book about personality change, is out now. If you haven’t yet, please pick up your copy today. And if you’ve read the book, it would mean the world to me if you could leave an Amazon review. Thank you!

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

My paperback is out this month! It has a spiffy new cover, in case the only thing keeping you from buying the book was the cover. To mark the occasion, I’m putting out a list of the 10 most interesting things I’ve learned about personality in the course of this now years-long project:

1. People who have experienced some negative life events—including serious setbacks like injuries and divorce—seem to have better mental health than people who have experienced either lots of adversity or no adversity at all.

2. There’s probably not a big, global decline in conscientiousness, the trait that’s associated with dutifulness, timeliness, and organization.

3. There’s no one way that parenthood tends to change people’s personalities, but “signing up to be a parent is signing up to have a lifetime of some degree of depression and anxiety,” as one therapist put it to me.

   Subscribe now

4. When it comes to professional success, your personality traits matter more than socioeconomic status or parental income, and nearly as much as your IQ.

5. People who are conscientious don’t actually rely much on willpower or self-control; they just aren’t as tempted by various bad-for-you vices.

6. People who become parents tend to be higher on extroversion and lower in openness to experiences, a trait that’s essentially creativity and nontraditionalism.

7. Over time, Americans are becoming more open to experiences and more extroverted.

8. Neuroticism, the trait that is associated with depression and anxiety, is negatively correlated with cognitive ability, contra stereotypes of the moody genius.

9. In one study, Russians said that friends are people who interact with each other frequently, fully trust one another, and can say anything to one another without worrying about how the other person will take it. Meanwhile, Canadians saw friendship as a “reflection of a person’s social skills.”

10. You can change your personality, and doing so doesn’t mean you don’t love yourself. <3

Share

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

I will confess to being a small-talk hater who constantly small talks. If you find me at a bar or playdate or party surrounded by new people, I will invariably be soft-interviewing whoever I’m talking to, asking about where they’re from, where they live now, what they do, and what they think of the weather we’re having.

Does this make me want to gag? Yes. Do I know how to break out of this cycle? Absolutely not.

Don’t get me wrong, I know all the tricks to “deep talk,” and I write about them in my book. I’ve read approximately 400 nonfiction books that are all titled something like TALK TO PEOPLE: THE POWER OF ACTUALLY LEAVING YOUR HOUSE AND ENGAGING WITH ANOTHER HUMAN BEING. I know about the “36 questions that lead to love” (which are actually just 36 questions that a couple of psychologists have found lead to greater emotional intimacy—not love—in lab settings.) I know about Nick Epley’s research. I know you’re supposed to ask strangers “when is the last time you cried?” instead of where their kids go to school.

Yet I cannot bring myself to do any of this. The reason is that what I hate even more than small talk is when people think I’m weird. And when I try to enter “deep talk” territory, people often react very negatively, in a way that makes me want to retreat back to weather-and-vacations-land.

Subscribe now

To name just one example, many years ago I was part of a group of early-career science writers covering a scientific conference in California. For whatever reason, they had all of the writers eat their meals together as a group. One night I broke into the dinnertime conversation with, “Do you guys ever think about how we think we’re helping people with our journalism, but we’re actually not?”

There was about a three minute silence that followed, and then everyone suddenly felt very full and tired and excused themselves. (I realize this was basically the Barbie “do you ever think about dying” scene, but I didn’t go on a fun vision quest afterward. I just remained a weird curmudgeon.)

To help me reconcile my impulse to be a dark, brooding Slavic person with my impulse to have people actually like me, I recently spoke with Harvard Business School professor Leslie John about her new book, Revealing, which is all about the power of sharing more in social settings. She explained why it is that we stick to small talk even when we prefer deep talk, and why negative reactions to oversharing—like everyone wrapping up that dinner quickly—might not actually be as bad as we think. She also explained how to overshare in the right way.

An edited excerpt of the conversation is below, but you can find the entire thing in the video above or wherever you get your podcasts.

Olga Khazan: I think I’m a little bit of an over-sharer, and something I think about a lot is, why does it feel risky to share more than just small talk? So when I’m at the playground, my toddler’s playing, I’m talking to other moms, it’s almost always the weather, where our kids are in daycare, when we move to this area, like very, very surfacey stuff. Why does it feel riskier to go beyond that?

Leslie John: Lots of reasons. One of them is that when we do go a little far, say something a little cringy, we get immediate negative social feedback, like someone cringes. And that really hurts, you know, the negative social feedback we get when we go a little bit past the line. And we remember that, right? We live in fear of that. And because we dread that feeling, we tend to censor ourselves. The tricky thing, though, is that someone can have a cringy reaction, but also admire you for it. They can also feel like they trust you more, and those benefits, you don’t get that visceral social feedback in the way you do the negative ones.

Olga: What are some contexts in which it might be wise to share more than we usually do or might be initially inclined to? And I’m thinking specifically about something like the playground or the office or in a friendship or something. Where are places where you find that saying more is valuable?

Leslie: My gut reaction to your question is almost every context. It wasn’t until I wrote the book that I actually internalized the stuff and started using it myself. And so I would just keep practicing and trying out new things and almost everything I did that was revealing went over well. One of them was that there was a acquaintance of my husband’s and we went out for dinner and I was talking to his wife and I thought, “I really like this woman!” Normally wouldn’t say that, but I just said to her, “I really like you,” and now we’re really good friends. In the past I’d be like, “I seem needy.” Now I kind of go, as my grandmother would say, “nutty noodle” with compliments. I praise people. And in academia, that’s super weird.

Olga: I was wondering if we could talk about the risks of over-disclosure, because you have this example in the book of someone who tells an acquaintance, not a close friend, about a situation where there’s only one first-class ticket and two people are flying somewhere, and so she tells her husband, if you give me the first-class ticket, I’ll give you a blowjob later.

And the acquaintance was really put off by this. I don’t know that that would have bothered me that much. I would have been like, “that’s a weird thing to say,” but I wouldn’t have cut that person off. But can you talk a little bit about why that was too much and what is the line between just enough and too much?

Leslie: I think it was too much because it was out of the blue. It was this giant step. And if you think about, especially in new relationships, people are exquisitely sensitive to the kind of disclosure dance you’re doing, the back and forth.

You don’t want to take too big of a step. So you start off making small talk talking about how good the champagne is and then it’s like blowjobs on an airplane. That’s that’s like giant. The rule of thumb there is when you’re with a new acquaintance is to match their level of disclosure or the next level move is to go a little bit deeper. You want to get deeper, but you want to do it together and gradually.

Olga: Why is small talk so boring? If you think about it, it’s mostly what we do. So like, why do we find it so boring?

Leslie: Well, it’s boring because there’s no risk in it. I think what makes talk interesting and deep and meaningful is the risk. And that’s kind of the paradox because with risk comes reward, but risk sucks. But I do think as a behavioral scientist, I know that there are cognitive biases we have that that make us be overly conservative to make us under share. If we go back to this idea of the overreaction to risk of the negative impact of revealing, we feel that viscerally. We live in fear of it. And so then we we never go deeper, and then so we never get practice going further.

The more negatively valent stuff is inherently more risky, it’s inherently more sensitive, but that’s also where the magic is.

Olga: I want to talk about social reappraisal and why it’s so powerful. I saw a demonstration of this just yesterday. I was having kind of a panicky spiral about something, and I have this friend who I call when I’m in a panicky spiral and you know, she’s always like, “think of it this way” or “here’s another way to look at it.” And I find that so soothing. So first of all, maybe define what it is and talk about why it’s so powerful.

Leslie: Social reappraisal is when you say something that’s bothering you and the person you’re talking to helps you think about it in a different way. And that’s really powerful because having someone else say it to you makes it more credible. It gives you perspective. So studies have looked at what is the best thing for your friend to say in response to you. What is the best kind, most helpful kind of social reappraisal?

The number one thing is simply validation. Is simply saying, “that sucks, I hear you.” “That must’ve been so hard.” Those, they seem kind of fluffy and vacuous and woo woo those statements, but my gosh, they’re so effective.

Share

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

Quick housekeeping note: I was supposed to publish this closer to Valentine’s Day, but because I have mom brain, I accidentally scheduled it for the same day as another post. To give Sonja’s book the air it deserves, I thought I’d re-up it today.

I’ve had phases of my life where I knew and interacted with hundreds more people than I do now, yet I nevertheless felt a lot lonelier.

High school is one example: Every day, I was surrounded by more than 2,000 people who I could have technically been best friends with. But—because our prefrontal cortexes were still mushy, and because I wasn’t great at social interaction, and because no one else really was either—I was actually close with very few people.

I knew a lot of people, but I wasn’t known. I felt like I mostly was trying to shape-shift my way into being accepted by people who I barely understood. What do they want me to say? What do they want me to do? I often felt like the people who tried to “get to know the real me” were actually just trying to convert me to Christianity. (Some of them were successful! At least in the short term.) It felt like one big reporting trip, where I was gathering material for some unwritten book by observing what everyone else was doing, but not actually engaging in the world around me. As a result, I have very few friends from high school. I keep in touch with literally two people (shout-out to Lauren and Caitlin!).

Lots of people feel like this at various stages of their lives. Maybe it’s not high school; maybe it’s middle school. Maybe it’s a sorority that it seemed like a great idea to rush but turned into a viper pit. Maybe it’s a job where everyone was treated “like family” but which actually meant that everyone was treated like shit. Hell, maybe it’s a monogamous, romantic relationship where you felt like you could never really drop the first-date manners and just be yourself. The point is that simply having lots of people in your life is no guarantee that you’ll feel seen, heard, and, well, known. In order to do that, you have to really get to know the real people around you, and they have to get to know the real you.

For this week’s podcast, I sat down with Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at UC Riverside who, in the forthcoming book she co-authored with Harry Reis, How to Feel Loved, explains that it’s not simply physically being around people that makes us happy, it’s having people in our lives who accept us as we are, because we accept them as they are. In our conversation, we talked about how to see people as their whole selves, so that they can see us that way, too. And so that we can feel loved.

Subscribe now

The full conversation is above on video and in your podcast apps, but an edited excerpt is below:

Olga: I’ve followed your work for a long time, and I interviewed you for my own book. You're like the OG happiness researcher, so I'm very excited for this conversation.

My first question might sound obvious, but it’s key to everything that follows: Why is it important to our well-being to feel loved?

Sonja: I’ve been studying happiness for 36 years, and it took me a long time to realize—although it sounds cliché—that the key to happiness is feeling connected and loved.

If I back up for a moment: My lab has been developing what we call happiness interventions since 1998. These are essentially clinical trials where we prompt people to practice happiness strategies, such as expressing gratitude, doing acts of kindness, or acting more extroverted. Under the right conditions, these practices reliably make people happier.

A few years ago, it hit me that almost all the interventions that work do so because they make people feel more connected to and loved by others. Writing a gratitude letter to my mom makes me feel more loved by her. Doing an act of kindness for a friend or colleague makes me feel closer to them.

I then talked to Harry Reis, my co-author and a prominent relationship scientist. And I asked him, what does he think is the secret to happiness? And he said, “I don't really know, but I know that the difference between people who are really happy and who are unhappy is that happy people feel loved.”

Olga: I’ve noticed that too. Every time there’s a book about the longest-living, happiest, healthiest people, it turns out they have huge families, tons of friends, and they socialize a lot.

Sonja: Yes—relationships. But something important to note is that you can have tons of friends and you can actually be loved, but not actually feel loved. So that's why our book is really about how to feel loved. Because most people, when we ask, “is there a relationship in your life right now where you don't feel as loved as you'd like to be?” The majority of people say, yes, there's at least one relationship like that. And that's really the key, because you can be lonely, surrounded by people

Olga: Can you elaborate on that? I liked a line early in your book: “When you actively show another person that they are seen, valued, and cared for, you initiate a cycle that naturally leads you to feel more known and cared for yourself.” Can you talk about the science of feeling loved versus just knowing a lot of people?

Sonja: We argue that to feel loved, you need to be known—and you also need to make the other person feel loved. If you want to feel more loved, you often have to start by making the other person feel loved.

We all walk around with walls. Those walls protect us, but if they’re too high, no one can really know us. Because I’ll always wonder, “if they really knew me, and they knew all about my strengths and weaknesses and faults, then they wouldn't really love me.”

And so the key is really to be known and then to become known, you need to share, you need to listen. And so a lot of our book is about how to get to really know the other person, and the idea is that they will reciprocate and try to get to know you.

Olga: You use a compelling metaphor in the book: the relationship “seasaw”—spelled S-E-A. Can you explain it?

Sonja: The “sea” is because we’re submerged in water. Imagine a seesaw partially underwater, with you and me on opposite ends. Most of us are submerged—we only show the tip of ourselves, often our positive qualities. Because often when we're interacting with other people, we want to impress each other, right? We tend to hide our shortcomings and our contradictions and our weaknesses.

And then the idea is if I really truly pay attention to you and I show genuine curiosity in you, and I ask you questions about your inner life and the details of your day and what is really going on with you, that that's gonna make you feel safe, and you’re gonna trust me and you're gonna be motivated to sort of open up a little bit. I'm pressing down on the seesaw and I'm lifting you up a little bit out of the water and so you're able to show a little bit more of yourself.

And then you reciprocate. Reciprocity is very, powerful. It’s very hard for us to do something and then not reciprocate. And then you will hopefully reciprocate and then show that genuine curiosity in me and ask me questions and truly listen and show warmth and acceptance towards me. So then you lift me up in the water. So we're lifting each other up out of the water.

Olga: The water being the cold water of small talk?

Sonja: Or you can think of it as tip of the iceberg is the part we're showing. Underneath is the part that we're not really showing to each other.

Olga: You write a little bit about chemistry, and I thought that was interesting because a lot of times people say you have it or you don't with someone, kind of like “we didn't have any chemistry” or “the chemistry wasn't there,” usually in the dating context. How can you actually create chemistry or responsiveness with another person?

Sonja: Sometimes there really isn’t chemistry, and that’s okay. But often it grows from responsiveness. Harry Reis’s partner responsiveness theory shows that relationships thrive when people make each other feel understood, valued, and cared for.

That comes from truly listening, following up, and showing genuine interest. It’s surprisingly rare. That dynamic when you’re truly curious and listening to each other and asking questions and also showing warmth and care. I think that that’s where you can build chemistry.

Olga: I’m later gonna rag on myself, so I’m gonna brag a little bit. I am a good question asker because of my job, and I often find that people don’t ask me good questions in return. Is that because we just don’t ever really learn how to ask questions unless you literally have to do it professionally? Why is it that this skill seems to vary so much?

Sonja: I’ve been on dates where I’m asking like questions, the guy doesn’t ask a single question. I’ll even call it out sometimes. I’m like, “do you realize the last 45 minutes you haven’t asked me a single question?” Sometimes that ends the date, which may be good riddance, right? But yeah, I guess we don’t learn. I mean, I tell my kids, “if you want to make friends, show interest in them and ask them a lot of questions.”

Of course, if you’re only asking questions, then it’s sort of asymmetric. You have to kind of ask the right question at the right time, right? If it’s too probing right away, then people are going to, the walls are going to come right back up again. Maybe you sort of start small, but I think we all have to remember that we all want to be seen and heard. And we would love for people to show interest in us.

Olga: In addition to being good at asking questions, I am also awkward. And so I’m gonna ask some questions for the awkward among us. So one of the things that you talk about is disclosure, and this concept that you can’t just hide your cards completely, you have to share a little bit about yourself to the person you’re trying to bond with and be a little bit vulnerable.

I guess I’m wondering how to apply this in various situations. For example, you talk about choosing topics that are likely to foster connection or match your disclosures to the situation. And that’s one I really have trouble with. I’ll tell my birth story in the grocery checkout line. And I’m just a huge oversharer, but other people are not. What’s a way to disclose without being TMI or just too much.

Sonja: That’s where that emotional attunement comes in, right? Small talk is a little social lubricant at the beginning. Start a little small/medium, and then you really watch the person. Do they seem interested? Do they seem a little awkward? Is it a little uncomfortable for them? And then if it’s uncomfortable, then you don’t want to go farther at that point.

So it’s maybe something like if they ask, “how are you?” Instead of saying, “I’m fine,” you might say, “well, I’m kind of struggling today” or “I had a rough day today.”

Watch for people’s reactions. Are they like looking away because they’re they’re not listening? Are they following up? And then maybe sometimes you ask them a question so that you can see if maybe they want to share a little bit. It needs to be a back and forth. I know of friendships that actually have ended when one person shares, the other person never shares, and then it’s just so asymmetric that they just can’t continue the friendship.

Olga: Do you think it’s because we’re both Russian that we don’t like small talk?

Sonja: That’s so funny. Yeah, I came to the US from Russia when I was 10 years old. It’s interesting, that might be part of it. I just feel like life is too short for small talk.

It depends what you mean by small talk. If you’re really into basketball and that’s your passion, talking about basketball is not small talk. By deep talk, I don’t mean sharing your deepest secrets or traumas. It’s just sort of having a conversation about something that you care about. It could be a book or movie that you just saw or read.

I have gotten pretty good at breaking that. I was on a date not long ago where we had actually a really good conversation. We actually were talking about the war in Gaza, of all things. It was kind of an intense conversation. It was really interesting, but I just still felt like we weren’t really connecting.

So I said to the guy, “you’re a little intimidating.” And he’s kind of an intellectual powerhouse. And he’s like, “really?” And that kind of broke through. We sort of talked about that a little bit. Suddenly the conversation went to another level.

Olga: You also write about listening more attentively and listening better, for lack of a better word. This is something I struggled with also while was reporting my book, because one of my things that I did was try to have better conversations and to listen better.

But I have a lot of people in my life who I don’t agree with about really important things. Just like huge matters of importance in the country, and I’m wondering how you show a lot of warmth and attentiveness when someone’s saying something you completely don’t agree with, like, “I don’t think you should vaccinate your kids.”

Sonja: I hear you. So, well, this has to do with one of the mindsets that we talk about in our book, which is called the multiplicity mindset, which is this idea that we’re all a quilt of both positive and negative qualities. I can be loyal and kind sometimes. And sometimes I’m selfish and narcissistic. We all have that. And so the idea is that we see both ourselves and other people in all of their messy complexity.

You can make someone feel understood and heard without agreeing with them. And you can think about a therapist talking to say, a severely depressed patient who feels they’re worthless and hates themselves. They don’t agree that that person is worthless, right? But they respond in a way that makes them feel understood. Like they understand why they’re feeling that way and what’s going through their mind.

So the idea is that you listen and you show curiosity. And actually curiosity is almost like the balm, like the salve to so many things. Where imagine during a fight, like you’re fighting with your spouse and they’re really angry, and instead of being angry back at them you actually show curiosity. You’re like, wow, “I wonder why they’re so angry like that.” You’re really curious. Same with the friend who doesn’t agree with you on something. Why do they believe that? Try to make them feel like, “I understand where you’re coming from but I don’t agree with you.”

Share

ME, BUT BETTER, my book about personality change, is out now. If you haven’t yet, please pick up your copy today. And if you’ve read the book, it would mean the world to me if you could leave an Amazon review. Thank you!

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

I was going to start this post by saying that for me, making new friends is like “pulling teeth,” but then I realized that I would rather go to the dentist than to try to make a new friend.

Other things I would rather do than to awkwardly text someone I just met, “hey, want to get together sometime?” include:

• Go to that dentist and get a root canal

• Just stay in my house and watch the Pitt. Twice.

• Sleep-train another baby

• Write multiple blog posts about health insurance

• Write an entire book that contractually requires me to make friends, so I have no choice

  Subscribe now

The thing I’m trying to get across is that, I really, really dislike the early stages of friend-making. Especially the part where you’re just cultivating acquaintances, texting them a lot, trying to make plans that will appeal to people you barely know, driving there, looking for parking, trying not to talk about your kid too much, trying to drink enough to be fun but not so much that you seem like an alcoholic.

All of this feels extremely vulnerable and scary to me. It brings to mind middle-school lunchtime, when I would scan the cafeteria for faces that look friendly, or at least not hostile, and try to white-knuckle through the next 30 minutes. As an adult, when meeting someone new is optional, I can almost always convince myself to skip it.

This tendency of mine has negatively affected my life in multiple ways. I actually have very few friends. I lived in D.C. for 20 years, despite never liking it, because I was always afraid that if I moved somewhere new, I’d have to make new friends, and oh God no anything but that. I worry that my kid will turn out to be weird because he’s just always around his parents and never sees us talk to anyone but each other.

Don’t get me wrong: I actually really like having friends. It’s one of my favorite things about being alive. Once I actually get to the bar or indoor playground or wherever we’ve decided to meet up, and I get out of my head a little, 99% of the time I end up having a great time. I like having people over, and going out to dinner, and going to parties, and lunch, and calling just to chat. I like knowing people. It’s the getting to know them that’s hard for me.

However, readers of my book and this Substack will recall that I recently moved to Florida, and this has necessitating making new friends, because—in a surprise to me—none of my friends from D.C. decided to move to Florida with me.

So I have come up with a trick to get myself to “put myself out there” and “meet more people”—and I think it might work for other people staring down a difficult-to-initiate-yet-ultimately-good-for-you task.

It’s to treat it like exercise.

Ok, hear me out. You know how when you’re feeling really lazy and cozy on the couch, you really don’t want to get up and go to the gym? But once you get to the gym, working out feels actually pretty good? You get in the flow of whatever you’re doing, you’re listening to your music, you’re maybe getting some PRs, and life doesn’t feel so bad? And afterward, you get a runner’s high or weigh-lifters high or maybe even actually high if that’s how you roll?

When it comes to doing hard things, you have to coax yourself off the metaphorical couch with how you’ll feel once you’re doing it, not how it feels to start.

A lot of things in life are like that. I really hated basically every moment of pregnancy, but—and this is a cliche, I know, but it’s a cliche for a reason!—seeing my baby son smile at me for the first time made it more than worth it. Starting a new hobby feels awkward and difficult at first, but can quickly become rewarding and fulfilling. (Case in point: I dreaded driving to improv for the first few months that I did it, but loved actually being in class.) A run that seems difficult and boring can turn into an energizing break. For me, the agony of texting someone to hang out quickly fades during the fun of the hangout itself.

I’m not sure what your version of this is. It’s probably not “texting potential new friends,” because I’m getting the sense that I’m a special snowflake in this regard. Maybe it’s cleaning your house. Maybe it is actual exercise. Maybe it’s a creative project that you can’t seem to bring yourself to start a new Google doc for.

Whatever it is, don’t focus on how you feel about getting started. Focus on how you’ll feel 20 minutes in, or two months in, or 20 years in. Then acknowledge—begrudgingly, if you must—that the only way to get there is to start.

Share

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

I’ll be honest that when I first encountered the concept of personality change, all those years ago, one reason I was skeptical about it was that I thought personality was genetic, and you can’t change something that’s genetic.

One of the biggest things I wanted to change about myself was to lower my level of neuroticism—my tendency toward anxiety and depression. But both my parents are very neurotic, and I’ve been neurotic since I was a kid. This wasn’t some learned thing I picked up at some point in adulthood; this was inborn. (To name just one example, my dad is so anxious that he once declined to buy a car manufactured near Hiroshima, Japan, because he worried that a particle of the residual radiation from the atomic bomb dropped there in 1945 might somehow have nestled into the glove compartment, and, upon the car’s arrival at Pat Lobb Toyota in Texas, would jump out and give him instantaneous, fatal cancer.) And well, you can’t change your genetics, right?

It turns out that’s only partly right. First of all, genes only determine about half of your personality, and the genes you do inherit from your parents can make you surprisingly different from them in unexpected ways. And it turns out you can change some things that are genetic. To understand the relationship between genes, personality, and behavior, I recently sat down with University of Texas psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden. We talked about her forthcoming book Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness, a fascinating exploration of the genetic influences behind supposedly “sinful” (or societally maligned) behavior, and what that says about how we should think about other peoples’ bad behavior—and our own.

Some excerpts from our conversation are below, and you can listen to the full version above, or on Spotify.

Subscribe now

Olga: I wanted to start off by asking this question that has underpinned a lot of my research on personality, which is, how much are you doomed or blessed, depending on how you look at it, to be like your parents?

Paige: Most of the time when people think about genetics, they think about genes as something that can make you similar to your parents. And that’s true, but your genes can also make you different from your parents. So you only got 50% of your genes from each parent. Personality is this really interesting thing where it’s both highly tied toward genetics and we might be very different from our parents in terms of our personality.

If we’re thinking about traits, like let’s say like Huntington’s disease. So Huntington’s disease is a disease that’s caused by one gene and you only need one copy of it from one parent and then you’re definitely gonna get this disease, right? So in that way, it’s a gene that makes you a lot like your parent in having this particular disease because there’s only one factor that causes it.

Most complex human behavior and personality is influenced by thousands upon thousands upon thousands of genetic variants, and their effects seem to both depend on each other and depend on the environment, such that just by reshuffling your parents genome, which is what happened when each of this was conceived, could lead to a very, very different product.

So what you find is that identical twins who have the exact same genome, so they inherited all of the same ingredients, tend to be very similar for their personality. But as soon as you step down to even just fraternal twins or full siblings, you start to see that they’re not that similar at all, and they’re not that similar to their parents. And that’s because those genes are operating in interaction, and they’re operating in interaction with the environment. And so … I inherited this bit of DNA from my mom to am I similarly irritable if I haven’t had enough sleep? Not necessarily. You don’t necessarily get that same connection because personality is influenced by so many things that can interact in different combinations.

Olga: You include in your book one of my favorite quotes from Andrew Solomon, which is: “There is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production.” Once you have a kid it really hits home that, “wow I did not reproduce myself. I created a whole new person with all of his own opinions.”

Paige: I have three [kids] and I have them with two different partners. So my two oldest are with my first husband and then I have a three year old with my second husband. I’ve produced three children and they’re all different from me and they’re also all different from each other and their fathers. And when you have one, you’re like, this is what happens if me and my partner combine. And then you have another one and you’re like, this is a random draw from the same potential pool of genetic material, but these people are nothing alike.

Olga: One thing that you mentioned early in your book is one of your studies where you created this genetic score for, it sounds like bad behavior, and you found that less than 20% of people with a low score on this bad behavior genetics were ever arrested for a crime compared to nearly 40% of people with a high score. So tell me a little bit about what that score is and what that’s actually showing.

Paige: What we did in this paper, which we published in 2021, is we looked at a variety of behaviors ranging from things that are considered disorders, so like an alcohol use disorder or ADHD in childhood to things that are not disorders at all that are just normal range human behaviors, but are things that are stigmatized or are moralized or things that maybe someone who has very conservative values might think is a wrong behavior. Things like having sex at a younger age or having sex with more sexual partners. And what all of these things have in common is that people persist in doing them despite negative consequences. So early frequent sexual behavior is stigmatized in the United States. Alcohol use disorder has negative consequences. Children with ADHD do things in school that get them in trouble. And so what we’re looking for is genes that are associated not just with one of these things, but with all of these things. So they don’t just affect how your body metabolizes alcohol, they are associated with an increased risk of drinking and smoking and having sex at an earlier age and having ADHD in childhood.

So then we took those genetic variants and we applied those results to new groups of people including this longitudinal study of American adolescents who are no longer adolescents, they’re my age, but they’ve been followed since they were in high school. And saw, what other things are these genetic variants associated with? And they were associated with what you would think. So they were associated with sexual behavior, with drinking, with smoking, but also with aggression, pulling a knife or a gun on someone, ever becoming arrested.

Someone says I shouldn’t be doing this and I’m doing it anyway. And am I doing it anyway because I can’t stop myself or because I don’t care that you think it’s wrong or because the reward I think I’m going to get out of this is more valuable to me than any negative consequences that I’ll see. One way to think about this in basic terms is just sort of punishment sensitivity, right? And so that’s the genetic index that we’re trying to capture here.

It’s not deterministic, right? If you’re born with these genes, you’re not destined to become someone who’s committing some sort of criminalized behavior. But it is predisposing you towards doing things that might violate rules or that might have negative consequences and sort of being indifferent to those negative consequences.

Olga: So it’s impulsivity plus not being very sensitive to punishment?

Paige: Theoretically people talk about it as a combination of disinhibition and antagonism. So disinhibition is I’m doing things that are impulsive without regards to their future consequences to myself, right? So I’m having condomless sex at 15 without regards to the fact that this might, you know, risk pregnancy or disease. And antagonism is doing things without regard to the negative consequences for other people.

Olga: So you say that it’s not deterministic and I’m wondering, is there something you can do if you have that constellation of genes or have that predisposition? Is there an Ozempic for this disinhibited renegade behavior?

Paige: Our current best evidence for things that prevent really harmful forms of disinhibition among children who are high at this genetic risk come from adoption studies. And it seems to be a combination of things that are actually going to be really familiar to anyone who’s ever read a parenting book, which is not being really harsh and reactive in your own discipline and also being warm. So warmth, positive reinforcement and praise for self-control or for pro-social behavior for all children I think is more effective than harsh punishment for unwanted behavior but that seems to be especially true for children who have this kind of genetic liability towards disinhibition.

But … there is not a medication that a psychiatrist could prescribe that child. There’s ADHD meds and there’s anti-anxiety meds and there’s depression meds, but there’s no pharmacological treatments for conduct disorder, which would be psychiatry’s label for this. And I think the really tragic case of Rob Reiner’s family exemplifies this. All the reporting suggests that Nick Reiner struggled with not just substance use problems, but also aggressive impulses and sort of this impulsive aggression from the time he was a child and a teenager. And this is a family that had a lot of resources and tried a lot of treatment strategies. And that still didn’t prevent this really horrible outcome in which he has been arrested for murdering his parents. And I think that speaks to how few resources there are, maybe relative to some other disorders that onset in childhood for treating children who then become adolescents who then turn into grown-ups who really struggle with this persistent not just disinhibition but also antagonism.

Olga: You also write that genes influence religion and religious adherence. And I wanted to talk more about that because I also grew up in the South like you did. And I know a lot of people and knew a lot of people who grew up very religious. And then it was funny because they would grow up and then maybe stop being Christian, but then they would get really into yoga or really into Buddhism and be like this is actually the thing. And I’m kind of like, “you’re just doing it again except with a different idea.”

Paige: Yeah, I think that some people are extraverted joiners and then they replace, you know, kickball leagues with the church or vice versa. They have a “religiously musical mind” is one of the quotes that I have in the book.

I was raised evangelical Christian and then as many people in our generation have, left the church of my youth in my 20s. My dissertation was on differences in religiosity between twins. And what you see is that in early life when your parents are dragging you to church, it’s the shared environment that predominates.

Olga: So what you’re saying is people start out very similarly religious to their family of origin, but then it kind of branches off based on the influences that you encounter throughout your life?

Paige: Yeah, it looks, a lot like personality. What we see for religiousness, which is that people are very similar, regardless of their genetic relationship to their siblings in childhood, and they become less similar in adolescence. And then as they move through young adulthood, especially in some religious traditions, like the one I was raised in, there’s so much emphasis on individual belief. And I think that can be hard to manufacture if you don’t have the disposition for it. And so people start to drift into their own kind of idiosyncratic spaces, which might be a reflection of their own personalities and not their family upbringing as they move into adulthood.

Olga: You also write, genes make a difference, but genes are not usually destiny. Can you elaborate on that?

Paige: Yeah, so there are genetic differences, rare variants of large effect or big chromosomal abnormalities. Like Trisomy 18 or Down syndrome, where if that happens, it’s going to overwhelmingly affect your life.

Most genes though, most of their genetic variants, are not like that. Most of what we’re talking about is common genetic variation that changes the probability of something, but in combination with other things. So I give this example in my book where I talk about this Texas couple who had a beloved bull named Chance. And it was like this gentle, docile bull. And then it died and they cloned it, right? So you have a clone of this animal with the exact same genotype, but different mother, different epigenetics, different other things. And then they named it Second Chance, the cloned bull. And it gored its owners twice.

They just kept being like, well, we had a docile bull and we’d cloned it! And that’s a cow, right? Like that is a cow that we can rear under exact rearing circumstances with the exact same clone genotype. And you end up with a different level of aggression.

And think how much more complicated people are in terms of their socialization and rearing. So, you know, I think whenever people are tempted to think about genes as destiny, they should think about Chance and Second Chance and how well that worked out.

Olga: It’s like that movie Multiplicity where each successive copy, he gets weirder and weirder. You had one description about gene-environment interaction that I really liked, which was, “Children genetically predisposed toward faster development in toddlerhood elicit more cognitive stimulation from their parents, which in turn predicts faster language development by kindergarten, a gene➞development➞environment ➞development feedback loop.” It’s like our genes kind of elicit ways of people treating us that then influence us even more.

Paige: Yeah. So my, would say my most extroverted child genetically is my third one. And we took her to Italy with us when she was like a year old. And we would be sitting on the subway and she would just like find someone to look at and just smile at them. And so everywhere we went the whole week was like Italian grannies, also teenagers, but also like Milanese businessman just being like, you’re so beautiful. And I just thought, “she’s having an experience of the world in which everyone is smiley and she’s smiley and people are such a source of reward for her.”

This is this is the gene-environment feedback loop that builds personality in real time. I’m watching it happen in real time that you have this tendency towards positive affect and it elicits something from the world. Like if I got on the subway I would not be like everyone is beautiful, life is beautiful … that would not be my experience of the world, but I wouldn’t be putting out that energy that like gets that experience either.

It’s amazing how evolution has equipped us to build each other and to build ourselves in community. We have this initial program and then it’s scaffolded by living in society, living with other people. And it snowballs in these interesting ways.

Olga: I also don’t have that energy, and in fact, when I’m in public people often ask me what’s wrong. But good for your daughter, she’s gonna be the captain of the cheerleading squad. At the very end, you ask this very poignant question which is, a lot of times when we talk about how much our genes influence our lives or our behavior, the real question is, can I change? And I think that was ultimately the question I was wondering about: My parents are both super neurotic and I’m neurotic, can I change? If something is genetic, can it be changed?

Paige: It’s a very common association that genetic means unchangeable and environmental means changeable. And if we stop and think about that for five seconds, we know it’s not true, right? Like we know that there are people who’ve had very severe childhood trauma, and that’s environmental, but it’s really hard to recover from. And we don’t have an obvious solutions to make them feel better. And people might have a genetic set point for being higher weight, and we give them a pharmaceutical.

So the relationship between genetic versus environmental and changeable versus not changeable is not nearly as straightforward as is commonly assumed. Why do we have that assumption? My speculation in the book, one of the things I invite readers to consider is that it’s very Christian of us to think that way. Even if we weren’t raised Christian, this idea that our flesh, our genes, are the things that are weighing us down and holding us back and are insurmountable without divine salvation is an extremely Augustinian way of viewing the flesh and of viewing the self. And I think that even if we aren’t personally steeped in that tradition, we are intellectually all steeped in that tradition.

And so what would it be like to think of our bodies as also a source of virtue and not just vice, also a source of change and not just stagnation. I think it would require us to revise some really deep seated cultural narratives about the relationship between our identities and our bodies.

It’s very American of us to think about “how can I change myself” versus “how can we collectively change the way that we’re operating such that myself fits better within this system,” right? Like do we want to change the ADHD child or do we want to change the way that classroom demands are set up so that more people can flourish within them. So I think it’s the combination of our Christianity and our individualism, and I’m saying that culturally, our cultural individualism and our cultural Christianity that really keeps like dragging people down to this, “because it’s genetic, I can’t change it. And if I can’t change myself, I’m doomed.”

Share

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

Right around this time of year in my industry, the Content Gods demand their annual sacrifice: A piece about arguing with your family at Thanksgiving/Christmas/other holiday celebration. The presumption is usually that the family member is a yokel conservative and that the reader is a liberal who has come down from Correct Mountain to educate his brethren. Some of these stories focus on how to win the argument, while others focus on how to side-step the argument by entering more innocuous terrain (what’s in these green beans?). Still others focus on the cause of the fighting or on how to recuperate after going four rounds with your aunt about zoning reform.

But I would argue (heh) that what’s even better is to not argue about politics in the first place. In all likelihood, you’re not going to change your family member’s mind. (Reams of studies show that facts don’t change peoples’ minds.) What’s more interesting is to try to learn more about why they think what they think.

The idea here is not that politics don’t matter—in fact I think they matter a great deal—but that there is a lot of stuff inside all of us that is more interesting than the political positions we’ve chosen to represent it. Often, getting people to explain that stuff is a better way to change minds, in the long run, than one-on-one debates. When you tell your therapist something like, “everyone hates me,” which is obviously wrong, she doesn’t say “No! Some people like you.” Instead, she’ll say something like, “why do you think that?” That’s because that question is where real growth happens.

Subscribe now

Much of the time, peacefully navigating conversations across ideological lines comes down to figuring out why someone is telling you the controversial (or just plain wrong) thing they’re telling you. Getting at this deeper motivation is often the quickest way to stop arguing about the facts of a topic and start learning more about their underlying motivations, which is usually a far more interesting conversation.

Sure, your grandma might have crazy-sounding opinions about (insert your pet issue here.) But how did she come by those opinions? What news does she read? What does she make of all the contravening evidence that has come out? Is there any evidence that she feels would prove her wrong? What does she hope will happen if the people with her point of view prevail? All of these, to me, are more fascinating lines of inquiry than “how can you be so wrong?”

In reporting my book, I learned one way to maneuver through these kinds of conversations in improv class. Improv famously operates on the “yes, and” principle—that you should say “yes” to whatever your scene partner is doing and add something else. But what to do if, in real life or in improv, you just can’t cosign whatever your interlocutor is saying?

Let’s say someone in an improv scene comes at you with an insane statement: “Washington is run by a cabal of Satanists who drink the blood of children.” Instead of saying something like, “you sound crazy!” or “yes! let’s go stop them,” you can try to figure out what the other person wants to accomplish by telling you this. You’re listening for the intent behind their words, rather than for the content. It’s possible they want you to agree with them about the Satanists, but underneath that, they probably just want to feel seen. Saying something like, “I see you want to share this with me because it’s important to you. Do you feel like people often don’t understand you?” allows you to accept the underlying bid for connection—and move the conversation forward—without agreeing with their beliefs.

Another way you can do this is by asking what a certain experience or idea means to the other person. I learned this from Georgie Nightingall, a conversation coach who facilitated a workshop I attended in London. At the workshop, we paired up with a partner to talk about a recent vacation we took. But rather than grill each other about the details of our itinerary, we’d ask what certain elements of it—the country we visited, or the museums we saw—meant to us. Being asked why we we’ve always wanted to go to Portugal or Greece, or wherever, led to a much richer exploration of our inner selves than a straightforward recounting of all the different wines we drank.

This might sound cheesy, but asking someone what a Trump rally meant to them, for example, might yield a more interesting answer about their motivations and values than would debating them about Trump’s policies. I saw this myself when I did a profile of a January 6 insurrectionist who is also the florist in my hometown. (By way of explanation, I’m from Texas.) I’m sure we could have filled the entire four-day reporting journey with just me telling her over and over that it was a bad idea to participate in January 6. But what was far more interesting—both for the story and for me personally—was to try to understand what she sees in Trump, why she traveled to the Capitol that day, and what she hoped to gain from the experience. Not to excuse her actions, of course, but to understand what animates people like her.

This all fits with recent research on how curiosity is a better approach for discussing politics with your ideological opponents than a “debate-me bro” attitude. “Curiosity provides us this mechanism of connecting with each other while at the same time honoring each other’s autonomy,” Spencer Harrison, a professor of organizational behavior at the European business school INSEAD, recently told the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. Curiosity doesn’t mean accepting defeat; it means you’re more interested in learning about the other person than you are in being right. And really, what could be a better gift than that?

P.S., good news: You can increase your level of curiosity.

Share

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

I recently moved, and it was among the most stressful things I’ve done in my life. We have a toddler, so moving involved finding someone to be “on” him constantly while we packed and unpacked, as well as finding him a new daycare, and trying to set up his room as quickly as possible so we didn’t disrupt his routine too much.

Then there were the typical address changes, logistical challenges, and the uncertainty over whether we would sell our old house. We also don’t know anyone in our new town and don’t have a “village” here, so it’s not like we could throw back beers with old friends while we slowly unpacked together. The first few weeks were a lot of tense days in which one of us opened boxes while the other watched our kid. (Not pictured: The surprise norovirus that swept through the house the first weekend.) We have to find all new doctors, dentists, and other service providers. I basically feel like I launched myself into outer space, and while it is cool and I like it here, it is also scary.

BUT, I also feel like I can handle it. It’s been a little more than a month now, and I more or less feel settled. Occasionally something will come up with our new house or our new town that is challenging or unexpected, but I can usually figure out how we’re going to deal with it pretty quickly. (Our dryer broke right as we were moving in, for instance, but our landlord was good about it.) I have socialized a few times, and my kid seems to like his daycare well enough. We FaceTimed his old nanny recently, and it was sweet but he didn’t have a meltdown or anything. We’ve found some local spots that are fairly welcoming to toddlers, and I’m working on making mom friends.

All in all, if I do say so myself, I’ve handled this objectively stressful thing rather well. I’m falling to pieces a lot less than might be expected for someone who was in the 94th percentile of neuroticism just a few years ago.

And I think this is because, just 20 months before we moved, we did the actual most stressful thing we’ve ever done: We had a baby.

Subscribe now

I had the kind of birth and newborn experience that, in earlier eras, was said to “build character.” (Today we’d probably just say it was traumatizing.) I had planned a natural birth, but ended up having an emergency C-section because of a problem with my placenta that endangered my baby. Then he went to the NICU because of a problem with his breathing. Then we came home. Breastfeeding didn’t work. The pump made my nipples bleed. He never stopped crying, especially when we held him. It’s like he hated it when we touched him. I have no idea what it means to do a “contact nap” because if I was holding him, it meant he was screaming. Then he turned four months old and he was diagnosed with a rare and somewhat disabling genetic condition. Then I had to go back to work.

I remember being so stressed out during this time that I would cry to the point of dry heaving. I would drive around shoveling Chick-fil-a in my mouth while dissociating and sort of hoping I would get hit by a car. At one point I asked my husband, “did we just ruin our lives?”

But though I wish, for my own sake, that I’d had a better newborn experience, I do think, in retrospect, that enduring that stressful period benefitted me. Research is beginning to show that, though serious, unrelenting adversity is of course not advisable, short and manageable periods of stress can actually make you stronger. For me, having had the most stressful possible baby-having experience made moving across the country feel like a breeze. And it’s making me see other stressors as more manageable, too.

This theory, which is called “toughening,” comes from Mark Seery, a psychologist at the University of Buffalo, and I wrote a bit about it in this Washington Post article. Seery and others have found that both humans and animals who’ve been exposed to small, manageable stressors are able to face future stressors with more confidence and less anxiety.

In an interview, Seery likened it to physical fitness. If you never work out, you’ll never be sore, but you also won’t grow stronger. Similarly, if you’re never stressed, your mind and body never learn to deal with stress when it inevitably arises. “Things like having to give a speech in public, even though it may be terrifying to begin with, that could develop toughness,” Seery told me. His own research has shown that people who have experienced some negative life events—including serious setbacks like injuries and divorce—seem to have better mental health than people who have experienced either lots of adversity or no adversity at all. In lab experiments, people who have experienced some, but not a lot, of adversity react less negatively to sticking their hands in ice-cold water or taking an important test than people who were untouched by adversity. (Seery said this number is very approximate, but about five negative life events seems to be the sweet spot.) Over time, Seery told me, difficult periods in life “can actually lead people to have this greater capacity to have a more positive response in the face of something stressful.”

I like this theory for two reasons. First, shitty things are going to happen to you, and it’s nice to think they will prepare you for all the other shitty things that are unfortunately also in your future. Now, whenever something annoying or bad happens, I sometimes think to myself, “oh, but at least this is giving me some reps for when the shit REALLY hits the fan.” This is my version of optimism!

But also, it reminds me of my favorite way of thinking about reducing neuroticism, the trait associated with anxiety. Readers of the book will know that bringing down my sky-high neuroticism level was a big part of my personality project, but simply trying to Be Less Stressed didn’t work for me. I care a lot about my work and my family, so anything going wrong in either of those two domains will be stressful for me. I can’t just sit on a mountaintop and meditate it away. Instead, what finally clicked for me was something the psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary told me in one of our interviews:

“Mental health is not the absence of uncomfortable feelings. It’s our ability to struggle.”

To me, a healthy level of anxiety is not the absence of stress, it’s the ability to deal with stress. It’s feeling the anxiety. It’s realizing that this is super unfortunate and you’d really rather it not be happening. It’s, yeah, maybe crying and dry-heaving a little. AND THEN it’s pulling yourself together and doing what you need to do anyway. It’s realizing that, ultimately, you can handle it, even if, like a really tough workout, it sucks while it’s happening. Healthy anxiety is the ability to look at something daunting on the horizon and say, “ugh. Okay, let’s do this.”

Share

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

Whenever we talk about the Big Five personality traits, one stands apart from them all: Openness to experiences. All the other traits are easy to define: Extroversion is, well, extroversion. Conscientiousness is basically “grit” and organization skills. Agreeableness is niceness. Neuroticism is depression and anxiety.

But openness … what is openness exactly? It’s correlated with a bunch of stuff, like being spiritual but not religious, and being sexually adventurous, and creative and art-loving, and educated, and socially liberal, and good with words. But what is the thing underpinning all those other things? Back in the 50s, openness was called being “cultured,” but … whose culture are we talking about exactly?

And once you dig deeper into openness, it gets even weirder. Unlike the other personality traits, very few people say they want to either increase or decrease on openness. The trait doesn’t predict wealth or longevity or health like some of the other traits do. And some cultures don’t even have a trait like openness. They have people who are creative and liberal and so forth, but they don’t call it “openness.”

The guest on the latest episode of Why We’re Like This is Ted Schwaba, a psychologist at Michigan State University and an expert on openness to experiences. He joined me to talk about what openness is, how it benefits us, and how you can increase on openness if you want to—though you probably won’t want to.

Subscribe now

Some highlights from our conversation are below:

Olga: To kick things off, what is openness to experiences?

Ted Schwaba: The really short version would be people who are more creative and more curious and who like learning and who are more intellectual. But there’s also all these fun things that go along with it: People who are high on openness to experience, they feel more awe. They like to be more reflective about their emotions and their inner lives. They really enjoy art and poetry and reading and they’re kind of unconventional and odd. The people who are listening to this right now, they’re learning about science for fun—that’s a super open-to-experience activity.

Olga: Is openness like the same as intelligence? And if not, how is it different?

Ted: That’s actually a debate that’s gone back like 60 years because way back in the day, people were afraid that we’re just going to be studying intelligence if we’re measuring openness to experience. But they’re really not the same thing. They’ve got a correlation of like .2. So on average, people who are more open to experience tend to be a little bit more intelligent. But you probably know people who love art but they’re not the brightest bulbs and other people who are really, really smart and they’re like, “no no no, I don’t want to go to the museum.”

The theory is that a lot of these things go together because open people are curious, so they spend their whole lives learning, and if you spend your whole life learning and you like going to school, then you get smarter.

Olga: I’ve come across a lot of studies that suggest that openness is associated with political liberalism. And I was wondering how strong that association is. Is it true that open people tend to be more liberal? And if so, how does that fit together exactly?

Ted: The correlations aren’t super strong, but they’re not anything to ignore either. They’re about .1 to .2. They’re stronger in the US, I think, than in other places. And it’s mostly with social liberalism, rather than economic leftism. But in the US, you find that people who are more open tend to vote Democrat.

And I think that we might be seeing this increase in terms of like this coupling in the future. This is my hypothesis. We’re really seeing this kind of political polarization play out in the US right now, where people who have college degrees and above are tending to move further leftwards and people who don’t have college degrees are moving further rightwards. And openness is really highly correlated with people’s educational attainment. So if education is starting to go along with politics and openness goes with education, I think openness is going to start going along with politics more.

Olga: Okay, so why is openness not quite like all the other personality traits? And you recently wrote a paper about this that I’d love for you to summarize.

Ted: One of the things that is nice about the Big Five is you can study them all together. But one of the things that kind of slips through the cracks is that when there’s a weird result for like a certain trait, you kind of brush over it. People will say, yeah, most of the time people love to change their personality traits and they really have this desire to change. But we don’t see that for openness to experience. They love talking about “I want to be more extroverted,” “I don’t want to be so anxious and depressed,” “I want to be more organized,” but no one’s like, “I wish I had more sensitivity to art.” I think that’s a really curious finding, but we really haven’t talked about it much as a field because we’re kind of focused on the idea more generally of people wanting to change their personality.

So volitional change is one of them. Deciding on a name is another one. Like all the other big five traits, everyone’s like, oh yeah, extroversion. Everyone calls it extroversion. But there are some questionnaires that call openness to experience “intellect.” There are some questionnaires that call it “open-mindedness.” There are some way back from the ‘50s that call it being “cultured.” The fact that people can’t even agree on a name for it suggests that we’re not really agreeing on what’s inside of it or what it means or what’s going on with it.

Olga: It’s interesting you said people don’t want to increase on openness and that’s so true. All of Nate Hudson’s studies [the studies that underpin my book] say like, “but of course for openness we did not find a result because literally no one picked that one and we have no idea what’s up with that.”

When I was talking to you and I think quote you in the book saying this, you said openness is people “becoming more who they are.” Open people want to become more open and closed people just don’t. Why is it that people don’t really feel motivated to change on this trait? Why is it that this is the one where we’re just like, “I like being where I am on this.”

Ted: Right now we’ve got two theories. One of them could be people are just happy with where they are. If you ask someone who isn’t very creative and curious to do creative and curious things, they’re like, “why would I want to do that? I’m happy how I am.” And people who are creative and curious, they want to be more that way. But there’s nothing punishing you for being how you are.

People who are high on neuroticism, our whole lives are punishment, you know? It’s just like going from one anxiety provoking thing to another. And people who are low on conscientiousness, people are like, “why weren’t you on time? Bad grade, you didn’t turn that in on time.” There’s just not the punishments for lacking [openess], because there really is no “lack.”

But I think another option, and this might be a little less likely, but I think could be the case, is people might have more of this fixed mindset regarding openness. So people might not think that they can become more intellectual, or they can become more curious. They might be thinking, yeah, that’s just how intellectual I am.

Olga: So does openness have any benefits? Is there any upside to being super open?

Ted: I mean, have you ever like read a book and just felt this sense of like awe and just like, “wow, my mind is blown.” I think that that is the reward of openness. I think it’s more this intra-psychically valuable thing. I think that there’s something beautiful about experiencing something that’s totally novel and that kind of changes your conception of how the world can even work. But that’s not going to make you live longer and it’s not going to make you a lot more money.

Share

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

As I write in my book, many years ago, I was not very conscientious. Conscientiousness, or “grit,” is the personality trait that’s associated with being organized, timely, persistent, and motivated. It’s also associated with practically everything good, from living longer to earning more. But at that point in my life, I was bad at adulting, which means I was bad at conscientiousness.

Because I wasn’t in the habit of reading my mail, I nearly threw away the letter that offered me a full scholarship to college, and in grad school I regularly forgot appointments or ran late for interviews (for our silly little school-wide “news site,” but still.) I sometimes let people down because I just wasn’t organized enough to follow through on things. More humorously, I once gave my number to a cute guy, then forgot that I did that, then didn’t respond when he texted me because I thought he was a scammer. (He won me over with “I’m confused why you’re ignoring me because you asked me to text you.” Swoon.)

But as I also write in the book, not long after that period in my life, I changed. I became way more conscientious, through a process of maturing, goal-setting, and frankly, getting better at driving. But one other thing contributed to my increase in conscientiousness: I got my first iPhone.

Suddenly, instead of printing out Mapquest directions that I struggled to read as I sat in traffic on the Santa Monica freeway, I had Google maps talk me through the directions in real time. I had a constantly-updated to-do list in my pocket, and calendar reminders that popped up throughout the day. I could read and write emails on the go, which meant I could let people know if I was running late or had to change my plans.

Years later, my phone has continued to be a conscientiousness tool. Sure, I still waste time on social media, but overwhelmingly, my phone mostly helps me stay on task. If I don’t have my phone, I literally can’t do anything that day because I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.

The fact that the iPhone helped me, and likely lots of other people, become more conscientious sits somewhat awkwardly with a recent Financial Times article that purported that people are becoming less conscientious, and that placed the blame in part on smartphones. “The advent of ubiquitous and hyper-engaging digital media has led to an explosion in distraction, as well as making it easier than ever to either not make plans in the first place or to abandon them,” writes author John Burn-Murdoch. (I wrote about Burn-Murdoch’s analysis here.)

So here we have evidence that people are becoming less organized, because of the very thing designed to help people stay organized. To get to the bottom of what’s really happening with conscientiousness, I recently spoke with Brent Roberts, a personality psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign who has studied conscientiousness extensively. Our full conversation is available on the latest episode of my podcast, Why We’re Like This, and some snippets are below.

Subscribe now

Olga: What is conscientiousness?

Brent: Most people would understand it under the term “grit,” which is a more popular, shorter, and much more effective marketing of the idea. It’s your willingness to work hard and to persist in the face of often setbacks and the like.

That’s one aspect of conscientiousness. Other aspects are whether you keep your desk neat and clean and things tidy around your house. That’s the organization facet. There’s also your ability to inhibit your impulses. So if you really can’t stop eating the cake or something like that, that’s what we think of as impulsiveness, which is the opposite of conscientiousness. There’s responsibility, which is your propensity to follow through with promises to remember those birthdays, to do good things for other people on a schedule.

There’s also kind of a conventional aspect to it, like following rules. So people who really like to follow the rules and will be aware of them, those folks are also higher on conscientiousness. Young people usually don’t [want to be conscientious], but as you get older, you usually do.

Olga: So why is conscientiousness associated with seemingly everything good, like living longer and making more money?

Brent: When you’re a kid, kids who are more conscientious do better in school. So they’re studying, they’re working harder in classes, they’re getting better grades, then they’re getting asked to go to a higher education and they’re finishing their college degrees. It plays out in work where people who are more conscientious tend to be seen by their supervisors as better employees. So they actually perform better on the job. It’s not only work, but it’s also love. People who are more conscientious tend to have more stable, long-lasting marital relationships or just stable relationships.

Then it predicts health. People who are more conscientious … they don’t drink as much, they don’t do as many drugs, they exercise a little more. They tend to listen to what people say about what should be eaten. And so they tend to have better physical health. And then that results in a not-so-confusing relationship with longevity.

And then, of course, because they tend to do things that are rewarded by lots of things in society, either your bosses or partners, they tend to experience better life satisfaction. That combination is pretty profound: avoid problems and get goodies from the world. Money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it does keep a whole heap of trouble off the front porch, as they say in Oklahoma.

Can people increase their conscientiousness and if so, how?

If you believe our studies, yes … Set your goals better, organize your goals better, give yourself some accountability systems so that when you actually achieve things, you celebrate and you actually track what you do. For those of us who are not conscious, though, there’s a follow-through problem.

I have benefited greatly from some of the skills that consultants teach in terms of, like, organizing your to-do list. For years, I did a completely ridiculously stupid to-do list, which was not a to-do list. It was a project list. Which was of course a psychological burden because you never get your projects finished. So every day I’d open up my to-do list and it would remind me of how inadequate I was. I get depressed, close it, try to ignore it. And you know, I went through some of the books. “Oh, so you should do a to-do list each day on things that you’re going to get done that day.” I thought this was amazing until I turned to my wife and asked her about it and she’d been doing it for decades.

And the other idea is getting things out of your head. Not using your own brain to organize all your information. It’s really good to park your brain someplace else … it’s another little technique that works really to make you look a lot more responsible than you really are.

Is conscientiousness declining, as this FT story suggests?

You see it in some cases, sure. Did it happen in the Understanding America study [that the FT used]? Yes. I would not say that the data was wrong or that it doesn’t exist.

The question to ask is, does the effect replicate in other data sets? So there’s this study of the same period that asked a bunch of Dutch people their responses to the yes-no questions on personality inventories. And that sample, starting in 2014, people increased in conscientiousness. And it didn’t actually decrease at all until just recently.

There’s another study called the NLSY, the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, that also tracked conscientiousness during the period.

Lo and behold, did those people go down? No, they kind of went up a little bit, went down a little bit, mostly were flat.

In our data where we track people over a longer period of time, do people start going down in 2014 or so? A little bit, just much smaller. But what was really cool is we have history in that data all the way back to 2000. And you see that actually, people were increasing [on conscientiousness] and that the peak year for people was 2014.

So if you bother to look at other data sets, you don’t see the same pattern. And in the aggregate, there’s nothing so dramatic as to lead you to conclude that people have fallen off a cliff when it comes to conscientiousness.

At this point, given what I’ve seen in data, and it’s across lots of longitudinal studies, at least a dozen, there is no general decline. There is no freefall on consciousness in young people.

Are smartphones affecting conscientiousness?

I mean, don’t want to say cell phones or smartphones don’t have any effect on people. I actually do think they have an effect, but it’s not using smartphones. It’s the damn programs that you use on them that make you feel bad. [Smartphones are] a human nature accelerant. It can do lots of things, but mostly it makes things bigger.

If you take these other samples that had the same young people over the same period of history and you do not see a decrease, it’s it’s a really good counterfactual and it really says, you should not conclude that the easy answer, which is smartphones, is the right answer.

I saw it with my kids where, we had a particular setup where they were in school districts that separated them so they didn’t see each other after school or go to their neighbor’s school. Then they got on social media in some sense, usually Minecraft, and then played each other all afternoon with a group of kids who would have never been interacting. They also had bad experiences with people on that platform, but I also saw them interacting verbally so much more than [I did as a kid.]

Now they text each other. And then they would have a discourse that would be, from my perspective, rich in terms of the social exchange and emotions. They got really good at saying, “hey, you hurt my feelings” and “oh, I’m sorry.” And the sophistication of the social interaction was far beyond a 12-year-old or 14-year-old or something like that. And it was just simply because the base rate of interaction was so much greater.

It’s humans, man. We’re just using a vehicle. So I think the idea to paint all the problems of society into that little box is looking askance to the real problem, which is us.

Share

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

Some news! I’m starting an occasional podcast, Why We’re Like This, consisting of interviews with personality experts who can shed light on, well, why we’re like this! Why do we humans do the things we do? Want what we want? React to adversity in some ways and not others? Fall in love with that person, but not this person. I’m hoping to probe these questions and more from the brilliant minds whose studies I mine for my books and articles.

Subscribe now

Today’s inaugural episode is with Shannon Sauer-Zavala, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. I first interviewed Shannon about her work on something called the Unified Protocol, which is a treatment that aims to help people reduce their level of neuroticism, the personality trait that underpins both anxiety and depression, rather than targeting anxiety, depression, OCD, or another ailment individually. Shannon has since expanded her work to helping people change other personality traits, beyond neuroticism, so I thought it was a perfect time to call her back and talk all things personality change. Plus, we were on CBS together!

In our interview we cover what your feelings do and don’t mean, why replaying anxious thoughts can make you less sensitive to them, and why sometimes, purposefully bringing on anxiety can be good for you.

Some other highlights from our conversation:

Olga: Do you ever get pushback on the idea of personality change?

Shannon: People misunderstand what personality is. They think it's their sense of humor, their values, like their tastes. I could see why you would think that. You know, “it's my essence.” No, it's your characteristic way of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

Olga: When would it be a good idea to change your personality?

Shannon: When there's something that's getting in the way of a client living in accordance with their values, with a particular goal that they have.

Olga: What is the difference between having depression and anxiety and having a neurotic personality?

Shannon: [With high neuroticism], it's not just that you feel anxiety, it's that you make changes to your life. So maybe you start checking to make sure that there's no typos in your email. And then you check again and again. And all of a sudden it takes you 35 minutes to send a two line email. That's where we're starting to see what we'd call impairment.

Olga: Can you talk about like the different elements of the Unified Protocol and how they all come together to help people with neuroticism?

Shannon: [Regarding one part of the UP, called emotional exposures]: There's no better way to show that emotions aren't dangerous, that you can tolerate them, that they're just a part of being alive, than by deliberately bringing them on purpose. And that's exposure, right? So if I want to have a job that requires me to speak in meetings or to give presentations, then I gotta get cool with public speaking.

And so an exposure would be to publicly speak, maybe for our friends, maybe for a bunch of therapists at the practice, and kind of work up a hierarchy until we learn that I can do things even when I feel anxious. Because a lot of times people are like, “well, if I'm anxious, then I won't be able to do it.” And that's not a thing. You do lots of stuff when you're anxious. It's not ideal or it doesn't feel great, but you can do it.

Olga: What is the middle ground between beneficial and non beneficial anxiety? When I was working on my book and experimenting with reducing neuroticism, I was like, “well, if I didn't have anxiety, I wouldn't get anything done.” For people who think like that, what would you say to that answer?

Shannon: If you've always overworked, if you've always double-checked, you don't have any evidence of what happens if you don't. My favorite exposure for working with people like this, is, I call it “do 80 % of your best job.” Do that. It's so uncomfortable. Send an email with a typo.

Olga: How can you help people increase agreeableness, which is a trait that not a lot of people want to increase and that is also really hard to change?

Shannon: [One thing we do is] called dimensions of trust. So we have people list out important people in their lives and then they have to rate them on like, “would trust to pick them up from the airport, would trust to watch my kid, would trust to pay me back … I would trust this person to be supportive and not a jerk if I told them I was upset about something.” Often what we find is that trust is not black or white, that different people in your life can fulfill different roles and you can get your needs met across a breadth of relationships, not just one … And our data suggests that agreeableness increases.

Some resources mentioned on the show:

Big Five Personality Test

Values activity

Share

ME, BUT BETTER, my book about personality change, is out now. If you haven’t yet, please pick up your copy today. And if you’ve read the book, it would mean the world to me if you could leave an Amazon review. Thank you!

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

My son is only 18 months old, but I can already tell what the most challenging aspect of parenting him will be. It’s that we have completely different personalities. He is completely immune to external validation, and I’m completely reliant on it.

Evan, as his occupational therapist has observed, will only do things when it’s his idea. Currently, this is exemplified by his refusal to walk, or even practice walking. He physically can walk with support—quite a long distance, in fact—but he won’t try or even attempt a few steps unless he just happens to be inspired to do it at the time. Getting encouragement from me, his dad, or anyone else doesn’t seem to matter to him.

Subscribe now

I, by contrast, was a very praise-motivated child and continue to be a praise-motivated adult. I did whatever my parents wanted me to do as a kid because I aggressively sought their approval. Today, I still seek peoples’ approval, and when I don’t get it, I abruptly and permanently stop trying. But if I get even a few droplets of praise or positive attention, I can keep going for months! Years! The Crazy Ex Girlfriend song “Love Kernels” comes to mind.

My thing also has downsides. I sometimes have trouble knowing if I actually want to be doing something or if I’m just doing it because I’m getting praised for it. I can drive myself a little crazy seeking validation from people who are never going to offer it. And then there are all the times I don’t get external validation and melt into a puddle of shame like Alex Mack with a general anxiety disorder.

But the parenting world is premised on the idea that most kids care about being praised by their parents. Praise is one of the few tools that “supposed” to work with kids. I’ve written about the power of praise many times as a health and psychology reporter; it’s what you’re now supposed to do instead of spanking or time-out. All of my son’s many therapists and specialists suggest praising him for his walking attempts, and his reaction seems to be “glad you enjoyed it; I didn’t.”

Praise doesn’t work on my kid because he just wants to do his own thing. He’s aligned with his own values, to put it in corporate terms, and his values say “no walking.” So I’ve had to come up with all these ways to psy-op a toddler into thinking that whatever I want is actually his idea.

I haven’t been too successful so far. The short list of successes include:

• Wanting to impress an attractive female friend of mine (he walked across the living room)

• Wanting to impress an attractive female neighbor of mine (he walked down the sidewalk holding my hands) Also, are we noticing a theme?

• My parents clapping and cheering whenever he stood up. This stopped working after a few times.

• Walking holding my mom’s hands to go eat dinner

• Walking down the hallway with me before he realized what was happening and sat down

• Walking holding onto his diaper pail (he loves his diaper pail)

The latest thing we tried is DMI, an unproven and not-covered-by-insurance therapy that involves a full-body velcro suit and basically forcing the kid to stand up. All the sessions so far have ended in him screaming and demanding extra milk to help him recover.

Before I had him, I thought parenting a boy would be hard because we’d have different genders and (probably) interests. I guess those things will become more of a factor later. But something I didn’t take into account was how hard it would be if my kid and I see the world completely differently.

What I’m trying to do is just accept that he’s going to miss the magical 18 month walking milestone, and no amount of praise or validation from me can stop that from happening. He’s just going to walk whenever he’s ready: Whenever it’s his idea. That might be when he’s 2, or even older.

Because of this, he’s going to miss out on a lot of interactions with his peers, who are almost all walking at this point. But I think this personality trait of being so intrinsically motivated will serve him well in other ways. He’ll probably do a sport or hobby that’s rewarding for him, rather than one that allows me to bask in reflected glory. He’ll probably pick a college major that he cares about, not one that is meant to appease his parents. (Unlike me, who spent four years studying something I literally had no interest in.) He likely won’t succumb to peer pressure as much as the average person, and that’s probably for the best.

One thing I learned writing my book is that the personality traits are all a spectrum, and they all have both positive and negative elements. Even conscientiousness, which nearly everyone wants more of, can turn into obsessiveness and anal-retentiveness at its extremes. Having a child who is praise-sensitive is probably easier for the parents when they’re little, but harder for the child when he or she grows up. For now, I’m trying to see the beauty in my son’s personality, to see how stubbornness can look a lot like independence in a certain light.

What about you? Is anyone else super different from their offspring? Does anyone have tips on how to bridge this kind of divide with your kid? Tips on getting them to walk? Comment below!

Share

ME, BUT BETTER, my book about personality change, is out now. If you haven’t yet, please pick up your copy today. And if you’ve read the book, it would mean the world to me if you could leave an Amazon review. Thank you!

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

To win friends and influence people, Dale Carnegie wrote in 1936, you should, “Ask questions that the other person will enjoy answering. Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments.”

Ever since, “ask the other person questions” has been the go-to advice for making conversation. If you want someone to like you, the thinking goes, just ask them a bunch of questions. Women frustrated with self-centered men on dates implore them to “ask me a fucking question.” Much of the dating coaching on Love on the Spectrum involves reminding the participants to ask their date questions rather than to hold forth about llamas or whatever. Etsy brims with “wedding conversation starter” cards for people who get too wasted on the signature cocktail to think of any questions for their table-mates. The philosophy here is that people like to talk about themselves, so the more opportunities you give them to do that, the better.

This advice isn’t wrong, per se. When trying to get to know people, you should probably ask them some questions. But like that other Carnegie advice—to use the other person’s name early and often—this can become creepy and annoying if overused.

In fact, as I learned reporting my book, a far more effective strategy when getting to know strangers is to make statements.

Subscribe now

I actually learned this from Georgie Nightingall, who led a conversation workshop I attended in the U.K. as part of my book research. One thing Georgie tried to show us in several of the exercises she led is that asking someone a bunch of rapid-fire factual questions—How was your flight? What do you do for work? Where did you go on vacation?—can sometimes lead to a conversational dead end. The situation can start to feel like a job interview, which is something I noticed when I was going on lots of platonic Bumble friend dates. Because I’m a reporter, I’d find myself switching into journalist mode when talking to my “date.” I would quickly get a layout of where she lived, what she did for work, and what she liked to do for fun, then instantly forget it all and leave without a sense of whether I actually wanted to be friends with her or not. I was gathering details about her life, but I wasn’t actually learning anything about her.

As Kate Murphy writes in You’re Not Listening, peppering people with questions like “What do you do for a living” or “Are you married” can feel like an interrogation. It can make people feel a little defensive and “shift the conversation into a superficial and less-than-illuminating resume recitation or self-promoting elevator pitch.”

Instead, what Georgie and some others recommend instead is to make a statement about yourself, the situation, or (delicately) the other person. Sometimes it’s easier to break the ice if you volunteer something first, even if it’s something kind of banal. When I was taking my son to a swim class that was my only opportunity for social interaction for the week, I found it went a lot better if I approached the other parents and said something like, “the water’s cold today!” or “what a cutie!” (about their baby). Sometimes people are just waiting on a little shred of information to hang their next question or statement on.

In fact, making statements is one of the core tenets of improv, which for decades has been helping awkward people become slightly less awkward. When I first started taking improv classes, I would try to get out of doing anything in the scene by just asking my scene partners a bunch of questions: Who are you? What are you doing here? and so forth. But my improv teacher quickly and wisely told me to quit doing this, because I was making everyone else do all the work. The other people don’t know who they are or what they’re doing here! It was my job to move the scene forward so we could all find out. The only way to do that was by making a statement about who I am, and what I’m doing here, so that my fellow improvisers had something to play off of.

Conversation is kind of like that. Few people want to go to a wedding or to a party so that they can explain the basics of their job to someone they’ll never see again. Few people enjoy reciting where they’re from, where they went to college, and how long they’ve known a couple. It’s generally more fun to react to something someone else is saying than it is to be in a low-level grilling session for hours.

And good news: Research suggests people won’t actually like you less if you talk more rather than ask questions. For a study that came out a few years ago, researchers had study participants speak for 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, or 70% of the time in a conversation. Contrary to what people predicted, their conversation partner liked them more when they spoke more. The conversation partners enjoyed the conversation more when the participant spoke half the time than when they spoke 30% of the time, and they found the more loquacious participants more likable and interesting, too. (The benefits seemed to plateau out a bit after they spoke 60% of the time, though, so apply this in moderation.)

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should try to dominate conversations or avoid asking any questions. No one is suggesting veering from Carnegie-land to the other extreme. But all these findings and experiences taken together have made me think of conversation as kind of like a gift. When you offer someone a statement about yourself, an observation about the environment, or a vulnerable admission, you’re making a bid for connection. You’re giving them something to work with. You’re asking the other person to share something about themselves, too, without outright saying it. It shows that you’re not gathering facts for some sort of appraisal or mental pop quiz. You’re showing that you’re on the same level as them, and that you just want to talk.

Share

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

Last week, the always-great John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times posted some charts that are relevant to my interests. Using data from USC’s Understanding America Study, Burn-Murdoch found that the personalities of young people are, to put it bluntly, getting worse:

They were apparently relevant to everyone else’s interests, too, because these charts have been texted, DMed, emailed and otherwise sent to me multiple times. I’m so glad that everyone cares so much about personality change! (And do I have the book for you!)

Let’s dive in:

These charts suggest that the personalities of young people, here defined as ages 16 to 39, have essentially worsened over the years. If you don’t like the word “worse,” you can think of them as becoming less “adaptive” (to use a sciencey term) or less resilient (Brene Brown-ey) or more vulnerable (therapy-y) or less likely to succeed (podcasty). Over the years, it seems like young people have become less conscientious, meaning dutiful, planful, timely, and persistent in their goals. They’ve also become less agreeable, or empathetic and warm, and less extroverted. Meanwhile, they’ve become more neurotic, or anxious and depressed. (Burn-Murdoch found that older generations have also changed along these same lines, but not quite to the same degree as young people.)

I have no reason to doubt Burn-Murdoch’s analysis, and it echoes some unrelated published research, so assuming this is true, it’s concerning. None of these changes are associated with anything good: More conscientiousness is associated with better health and wealth, as is less neuroticism. Greater extroversion and agreeableness are associated with greater happiness, not the reverse. In short, young peoples’ personality traits are going in the wrong direction, fast.

Subscribe now

Why is this happening?

In some ways, I find this data a little gratifying, because it shows that not only can we change our personalities for the better (the topic of my book), we can also change them for the worse. We have free will, and our actions can and do shape our personalities, for better or worse.

The likely explanation for declining extroversion and rising neuroticism is fairly well-known at this point: We’ve become entirely too reliant on devices and screens for social interaction, and it’s making us isolated and a little crazy. It would be tempting to blame the pandemic for this, but these personality trends seem to predate the pandemic and have accelerated since it ended. Extroversion tends to work like a virtuous circle: The less you socialize, the less extroverted you feel, and the easier it is to retreat further into your shell. Neuroticism works similarly: The less you do things that feel fun and relaxing, the more depressed and anxious you feel, and the harder it is to go out and do fun things. Our phones seem to be drawing us inside and away from people, where we “socialize” by staring at Instagram and feeling bad that our lives aren’t as great as everyone else’s. “Social” media seems increasingly to be making us antisocial.

As far as agreeableness goes, there’s been a general decline in Americans’ trust in each other and in institutions over the years, and I think the agreeableness metric is picking up on that. (Trust is one of the elements of agreeableness in personality surveys.) Pew has found that financial instability is associated with declining trust, and it stands to reason that as young people have faced high inflation and other economic headwinds, their trust (and therefore agreeableness) has declined. Few people would feel agreeable when they find themselves working hard yet still unable to afford the things they need. And you may start to look with resentment on those who can.

Declining conscientiousness is trickier to figure out. Burn-Murdoch suggests that our online lives have made us more prone to distraction, and distractibility is indeed an element of low conscientiousness. But I think there might be something else at play here. In my reporting on conscientiousness, I talked to lots of people who never felt conscientious until they had a dream, a desire, or a big idea. One wanted to start a business. One wanted to go to grad school. One wanted to lose a bunch of weight. These folks had never run a company, written a paper, or worked out before, respectively, but this vision of what they could accomplish ignited something within them and made them very, very persistent toward that goal. They figured out how to make the Google calendar. They learned MLA format. They got down to the gym—and so forth. They became conscientious, because they had something to be conscientious for.

In order to be conscientious, in other words, you have to have something you want. You are not going to independently write a long research paper if there is literally no hope of you ever becoming a tenured academic, which was that one particular guy’s dream. You aren’t going to drag ass to the gym if there’s no way you would ever lose one pound.

One of the elements of conscientiousness that’s really cratered, according to this FT story, is “makes plans and follows through.” I’m wondering if people just don’t see a path to following through on their plans. It’s a really, really hard time to be a young adult right now: It’s widely considered the hardest time in history to buy a home. The job market is rough, even though unemployment is nominally not terrible. It can feel harder to afford having a child. The on-again-off-again tariffs are doing God knows what to the economy. There’s another climate disaster every other week. [Waves hands vaguely at everything].

It can be tempting to look at these charts, tsk tsk and think, “kids these days, always on their phones, and now they’ve got no follow-through!” But I wonder if young adults are seeing how difficult it is right now to make good things happen for themselves, so they’re not trying as hard to make good things happen. They’re not working hard toward a dream job; they’re not saving up to buy a home; they’re not enduring the gauntlet of online dating so they can have a family because daycare costs $36,000 a year. They’re less conscientious because there’s less to strive for, less to want. If you feel like something is completely out of reach, maybe you stop reaching.

What are your theories? Leave them in the comments below!

Share

I was delighted to be on 1A again recently, this time to talk about the loneliness epidemic.

Why am I considered an expert on loneliness, you ask?

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

Loneliness was actually one of the major motivators for the personality-change project behind my book. Even as the pandemic was easing up, I noticed that I had fewer friends than I did before it started, and that many of those friendships weren’t very close or fulfilling. I tended to default to spending time alone, even when it would probably have behooved me to socialize or at least get out of the house. Most days, I didn’t really interact with anyone other than my husband, and “really” is doing a lot of work there. This was before Twitter became a cesspit (and before it became X), and a lot of my interaction at the time was through Twitter. (Which can be great! But not a replacement for meatspace.)

One reason why I isolated and holed up in my house like this was that I strongly identified as an introvert. And I thought being an introvert gave me a blank check to basically never talk to anyone.

A common form of pushback I get whenever people hear about my book, or about personality change in general, is that being an introvert is great and there’s no reason for introverts to try to be more extroverted. But, Olga, I read that Susan Cain book and I identify as an introvert and I don’t want to change, so please unplug your microphone and get off this podcast I’m listening to.

So what I want to address today is how to “get out there” and “talk to people” and “be a human” even if you’re an introvert (and even if you want to remain an introvert). Because as one trillion studies have now shown, we all need some social interaction, even the introverts among us. We all need to feel liked, or at least seen, and to feel like we’re not completely alone. We need to feel like we’re part of humanity. When we don’t, introversion crosses into loneliness, and happiness really craters. You may not want to “become an extrovert,” but you probably need a least some extroversion in your life.

So, here is how I would recommend getting that, for introverts:

Subscribe now

1. Sign up for an activity that occurs regularly, meaning you don’t have to plan it or schedule it yourself. This can be any kind of activity—it doesn’t have to involve a lot of talking. It can be a “let’s all sit quietly and read” club. It can be yoga class. Studies show extroverts don’t just talk more to people; they do more activities, period. But as in introvert, you’re not as likely to reach out and get the ball rolling on an activity, so join something that’s going to happen with or without you. (Then, you know, actually go.)

2. Listen more than you talk. Yes, this still counts as extroversion! When I asked Sonja Lyubomirsky, the High Priestess of Happiness, how introverts can get the happiness boost of extroversion, she recommended focusing less on being outgoing and more on just being around others, even if you’re still pretty quiet when you’re doing so. This means you can just go to the book club and listen to everyone else’s thoughts without talking a lot yourself. You’ll still get the benefits of extroversion, just from being around other people.

3. Find an activity that isn’t talking-oriented. For a long time, I struggled with socializing because most of the socializing that took place in my (childless, thirtysomething) social milieu involved getting drinks with one other person and catching up. I can do this occasionally, but it’s often hard for me to talk to just one other person at length without a side activity to focus on. I especially find this challenging when there’s not some central issue or problem that we’re complaining about and working through, which meant that either these catch-ups were stilted and awkward (because I was trying not to complain) or they were just extremely unproductively negative (because I was giving into complaining).

   I’ve noticed that lots of other neurodivergent/neurospicy people have this same problem, and I think a lot of people chalk this issue up to “introversion” when it’s really not.

   My solution has been to do activities that don’t involve long stretches of uninterrupted talking, or that at least have a side quest to focus on during conversational lulls. Ideas include: going on a hike; watching a movie you’ve all seen a lot before; painting something or doing a craft; and my current favorite, having a play date where we all chase our kids around and scream about our pelvic floor issues while we pry mulch out of toddlers’ mouths. This last one has the additional benefit of hopefully making my kid better-socialized so that he’s not a weird antisocial freak like his mom.

4. Use a commitment device to make sure you go. I guarantee that, at least the first few times, you will not feel like going to your activity. I know this because I signed up for improv, the most extroverted activity imaginable, and I didn’t feel like going for the first … eight months? What forced me to actually go was that I had a commitment device: Our teacher said we were only allowed to miss two classes of the improv series. I’m a huge rule follower, so after I missed two classes because of work, I knew I had to haul ass to the studio whether I felt like it or not. (My improv teacher had a very funny story about a former student whose wife threatened to divorce him unless he completed an improv class, and after he missed three classes he had to beg for a makeup assignment so his wife wouldn’t leave him. Also a commitment device!) A less intense version of this would be a class that you pre-pay for, or a situation where you sign up to bring a dish or supplies something. However you want to structure it, just make sure that if you don’t go, there will be ~consequences~.

5. When you’re done socializing, give in to your introversion. The personality psychologist Brian Little believes that introverts can behave like extroverts for short spurts of time as long as afterward they retreat to what he calls a “restorative niche,” or a state of introversion that feels comfortable to them. In other words, after you’ve gone out and done your book club and really challenged yourself, it’s okay to spend an afternoon watching your shows or being by yourself. It’s not failure if you need a couple hours of super-cozy solitude and cat-petting to come down from extroversion.

   The point of personality change, after all, is not to flip a switch and become someone you don’t recognize. It’s to push yourself to try new things so that you can experience all the upsides of different traits. It’s okay if, in the end, you still consider yourself an introvert. You’re in good company: I do, too.

   Share

First, I’m thrilled to share that Me, But Better, has been selected as a Next Big Idea Club winner for Season 26!

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

The club was co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink to spotlight the most groundbreaking nonfiction books—and this season, mine is one of them.

This means my book will be shipped to thousands of readers and featured alongside a reading guide, a "Book Bite," a Next Big Idea Podcast episode, and a live virtual Q&A with me.

You can join the Next Big Idea Club here! I can offer you 20% off any new membership with the promo code SEASON26. If you join, you will receive a copy of Me, But Better and the other selection, Eric Topol’s Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity in your first box.

Subscribe now

Now onto today’s post:

How to Boost Your Curiosity

One of the most common pieces of advice I came across when I was reporting out research-backed ways to decrease anxiety was to increase your curiosity. You’re not supposed to get curious about why you’re anxious, you’re just supposed to get ambiently … curious. The psychiatrist Jud Brewer, to name just one example, is a huge evangelist of curiosity as an antidote to anxiety. In his book, Unwinding Anxiety, he writes about how rather than trying to “think your way” out of anxiety, you should “harness the power of curiosity, tapping into it as an inner resource that drives itself (because it is rewarding.)”

Okay!

As I wrote in my book, I never really got the hang of using curiosity to unwind my anxiety. Because along with not really understanding how to do that, I had another problem: I wasn’t sure how to become more curious when I wasn’t already. Like the anxiety-busting advice to become “comfortable with uncertainty,” this is one of those things that’s hard to do if you don’t already know how to do it. And it’s especially hard to do when you’re hyperventilating with anxiety!

This paradox—that curiosity is good, but also hard to increase in people who don’t already feel curious—has bedeviled researchers for quite some time. As Madeleine Gross, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, writes in a recent paper, curiosity is linked to an “impressive host of character virtues, including intellectual humility, creativity, resilience, gratitude, critical discernment, as well as positive outcomes, including increased academic and professional success, satisfying relationships, and increased meaning in life” but also that “not everyone has the benefit of being naturally high in curiosity.”

HOWEVER, she goes on to say, “recent psychological research indicates that individuals can develop facets of their character through behavioral interventions.” YES! This is what my book is about: How to become better at stuff you’re not “naturally” good at. Gross set out to see whether this can apply to curiosity, too.

To this end, Gross and her co-author created an iPhone app that was meant to boost their study participants’ curiosity. On some days, the app would offer the participants a researcher-assigned “daily challenge” meant to promote curiosity, like breaking your routine, writing a haiku about the present moment, or researching an idea to test whether it’s really true (like the idea that creative people are “right-brained.”) The full list of these challenges is below—and warning, a lot of them are things writers already do, or at least do as they’re procrastinating writing.

On alternating days, the participants performed curiosity-boosting behavioral goals that they had set for themselves, like “When I am on my morning commute, then I will listen to a new podcast.”

About half the app users were also instructed to perform mindful activities, like mindful walking or mindful hand-washing, during which they were supposed to get curious about whatever they were doing. They were prompted, for instance, to ask themselves questions like, “Why do certain water temperatures feel more pleasant than others?” or “How does soap work to kill bacteria?”

“We're surrounded by so many mysteries,” Gross told me. “And I feel like as kids, we're constantly asking questions to try to understand them, but [when we get older] we just kind of stop noticing all these curiosities around us. So it's kind of like tuning back into that childlike mindset and wondering how things work.”

After three weeks, Gross and her co-author found that, compared to the control group, the app users saw an increase in feelings of perceptual curiosity, meaning these participants showed a greater curiosity about their surroundings. This makes a certain amount of sense, since the app encouraged the participants to “seek novel sensory experiences, find hidden beauty in their environment, try new foods or listen to new types of music”—in other words, explore their surroundings. They were also more likely to believe that their lives were meaningful, and they felt more creative, too. The people who also did the mindfulness component saw an especially big boost in the “meaning in life” measure. In other words, this study suggests it does seem possible to change your background level of curiosity.

Now, is this the last word on this topic? Not really. The study is small—consisting of just 91 people—and a lot of the results don’t reach statistical significance, meaning the findings were pretty modest. The app didn’t totally blow the minds of those 91 people or anything.

But I still think that, when you’re caught in an anxious spiral, in writer’s block, or in a thought groove you’re not crazy about, it’s worth trying out some of these techniques. A lot of these curiosity-boosting strategies double as ways to increase the personality trait of openness to experiences, and as I write in my book, openness also seems to have beneficial effects on anxiety and neuroticism. In fact, some researchers think that the reason why psychedelics work is because they’re boosting openness, which allows the person’s brain to even accept the possibility that it’s okay to be less anxious. Openness and curiosity seem to overlap, and they both seem to turn down the volume on anxiety.

By opening us up to the world, curiosity seems to make reality less terrifying, or to at least make it more interesting. When you’re depressed as hell because you think you’ve seen it all and know it all, this study is a good reminder that probably, you haven’t and you don’t. There are still small mysteries waiting to be solved, and the prospect of that discovery is a good reason to hang in there. “By prompting individuals to seek novel experiences, explore new perspectives, and challenge existing beliefs,” Gross writes, “curiosity may act as an important catalyst for both cognitive and emotional growth.” At the very least, it’s cheaper than Lexapro.

Share

THE FULL LIST OF CURIOSITY BOOSTERS:

• Ask your friend one interesting thing they learned recently.

• Discover the history behind a common phrase you use regularly.

• Ask your friend one question about themselves that you are genuinely curious to know about.

• Transform something ordinary in your surroundings into an object of beauty through photography.

• Come up with a new, aesthetically pleasing way to arrange your food

  on the plate.

• Find a way, no matter how small it is, to transform your usual habits and break from your routine.

• Explore a different path to a familiar destination and document your

  observations.

• Turn on a song and begin moving slowly until you discover a new

  pose or way to position your body.

• Google search “Youtube TedEd” and choose a video that intrigues

  you.

• Learn something fascinating on an episode of the Curiosity Weekly

  podcast (search online).

• Create a haiku to capture the hidden beauty or wonder in the present

  moment.

• Explore musical genres or artists outside your usual preferences.

• Spend five minutes of your lunch break observing and capturing the

  hidden world of shadows around you.

• Track your emotions throughout the day to discover patterns.

• Take apart a simple, everyday object

• Eat a very small snack with a childlike mindset.

• Start at any Wikipedia article that catches your interest, then follow

  the hyperlink trail wherever your curiosity leads.

• How many different species of birds can you spot today?

• Explore the “why” behind an unusual animal feature.

• Have a 10-minute conversation with someone where you intentionally

  explore an unusual topic.

• Spend five minutes deeply observing a piece of art in your

  possession.

• Transform three randomly generated words into a poetic haiku.

• Transform a random shape drawn by someone else into a creative

  work of art.

• Elevate an everyday object into a museum artifact with an exhibition

  description.

• Excavate the origins and evolution of one of your core beliefs.

• Research something you’ve always assumed is true to test its validity.

• Write with your non-dominant hand.

• When you use a household item, a technology, or a word, ask

  yourself how it works or what its history is, then try to learn more about it.

• Discover how other people see you through their choice of three

  descriptive words.

• Create a visual representation of your core values

• Find a new recipe for food you already have in your fridge.

• Discover a small creature in its environment and imagine the world

  from its perspective.

• Choose a specific color and document every instance of it you

  encounter throughout your day.

• Create an authentic audio meditation to foster openness and curiosity.

• Take some time to look into one of your friend’s beliefs or their side to

  an argument.

• Embody the experience of someone in a current news story through

  imagination and photography.

• Reach out to someone you know and ask them to teach you

  something or tell you something they learned recently.

• Create an unpredictable story one sentence at a time with a partner.

• Interview someone from a different generation to explore how life

  experiences have changed over time.

• Rediscover forgotten stories by exploring old photographs with

  someone who shares your history.

• Engage in a structured curiosity-based 20-minute debate with

  someone on a topic where you may hold different perspectives.

• Conduct an in-depth interview with someone who has experience of

  war from any perspective.

• Create a digital gallery showcasing the art that has been part of your

  home environment.

• Research and explore the work and philosophy of a contemporary

  artist previously unknown to you.

• Create a visual representation of someone you’ve only heard about

  through descriptions.

• Craft a creative backstory inspired only by a book’s title and its final

  page.

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

When I was trying to bring down my Burj Khalifa-levels of neuroticism, a piece of advice that I often came across suggested that I should try to be “comfortable with uncertainty.” Neurotic people, the thinking goes, don’t like situations in which the outcome is unknown: Whether that person saw your email, whether you will get that job, whether this is the month you’ll get pregnant. (Feeling sweaty yet?) If we can maintain control, we think, we can more easily keep our anxiety at bay. This becomes a problem in the many, many situations in which we can’t maintain control.

The answer, duh, is to simply get comfortable with uncertainty! Every time I heard this piece of advice, I would think the same mental retort: I don’t know how to do that, either. When I was at my most anxious, telling me to get comfortable with uncertainty worked about as well as telling me to “just calm down.” If anxious people knew how to do that, they would! I even tried to read Comfortable with Uncertainty, the Buddhist Pema Chodron’s book that people beat you over the head with if they see you popping an emergency Xanax, but it was too esoteric for me.

This is why I was so happy to come across How to Fall In Love With Questions, a wonderful and profound new book by Elizabeth Weingarten that’s all about how not knowing the answer can be okay … sometimes even kinda fun! She doesn’t necessarily force you to embrace or learn to love uncertainty, but she walks you through a better way of thinking through life’s unresolved questions and uncertain moments.

Subscribe now

I recently read the book, and had the opportunity to interview Weingarten about it. An edited transcript of our conversation is below:

OK: Why did you decide to write a book about being comfortable with uncertainty?

EW: My book is about how to change your relationship with uncertainty so that you can emerge feeling renewed, refreshed, and awake to what life has to offer.

My favorite definition of uncertainty is “a sense of doubt that stops or delays progress.” The book asks: How do we not let doubt stop us? How do you move forward in your life when you don’t have all of the answers?

I wrote the book because I was stuck. It was spring of 2021. I'd recently gotten married and my relationship was struggling. On top of that, I'd decided to leave a job to pursue a creative project that was failing. I was asking two big questions: Should I get a divorce? And – what the hell am I supposed to be doing with my life? I was feeling miserable: anxious, alone, and mired in my circumstances. I wished that someone, anyone, would tell me the answers so I could get on with my life.

It was around this time that I discovered Letters to a Young Poet, which is a book of correspondence between the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the 19-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus, written in the early 20th century.

In the book, Kappus peppers Rilke with questions. Rilke famously does not give him answers, but instead encourages him to “love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign tongue.” And he goes further telling him he ought to “live the questions.”

I had two reactions when I read this passage. The first was: wow, what a beautiful idea. The second was: yeah, right. As a journalist and applied behavioral scientist, I’d spent years not only revering questions as part of my craft, but also reporting and researching the power of questions in our lives. But I was struck by the fact that at that moment, I hated my questions. It made me wonder: was it even possible to love the most challenging questions of our lives – the questions about identity, love, meaning, loss, relationships, purpose? In other words – could we learn to have a different relationship to uncertainty?

I wrote the book because, at this very low point in my life, I was desperate to find out if Rilke’s words constituted a real way to live, or just an impractical poetic idea.

OK: Throughout the book, you follow the story of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I love Rilke! I feel like my wisest yoga teachers quote him right before savasana. Why did you decide to weave his story into this?

EW: I have also been in many yoga classes where Rilke is quoted. He was an original master of the sound bite – his poetry channels peace and profundity in only a few lines.

Rilke’s words were a big part of the reason I decided to write the book in the first place. But as I learned more and more about his life, I realized that his personal story also held lessons about the complexity of loving, and living, our biggest questions.

Rilke excelled at loving and living the questions of his professional life, and floundered at loving his personal, and relational, ones. He was able to sit and explore his artistic work patiently – it took him more than a decade to finish one of his most famous bodies of work, the Duino Elegies – but not so with his closest relationships. He famously abandoned his wife and baby, and was as itinerant (and philandering) as they come.

There are two larger points here: Even the people who we might perceive as all-knowing sages, or gurus, also struggle with cultivating a different relationship to uncertainty across all of their life circumstances. Grappling with uncertainty and questions unites all of us.

And also: no one – not Rilke, not me, not any social media influencer – has all of the answers to this big question of how to live our lives. In this way, Rilke’s story is a bit of a cautionary tale. For many years, he chases after mentors who he thinks will be able to tell him how to live, how to be an artist (for instance, the sculptor Auguste Rodin). He fails to find that omniscient person, because there is no one person out there who can give us all of the answers we seek, or someone who can eliminate our uncertainty. This doesn’t mean they can’t still help us in times of need. But hopefully, this is also liberating: we are empowered to be able to find those answers ourselves rather than relying on someone else.

OK: One thing I was struck by is the importance of looking for answers in the right places. For instance, you wouldn't ask a friend who has never had a job for career advice. Can you talk about how you came to that realization, and how we can make sure we look for answers in the right places?

EW: In the book, I recount an experience I had with an astrologer while I was dating my then-boyfriend, now-husband.

A little bit of background: Even before we were married, I had my doubts about our relationship. We both had different ways of expressing love and care, and hadn’t yet learned how to communicate in each others’ styles. On the one hand, I’d never felt so attracted to someone – intellectually and physically – before. On the other, he challenged me in ways that were also unlike any other relationship I’d had. To him, care meant questioning and constructive debate. To me, it meant validation and agreement. We argued a lot. I wondered: was this normal? Was it worth it?

One summer, a few years into our relationship, a family member gave me the gift of a session with an astrologer. As a journalist and applied behavioral scientist, I did not “believe” in predictive powers of astrology. It’s a practice that has been debunked as a science.

And yet for years, I’d been occasionally going to psychics, getting my Tarot cards read, perusing astrology apps, and seeking out answers to my big life questions from alternative sources. There was something inside me that wanted to believe that these practitioners could give me the answers I sought.

During my session with the astrologer, I asked her about whether my then-boyfriend and I were a good fit and if we would stay together. Her response: no. She told me it wasn’t going to work, according to our charts.

This session haunted me, even after I got married, and especially when I was considering divorce. It wasn’t until I interviewed another astrologer, Jessica Lanyadoo, that I realized my mistake. When I recounted my experience to Lanyadoo, she pointed out that I’d gone to the astrologer for entertainment but then had asked this astrologer a deep and meaningful question. It wasn’t just about asking the right questions, she told me, but also about asking questions from the right sources. If the question was that important and sensitive to me, why would I pose it to a practitioner I didn’t trust?

This is a lesson that can also apply to the answers we seek from therapists to technology, particularly generative AI.

One of the biggest ways to make sure we’re looking for answers from the right sources is simple: slow down, and get to know your question a little better first. Try to understand what you’re really seeking – is it answers, or might it be something different, like connection? In the book, I share tools (like a questions map and guided prompts) to help guide people through this exploration.

OK: How does trauma play into our discomfort with uncertainty?

In general, we humans are wired to want to reduce uncertainty in our environments. That’s partly because of how we adapted to live in a world where food was more scarce: by conserving metabolic energy whenever we could. Navigating uncertainty forces us to use more metabolic energy, which means we feel a powerful drive to resolve it to conserve future energy. This is known as the selfish brain theory.

Of course, not everyone feels the same level of discomfort with uncertainty, and people feel different levels of comfort or discomfort across contexts and situations. There are many variables that can influence this. One is our personality (which you know all about!), and particularly our levels of openness to new ideas and experiences. In other cases it can be influenced by our upbringing, and whether or not we experienced trauma. Trauma can warp our sense of security, creating the specter of threats in the shadows of uncertainty when they don’t always exist, and making it harder for us to relate differently to our questions. It’s the difference between seeing the future as threatening, full of potential, or something in between.

This was the realization of one of the men I profiled in the book, Mateo. He began using the Internet heavily when he was a kid to help him cope with a traumatic childhood experience. Searching for information and answers online gave him the illusion of safety and security, like he could control his world. He ended up learning, through a long and painful struggle with what eventually became a technology addiction, that what he’d been searching for all along were not answers. Instead, he was looking for connection and community.

OK: Why is community so important to being comfortable with questions?

EW: On a basic level, community evolved to enhance our sense of security during uncertain moments. Research shows that a sense of being connected in community reduces cortisol, and activates parts of our brain that indicate we’re getting a reward and are safe. It puts us in an optimal place to explore questions, rather than rushing towards fast, easy answers.

OK: What are koans, actually, and how can they help us feel more at peace?

EW: A zen koan can be a paradox, or a question, or even a snippet of poetry, that’s designed to guide your mind past rational, conscious thought and onto another plane of understanding. A classic example of a koan is: ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’

You can’t understand a koan by thinking your way to a logical answer. You have to live it, to carry it around with you and start to relate it to experiences and conversations. Working with a koan isn’t about determining what it means objectively, but rather what it means to you. How might it help you see your own question, or problem, in a new way?

You can think of koans like uncertainty training wheels. They’re designed to help you get more comfortable with big mysteries in life by starting with small ones.

Koans also contain communities. When you carry a koan with you, you become linked to people who, across centuries, have asked the same questions and struggled with similar uncertainty.

In the book, I tell the story of Megan Rundel, who found a koan at a time in her life when she was feeling alone and rudderless, trying to figure out who she was and wanted to become. The central question of the koan she carried was essentially: how could someone who feels destitute and insignificant actually be rich and venerable?

Though the koan didn’t give her the answer, it helped her feel less solitary in her struggle, allowing her to see it as not just a “her” problem, but part of the human condition. This gave her more space to ask other questions that ultimately helped her find the right path.

OK: What is the "need for cognition," and what is its role in all this?

EW: The need for cognition measures how much someone is drawn to deep thought; there’s some evidence to suggest that higher levels of it are also associated with greater tolerance of uncertainty, and more wellbeing in general. In the book, I write about one study conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Pennsylvania State University, where they wanted to investigate the connection between the need for cognition and symptoms of anxiety and depression. What they found is that people with lower NFC scores also had lower tolerance for uncertainty and were less curious. Conversely, they also found that higher NFC scores were associated with fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression. One of the takeaways is that curiosity – and question-asking – is a tool that may help reduce your anxiety during times of uncertainty. Anxiety isn’t always bad, but sometimes it can make it harder for us to cope, or to see different possibilities for the future.

OK: Talk about the role uncertainty played in your pregnancy, and how your approach to uncertainty has changed as a parent. (The ovulation strips didn't work for me either and I got "surprise" pregnant because of them too!!)

EW: Pregnancy, and parenthood, has been a constant test of my relationship to uncertainty. The greatest challenge in parenthood for me thus far has been letting go of the illusion of control, surrendering to the uncertainty of every hour. It’s. So. Hard. Especially when you aren’t sleeping much!

Like Mateo, one of the characters I mentioned earlier, one of the ways I tend to seek control is through gathering information. And in some cases, this is an okay way to cope: There are parenting questions that can be answered through information.

But not always. And these days, I try to be much more aware of when I’m seeking an actual answer, something that I can research and feel relatively certain about, and when my discomfort is about a bigger question that doesn’t have a fast, easy answer. Sometimes, these are questions about my finding my own identity as a mother, about co-parenting with my husband, or about how some of my own challenges with anxiety might impact my kid.

When I’m tumbling around with these larger questions, I know from my research, and my own experience, that the best thing to do is to seek out people who are going through something similar, or have in the past. I’ve found a lot of comfort in talking to other moms, even when none of us know the answers to these big questions. There’s something powerful in simply stumbling through the morass of uncertainty together, and knowing that we’re not alone.

Share

ME, BUT BETTER, my book about personality change, is out now. If you haven’t yet, please pick up your copy today. And if you’ve read the book, it would mean the world to me if you could leave an Amazon review. Thank you!

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

Anxious people who like to google their anxieties will often come across a particularly noxious type of clickbait: This Simple Trick Works Better Than Klonopin for Anxiety, the headline will promise. Click on the link and … surprise! It’s meditation. It’s always meditation.

The problem is, I have never really liked meditation, and I’ve learned that this is a common sentiment among people like me. (Strivers, honor-roll kids, Washingtonians, etc.) For my book, I searched the world for cures for anxiety that didn’t involve meditation. But every time I thought I found something that wasn’t meditation, it turned out to be meditation, or some other form of mindfulness. Even the personality-change study that guided much of my experiment recommends meditation as a way to reduce neuroticism, the personality trait associated with anxiety.

But once I started to look closer into meditation, I found a lot of people for whom meditation worked better than I (or they) expected it would. And once I signed up for an intensive meditation class, it also worked for me better than I expected it would.

So I thought I would share the below story, one of the most striking meditation stories I encountered, which involved a veteran whom I’ll call Gabriel. I interviewed Gabriel while reporting my book, and I think his story serves as a powerful example of what meditation can do, even if you don’t “believe” in it, and even if you don’t know if you’re doing it “right.” It shows how mindfulness of any kind can halt the dark, intrusive thoughts that plague the anxious mind.

Subscribe now

Gabriel had joined the military for “no noble reason,” he told me. In the late 90s, he was a young man living on the West Coast and working three jobs just to pay $1,000 a month for a shabby apartment. One day, Gabriel was smoking pot with a friend’s roommate and complaining that he couldn’t afford college. The friend suggested joining the Army in order to collect GI benefits. Gabriel wandered into the recruiter’s office, and a month later, he was on a plane to basic training. (Because of the sensitive nature of his current job, Gabriel would only allow me to write about him pseudonymously, and to say that he now lives in the Midwest.)

The Army provided Gabriel with the stability and belonging he had always craved during his chaotic youth. Suddenly, he had friends and a mission. After 9/11, the country rallied behind the military. He was in his early 20s, and everyone around him felt what they were doing was incredibly important. “When you're in an environment where everybody’s doing it, it's really easy to just do the job and not really question it,” he told me.

Gabriel did human intelligence, a euphemistic-sounding assignment that meant gathering information from sources on the ground. This included conducting interrogations, which often entailed a purposeful twisting of one’s moral compass. The interrogations required “treating the detainee the inverse of what you think of them,” Gabriel told me.

If you thought the detainee might be an insurgent, you treated him pretty well: You built rapport and tried to make him like you. But if he was just a nobody, a “Joe Iraqi,” and you thought he knew who the insurgents were, you had to do something else entirely.

Joe Iraqi might hesitate to expose the local insurgents because the militants might later try to harm his own family. So, “the way that you get him to tell you who they are is by making him more afraid of you than he is of them,” Gabriel says. This process, of scaring detainees into talking, was called “fear up.”

That doesn’t mean actual torture; Gabriel had to get permission to even yell at a detainee. But you can make someone very afraid without ever laying a finger on them. Some of what Gabriel described were just standard tough-interview techniques, like being quiet and letting a detainee squirm. But at times, Gabriel would lie to detainees, threatening to send them to a long-term holding facility. He would prod them to feel afraid for their families, or ashamed of themselves, and then release them back to their cells for a long night.

On the other side of his job, Gabriel was developing sources among everyday people in the community. This, too, felt morally questionable. The sources who had the best intelligence were “dirtbags,” as Gabriel calls them—the ones closest to the insurgents and criminals. On one hand, he didn’t really like these people. On the other, he got to know and care about them, in a kind of reverse Stockholm Syndrome. (The Army did not reply to a request for comment about these techniques.)

Over time, Gabriel felt a growing disconnect between what he had to do for work and what he felt inside was right. Once, he told me, a detainee was so rattled by an interrogation that he had a seizure, and all the other soldiers high-fived Gabriel. At the time, it felt good.

It didn’t really hit him how horrible that was until he got out. “Everybody wants to believe they're a good person,” he told me. But was he?

Like so many other veterans, Gabriel was diagnosed with PTSD. Back in the U.S., he would see someone that reminded him of one of the detainees, and he would wonder how the detainee was doing now, or about how the interrogation had affected his life. He would lose entire afternoons to intrusive thoughts. He at times had trouble being around his kids. When people called veterans “heroes,” he bristled a little.

He tried talk therapy and medication, but they weren’t really helping. “I had a lot of internal crises, morally speaking, about who I was, who I thought I was, who I wanted to be,” he told me.

When we talked, I was struck by how unusual his story seemed—of depression and anxiety brought on not by things that happened to him, but by his own actions. Sometimes, the worst form of agony is the kind we had a hand in.

Around 2010, Gabriel had enrolled in college, and, seeking relief, signed up for a meditation study conducted by a researcher named Emma Seppälä. Seppälä, now a lecturer in the Yale School of Management, was studying a form of meditation called SKY, or Sudarshan Kriya Yoga, in which practitioners perform specific patterns of breathing for about 30 minutes.

Gabriel had always thought meditation was hokey, but he went along with it anyway. As part of the study, he learned the SKY breathing techniques and bonded with the other participants, who were veterans just like him.

In her studies, Seppälä has found that Gabriel and the other veterans showed reductions in PTSD and anxiety scores after learning the SKY breathing techniques, but that a control group did not. And indeed, within a few weeks, Gabriel was feeling less tense. Though meditation didn’t erase his misgivings about his time in the Army, it helped attenuate his emotional responses to his thoughts. Instead of pushing down his negative feelings, he would let the feelings happen—he’d feel them rather than fight them. He decided to just try to be as good of a person as he could be, now. Not long after, with the help of another mindfulness program, he quit smoking. He’s been meditating ever since.

The thing is, the SKY technique Gabriel learned is more complicated than other forms of meditation. The breath work—a distinct pattern of fast, slow, and sharp breaths—has to be learned through a teacher, and it can be hard to remember.

Which helps explain why, when I pressed Gabriel on what kind of meditation he does today, it sounded like he doesn’t do SKY. When he meditates, Gabriel often only goes for about 15 minutes, which is well short of the full SKY sequence.

Instead, Gabriel sometimes uses the VA’s meditation app, and sometimes he just sits quietly and pays attention to his breath. In fact, he didn’t seem very familiar with SKY when we spoke. “SKY is a term that I heard, but it wasn’t what they said all the time,” he told me.

When I ran this by Leslye Moore, head of an organization that runs the SKY veteran programs, she acknowledged that sometimes people who get the SKY training stop practicing or even forget how to do it. But “anytime someone is doing any kind of breath work or sitting with their eyes closed in a mindful way, there's some benefit to it,” she said.

Today, Gabriel still feels less neurotic than he was 10 years ago. He barely drinks, and he doesn’t yell at his kids like he used to. Sometimes he’ll fall off the meditation wagon for a few months, then come back to it during a stressful time. Meditation made him more self-aware, more sure of what he wants in life. Sometimes he still thinks it’s hokey. But it works, so he keeps doing it. If PTSD is an ocean, he says, the waves still crash over him, but they’re not as frequent. “And,” he told me, “you see a lot more of the beach now.”

Share

ME, BUT BETTER, my book about personality change, is out now. If you haven’t yet, please pick up your copy today. And if you’ve read the book, it would mean the world to me if you could leave an Amazon review. Thank you!

Buy ME, BUT BETTER

The more I talk about my book, the more I think “You Have It in You” could have been an alternate title for it. (Though I still think Me, But Better is, well, better :)

Allow me to explain: The number one question I get in interviews is “why would someone want to change their personality?”

Fair!

A few reasons:

1. It’ll make you happier, as being lower in neuroticism (one personality trait) and higher in extroversion (another personality trait) tends to do

2. It could make you better at your job and help you live longer

3. A lot of stuff that doesn’t seem like it has anything to do with personality—not exercising enough, drinking too much, stressing out over dumb stuff, or having conflicts with the people in your life—actually are elements of personality.(Conscientiousness, conscientiousness again, neuroticism, and agreeableness, to be exact.) Personality isn’t just your preferences and the types of jokes you tell; it determines much of your life.

   Subscribe now

But I think a less-obviously reason is that life is, eventually, going to demand something of you that you previously didn’t feel equipped for. Personality change can help you rise to the occasion when you start to require skills you didn’t need before.

Imagine that you are going through the world as a hardcore introvert. You’re happy in your reticent little way; you make stuff out of yarn and watch movies and have plenty of alone time and drink tea and all that. (I sympathize with this tendency because I used to be this way 100% of the time and now am just this way most of the time.)

And you’ve chosen a job that aligns pretty well with your introverted preferences: Maybe it’s one of those “remote jobs with no talking” that we’re always hearing about on TikTok. Maybe it’s just a job that doesn’t require a ton of in-person interaction, or that doesn’t call for you to take on any kind of leadership role or to do any public speaking.

BUT THEN, a big promotion becomes available at your company, and it’s for a job as a manager. This person would still be doing much of the kind of work you do—the kind without a lot of talking—but in addition, they’d occasionally have to give presentations to groups of managers and to other teams. They’d also have to travel around to other cities sometimes, meet new clients, and tell them about your company’s work.

Now, here’s a dilemma: You’re an introvert, but this job is going to require a lot of extroversion. “Taking charge and leading others,” or assertiveness, is literally one of the facets of extroversion. And you might be an introvert, but you’re still a person living under capitalism. And boy do you need that promotion money.

So what do you do? Do you stick to your “true” personality as an introvert, and pass up the job, or do you try to build up your extroversion—or at least this facet of extroversion—and go for it?

To me, it would seem reasonable at such a juncture to try to expand the ways you interact with the world—that is, to at least see if you can occasionally act more extroverted. You can still be an introvert most of the time, but when it comes to this job, you “try on” extroversion like an invisibility cloak. (Visibility cloak?) You figure out how to sound more confident in meetings. You pick up some tips on public speaking. You learn how to give subordinates feedback in a kind but clear way. That’s personality change!

Just because you’re not always acting how you’d naturally want to act doesn’t make you a hypocrite or a faker—it means you can adapt to new situations. You can build on the strengths you already have in order to develop the new skills you need.

Life throws lots of experiences at us in which we’re asked to do something we don’t quite know how to do. Many new parents weren’t “naturally” cooey and cuddly before they had their kids—they learned how to do that for their babies’ benefit. Many people feel they’re “not ready for a relationship” until they meet the one person they really do want to commit to. You learn how to be a good parent, or a good partner, over time, by nurturing personality traits that weren’t always evident.

People often say “I don’t have it in me” when they are faced with some task that feels undoable. (And, sure, you probably shouldn’t do anything that your gut is screaming at you not to do, at least not permanently). But for obstacles that are more like challenges, that could lead to good things, in all likelihood you do have it in you—there are elements of that trait inside you that you can grow into new traits and abilities.

You can become organized. You can give speeches. You can make new friends in that city you just moved to. You don’t have to have done it before. It doesn’t have to come “naturally.” You just have to realize that you’re someone who can do new things.

You don’t even have to believe it—though that probably doesn’t hurt.

Share