What if the anxious, disorganized, or introverted parts of your personality aren’t permanent fixtures, but changeable patterns you can reshape? Most people assume their personality traits are fixed characteristics they simply have to live with, but emerging research reveals otherwise: personality is malleable.
In Me, But Better, Atlantic staff writer Olga Khazan chronicles both the science of personality transformation and her own year-long experiment to become more extroverted, emotionally stable, and socially confident. Here’s an overview of her book.
Overview of Me, But Better
Most people assume their personality is fixed—that being anxious, introverted, or disorganized is simply “who they are.” But research reveals a different truth: Personality traits are malleable patterns of behavior that we can intentionally change through consistent practice. In Me, But Better (2025), Olga Khazan explores the science behind personality change and her own year-long experiment to transform her neurotic, introverted temperament into something more extroverted, agreeable, and emotionally stable.
The key to transformation, she shows, lies in “faking it until you make it”: practicing behaviors associated with the traits you want to develop until they become natural. This requires months of sustained effort and considerable discomfort—for example, Khazan took part in activities like improv classes, socializing, and meditation practices that went against her natural inclinations. But the discomfort can pay dividends; in Khazan’s case, personality change led to greater happiness and better relationships.
Khazan is a staff writer for The Atlantic who covers health, gender, and science. She has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. This guide unpacks her insights into personality change, first establishing what personality is and why it can be changed. Then, we’ll examine why someone would want to pursue such a difficult change, and we’ll provide strategies for changing your own personality. We’ll also examine the statistical methods behind the Big Five model of personality, explore the neuroscience of behavioral change, and consider how definitions of “ideal” personality traits reflect particular cultural values and assumptions.
What Is Personality, and Can It Be Changed?
Understanding personality change begins with learning what personality is and whether its fundamental characteristics can be modified. In this section, we’ll explore the scientific framework psychologists use to measure personality and examine the evidence that personality traits are malleable. We’ll also reveal how genetic and environmental factors interact to create opportunities for you to intentionally change your personality.
The Big Five: A Framework for Measuring Personality
Personality refers to the relatively stable patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that characterize how a person typically responds to life situations. While personality might seem like an abstract concept, psychologists have developed systematic ways to measure and discuss it. The framework Khazan uses throughout her book is the “Big Five” model, which organizes personality patterns into five core dimensions. The Big Five model emerged from a statistical analysis of how people describe themselves and others, and it identifies five broad categories that seem to capture much of the variation in human personality.
Khazan explains that each person has a unique combination of the Big Five traits, which creates their distinct personality. Psychologists say all of these traits exist on continuums rather than as binary categories:
Openness to Experience: The degree to which someone is imaginative, curious, and willing to try new things. If you’re highly open to experiences, you might show a lot of creativity, intellectual curiosity, and comfort with novelty. But if you’re low on openness to experience, you likely prefer routine and like to stick to conventional ways of solving problems.
Conscientiousness: The tendency to be organized, disciplined, and goal-directed. If you’re high in conscientiousness, you’re probably very punctual, thorough, and persistent in pursuing the goals you set for yourself. Conversely, if you’re low in conscientiousness, you might struggle with organization and follow-through.
Extroversion: The inclination to be outgoing, energetic, and socially engaged. If you’re extroverted, you derive energy from social interaction and you tend to be talkative and assertive. If you’re introverted, you probably prefer solitude and may find social situations draining.
Agreeableness: The disposition to be cooperative, trusting, and considerate of others. People who are high in agreeableness tend to prioritize harmony and show a lot of empathy for others. Those low in agreeableness may be more competitive and skeptical of other people’s motives.
Neuroticism: The tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, depression, and emotional instability. If you have high neuroticism, you likely worry frequently and experience emotional reactivity. If you have low neuroticism—also known as emotional stability—you’re resilient and even-tempered when you respond to stressful situations.
Personality Consists of Changeable Behavioral Patterns
Khazan explains that personality traits reflect habitual patterns of thinking and behaving rather than innate, unchangeable characteristics. In fact, research reveals that our personalities change throughout our lives as we encounter new roles, relationships, and environments. Young adults typically become more conscientious as they enter the workforce, while people generally become more agreeable and emotionally stable as they age. These natural changes demonstrate that personality traits are malleable rather than immutable.
Not only are personality changes perfectly normal, but Khazan shows that you can deliberately alter your personality through consistent practice. Just as physical habits can be modified through repetition, personality patterns can be reshaped by consistently practicing new ways of responding to situations. This suggests that personality traits might be better understood as skills that can be developed rather than attributes people simply have or don’t have. Khazan’s personal transformation illustrates this malleability: Her neuroticism dropped from the 94th percentile (extremely high anxiety) to the 39th percentile, while her extroversion increased from the 23rd percentile (very low social engagement) to above-average levels.
Genetics and Environment Both Shape Your Personality
Khazan explains that while personality change is possible, it occurs within certain biological constraints. Studies with twins suggest that genetics account for approximately 30-50% of variation in personality traits, which means that each person has their own baseline for traits like neuroticism or extroversion. But this genetic influence doesn’t predetermine your personality: It just means some people may need to work harder to develop certain traits. The remaining 50-70% of personality variation seems to stem from environmental factors, like your upbringing, life experiences, cultural influences, and social relationships.
Khazan explains that your genes and your environment interact to shape your personality. Your genetic predispositions can influence the environments you seek out, while your environmental experiences can affect how genetic tendencies are expressed. For example, someone with a genetic tendency toward introversion might learn to avoid social situations, so seeking out social environments could help them develop more extroverted behaviors over time. The brain’s neuroplasticity—its ability to form new connections—provides the foundation for this change. When people consistently practice new behaviors, they strengthen neural pathways associated with those behaviors while weakening pathways linked to old patterns.
Intentional Change Is Possible
Khazan says scientific studies provide evidence that people can deliberately change their personality traits with consistent practice. Researchers conducted studies where participants who wanted to become more extroverted received daily challenges like “introduce yourself to someone new,” while those who wanted to reduce neuroticism practiced activities like morning meditation. The participants who consistently completed these behavioral challenges experienced measurable personality changes—like more extroverted behaviors or decreased anxiety—over 15 weeks. These changes lasted even after the study ended, which suggests the new patterns became integrated into participants’ personalities.
Similar research replicated these findings using a smartphone app that prompted participants to practice personality-relevant behaviors. Friends and family members of the participants in Stieger’s study also reported noticing personality changes in the participants, which confirms that the personality changes they made were observable to others. Khazan notes that together, these studies reveal that personality change follows a consistent pattern: one of behavioral training. Identifying specific behaviors associated with the traits you want to cultivate, practicing those behaviors consistently over time, and gradually integrating the new patterns into daily life helps you make those new responses automatic.
Khazan explains that the scientific evidence indicates that some traits are easier to change than others. Extroversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism appear most responsive to intervention, while openness and agreeableness seem to be more challenging to modify. But she notes that even these more stable traits can be influenced through sustained effort and appropriate strategies, as we’ll see later in the guide.
Why Change Your Personality?
Knowing that personality change is possible doesn’t automatically make it worth pursuing. This section examines how personality traits influence life’s outcomes and explores how changing these traits can help people live more authentically.
Personality Traits Influence Life Outcomes
Khazan explains that personality traits aren’t just neutral characteristics—they’re powerful predictors of how your life will unfold. Research reveals that personality functions like a set of tools: Some configurations help you build the life you want, while others create obstacles to happiness and success. People with certain trait combinations report higher life satisfaction, achieve better career outcomes, maintain stronger relationships, and enjoy better physical health. But those with other trait profiles face disadvantages across these same areas. Personality traits influence how you respond to opportunities, handle setbacks, build relationships, and pursue goals.
For instance, Khazan explains that high levels of extroversion strongly predict happiness, not because extroverts are “better people,” but because extroverted behaviors—socializing, speaking up, engaging actively—create more positive experiences and stronger social connections. Even people who identify as introverts feel happier when they engage in these behaviors. Similarly, high levels of conscientiousness predict career success because conscientious behaviors—planning, persistence, reliability—are exactly what employers and academic institutions reward.
The same pattern holds for emotional stability (the opposite of neuroticism). People low in neuroticism experience less anxiety and depression and maintain more stable relationships. This is because they’ve developed ways of thinking and responding to stressful situations that help them recover more quickly from setbacks, which compounds into better life experiences over time.
Personality Change Helps You Live According to Your Values
If personality traits function as life tools, the crucial question becomes: Which tools do you need? You could pursue some idealized personality profile and try to fix what’s “wrong” with you by someone else’s standards. But Khazan argues that you should pursue personality changes that connect with what you value most and help you express who you want to be. For example, someone who values deep relationships might work on developing agreeableness and emotional stability because these tools enable deeper connection. On the other hand, someone who values achievement and contribution might focus on building conscientiousness and openness to experience.
Khazan draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hayes, to explain how this approach works in practice. ACT involves accepting negative feelings as a normal part of pursuing what matters to you, committing to your values, and taking action toward the kind of life you want to live.
Hayes defines values as the principles that guide you toward the kind of person you want to become. In the ACT framework, gaining clarity about your values is an important step toward living more mindfully and responding intentionally to difficult situations. According to Khazan, your values provide sustainable motivation for difficult change. When personality change feels like self-improvement for its own sake, people often abandon it. But when the change you pursue serves deeper purposes—like enabling you to be a better parent, contribute more meaningfully at work, or build stronger relationships—your motivation becomes more resilient.
Khazan’s Experience With Personality Change
Khazan’s experience illustrates how trait imbalances can limit life satisfaction and how values-based change can transform how you move through the world. Khazan writes that her high levels of neuroticism created a cycle of chronic anxiety that prevented her from enjoying her professional successes and personal relationships, while her low extroversion contributed to social isolation and missed connections. These patterns limited how much she enjoyed her life and how fulfilling she found her work and relationships.
While Khazan’s natural personality traits didn’t serve her well, she reports that developing more adaptive traits had significant benefits. Reducing her neuroticism changed her relationship with stress and setbacks, freeing up mental energy that had been consumed by worry. Her increased extroversion changed her approach to motherhood, leading her to actively seek out mom groups and social connections rather than isolating herself.
For Khazan, committing to a values-based approach to personality change meant connecting her transformation efforts to connection, presence, and authentic engagement with life. By framing her personality development as a way to better express what mattered most to her, the transformation felt like an expression of her authentic self rather than an abandonment of it. This deeper motivation sustained her through the inevitable discomfort of practicing new behaviors, even when they initially felt forced or uncomfortable.
How to Change Your Personality
Once you’ve identified which personality traits align with your values, the challenge becomes actually developing them. This section explores the core mechanism of personality change, why the process necessarily involves discomfort, how you can design your environment to support new behaviors, and specific strategies for developing each trait.
“Fake It Until You Make It”
Khazan explains that the fundamental principle underlying personality change is simple: You strengthen or weaken personality traits through repeated practice. This “fake it until you make it” approach recognizes that your personality patterns emerge from habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting rather than from fixed characteristics. This runs opposite to what most people assume—namely, that personality determines behavior. For instance, you might think you avoid parties because you’re introverted, but research reveals the reverse: Consistently engaging in introverted behaviors, like avoiding social interaction, reinforces introverted personality patterns.
This creates a powerful feedback loop you can use to change your personality. Khazan reports that when you consistently act in ways that align with a particular trait, those behaviors start to become automatic. Your actions influence how you see yourself, which in turn motivates further similar actions. So, for example, when you repeatedly practice extroverted behaviors (like initiating conversations or attending social events), you gradually develop extroverted traits and see yourself as an extroverted person. Your brain’s neuroplasticity provides the foundation for this process: Repeated behaviors strengthen neural connections associated with those actions. Even deeply ingrained traits can be modified through practice.
Khazan reports that in studies on personality change, participants who consistently completed daily challenges aligned with their desired traits—such as “introduce yourself to someone new” for people who wanted to become more extroverted or “spend five minutes meditating” for people who wanted to become less neurotic—showed personality changes within 15 weeks. The key was repeated practice over time, not occasional bursts of new behavior.
Embrace the Discomfort of Acting Against Your Nature
Developing new personality traits involves acting against your current inclinations. This process, while uncomfortable, is essential for building new patterns. The discomfort you feel—anxiety, awkwardness, or resistance—is evidence that you’re changing. Khazan explains that personality change often follows the same principles as exposure therapy for phobias. Gradually and repeatedly exposing yourself to situations that trigger discomfort, while staying present rather than avoiding or escaping, eventually reduces the anxiety response and makes new behaviors feel more natural. This requires taking action first and allowing your emotions to follow, rather than waiting to feel motivated or comfortable before acting.
Khazan’s experience with improv classes illustrates this principle. As part of her effort to become more extroverted, she enrolled in improvisational comedy classes that forced her to interact with strangers in creative, unstructured ways. She experienced overwhelming dread before each class for months, but this discomfort was evidence that she was pushing beyond her natural introversion toward more extroverted behavior. Rather than interpreting struggle as proof that change was impossible, she recognized it as part of the process.
Believe You Can Change
Khazan also points out that your beliefs about change matter enormously. One of the most significant barriers is believing your traits are unchangeable. When you encounter difficulty with this fixed mindset, you interpret struggle as proof of fundamental limitations rather than as a normal part of the learning process. Conversely, believing that personality traits can be developed through effort makes you more likely to persist through challenging periods and reframe setbacks as learning opportunities.
Many people worry that acting against their natural tendencies involves being inauthentic, but research suggests that you often feel more authentic when expressing a wider range of behaviors rather than being constrained by narrow personality patterns. The goal is to expand your behavioral toolkit rather than becoming someone entirely different.
Design Your Environment for Success
Developing new personality tools requires creating environments and social contexts that make the behaviors you want to develop easier while making the behaviors you want to stop harder to engage in. Khazan explains that context plays a powerful role in shaping your behavior, so think carefully about the situations you enter: Seek out contexts that encourage the traits you want to build while avoiding situations that reinforce unwanted patterns. If you’re working on extroversion, you might join a club that holds regular meetings. If you’re developing conscientiousness, you might choose to spend more time with coworkers who are particularly well-organized and focused on their goals.
Khazan also points out that surrounding yourself with people who embody the traits you aspire to develop provides you with both accountability for your choices and opportunities to see those traits in action. For example, Khazan’s improv class not only forced her to practice extroverted behaviors, but it also gave her regular opportunities to spend time with people who were already comfortable with social interaction and creativity.
Apply Specific Strategies for Each Trait
While the core principles of personality change apply across all traits, Khazan explains that each of the Big Five traits can benefit from somewhat different approaches.
To reduce neuroticism, focus on developing emotional regulation skills. Khazan participated in a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program that included daily 45-minute meditation sessions. Despite initially hating the practice, she found that consistent meditation significantly reduced her neuroticism scores. Other strategies include challenging catastrophic thought patterns, developing healthy stress responses like deep breathing, and cultivating gratitude practices that shift your attention toward positive experiences.
To increase extroversion, systematically expand your amount of social contact and engagement. Other approaches beyond Khazan’s improv classes include deliberately starting conversations, engaging in performance activities like public speaking, and gradually building social stamina while managing your energy levels to prevent burnout.
To develop conscientiousness, you should implement structure and planning systems in your life. Khazan’s strategies include establishing organization systems for time management, vividly imagining future scenarios to increase your present motivation, building regular habits and routines, and creating accountability systems through deadlines and commitments to others.
To enhance agreeableness, focus on building empathy and relationship skills. You can practice perspective-taking to understand others’ viewpoints, learn constructive conflict resolution techniques, and develop deeper conversation skills. Khazan’s approach was to attend conversation workshops that taught techniques for asking meaningful questions and creating genuine connections.
To increase openness to experience, actively seek novelty and embrace uncertainty. Khazan’s strategies include deliberately exposing yourself to new activities, ideas, and environments, and engaging in creative activities even if you have no prior experience or skill in those areas. You can also cultivate intellectual curiosity through reading and learning, and you can practice flexibility by varying your routines and embracing unexpected change.
