Category: Personality

One trait can help protect you from anxiety and depression.

People with stable emotions are at a lower risk of developing anxiety and depression, research finds.

Emotional stability is linked to being better at dealing with stress and minor frustrations.

People who are emotionally stable usually find it easier to control their urges and are mostly unselfconscious.

On top of this, people with stable emotions tend to live longer, perhaps because it leads to a healthier lifestyle.

In contrast, being neurotic — the opposite of emotional stability — is linked to less happiness in life.

Unfortunately, the personality trait can lead to a shorter lifespan.

Part of the reason may be that worriers tend to self-medicate with alcohol, cigarettes and other unhealthy habits.

The conclusions come from a study of 1,788 men who were followed over 30 years.

The results showed that neurotic people were more likely to smoke and this was linked to higher mortality.

Professor Daniel K. Mroczek, the study’s first author, said:

“Research shows that higher levels of neuroticism can lead to earlier mortality, and we wanted to know why.

We found that having worrying tendencies or being the kind of person who stresses easily is likely to lead to bad behaviors like smoking and, therefore, raise the mortality rate.

This work is a reminder that high levels of some personality traits can be hazardous to one’s physical health.”

Reducing neuroticism

It is possible to change a neurotic personality, though, the results of 207 separate studies have found.

People become significantly less neurotic after undergoing therapy.

After only three months of treatment, people’s emotional stability had improved by half as much as it would over their entire adulthood.

After having psychotherapy and/or taking medication, people were also slightly more extraverted.

Both reduced neuroticism and increased extraversion were maintained in the long-term.

The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Mroczek et al., 2009).

The traits that people find hardest (and easiest) to spot in themselves.

People are worst at judging their own levels of intelligence, attractiveness and creativity, research finds.

However, they are good at judging their own levels of anxiety and sadness.

The reason is that people are good at judging internal feelings because they have direct access to them.

However, people are worse at evaluating themselves in comparison to others.

The research underlines that we are not always at our best when judging ourselves.

Dr Simine Vazire, the study’s author, said:

“I think that it’s important to really question this knee-jerk reaction that we are our own best experts.

Personality is not who you think you are, it’s who you are.

Some people think by definition that we are the experts on our personality because we get to write the story, but personality is not the story — it’s the reality.

So, you do get to write your own story about how you think you are, and what you tell people about yourself, but there still is reality out there, and, guess what?

Other people are going to see the reality, regardless of what story you believe.”

We leave traces of our personality all around us, said Dr Vazire:

“Everything you touch you leave a mark of your personality.

You leave traces unintentionally.

You give off hints of your personality that you don’t even see yourself.”

For the study, 165 people were given tests of personality, intelligence and of how they reacted to various social situations.

The results showed that people were best at judging their own levels of anxiety.

Dr Vazire said:

“You probably know pretty well your anxiety level, whereas others might not be in the position to judge that because, after all, you can mask your inner feelings.

Others, though, are often better than the self in things that deal with overt behavior.”

Where people had difficulties, though, was in judging desirable personality traits in themselves, such as attractiveness, intelligence and creativity:

“…there is so much at stake, meaning your life is going to be so much different if you are intelligent or not intelligent, attractive or not.

Everybody wants to be seen as intelligent and attractive, but these desirable traits we’re not going to judge accurately in ourselves.”

Dr Vazire explained why these traits are so hard to judge in ourselves:

“We look in the mirror all the time, yet that’s not the same as looking at a photo of someone else.

If we spent as much time looking at photos of others as we do ourselves we’d form a much more confident and clear impression of the other’s attractiveness than we would have of our own.

Yet after looking in the mirror for five minutes we’re still left wondering, ‘Am I attractive or not?’ And still have no clue.

And it’s not the case that we all assume that we’re beautiful, right?”

The study was published in the  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vazire, 2010).

Focusing on how habits are initiated is key to getting regular exercise.

Exercise makes people more extraverted and agreeable, research finds.

These are just two of the positive changes that modest amounts of exercise can have on personality.

Exercise also increases people’s conscientiousness and makes them more open to experience.

A few of the benefits of these personality changes include:

• More extraverted people tend to have more positive emotions,
• greater conscientiousness can lead to more success in life,
• and being open to experience is linked to intelligence and creativity.

In contrast, those who remain sedentary tend to see the opposite pattern of changes to their personality.

These include reduced agreeableness, being more closed to experience and less conscientious.

The conclusions come from a study of over six thousand people who were followed for more than twenty years.

They each completed surveys that asked them about their personalities and levels of exercise.

The results showed that only relatively small amounts of exercise were linked to positive changes in personality over the years.

The study’s authors write:

“A physically inactive lifestyle has a range of long-term
biological, health and cognitive outcomes, such as higher risk of frailty, worse mental and physical health and declines in
memory and executive functions.

Such outcomes, in turn, may have a long-term impact on personality, such as reductions in the tendency to be self-disciplined and organized or to be exploratory and curious.

Indeed, cognitive decline, greater frailty, and more
depressive symptoms and disease burden have been associated with reduced conscientiousness and openness over time.”

Focusing on how habits are initiated is key to getting regular exercise, studies have found.

It’s all about making sure there are regular cues which prompt you to automatically exercise.

To create good exercise habits, you should focus on what starts you exercising, not what type of exercise you do.

The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Stephan et al., 2018).