Something I've been thinking about recently is the relationship between personality and habits, and if there's anything to be leveraged there for personal growth. Recently, I've been seeing discourse around twin studies around personality heritability (2018 example, 2020 example) make the rounds on Twitter, where the takeaway is basically that personality (as measured by the big 5 traits methodology -- where the traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) is relatively stable over time (part of their definition?), and that it is surprisingly heritable by genetics (identical twins share about 50% of tested personality traits, compared to fraternal twins sharing only 20%).
Now, as a personality test junkie in my youth, I've taken my fair share of these types of personality quizzes, and although the tests themselves are probably not scientifically vetted, I think there definitely has been some level of variance through the years as I retook the same quizzes. Part of it may have been to do with transient background experiences around the time of test taking (for instance, I attribute the elevated neuroticism trait number on a test I took partway through college to homework stress and lack of sleep), but I also wonder about longer term 'permanent' changes. Even if it is true that personality is highly heritable, the fact that only 50% of traits are apparently genetically determined (if we are to extrapolate the identical twins studies) leaves a lot of room for environmental factors. The other 50% of non-genetic trait swing could (fudging the scientific method a bit) arguably be enough to turn someone from being described as basically an introvert into basically an extravert. At that point, what even does 'semi stable personality trait' refer to?
Another thing I've been thinking about recently which I am bringing into this thought exercise is the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. I confess I have not actually read it cover to cover, but it is referenced so often in tech industry and self help / personal growth circles that I feel I basically know the gist of the ideas. From my understanding, the methods described in the book are pretty good at getting new habits started, but my interest in this in this particular discussion is not so much adopting a new habit of, say, flossing every night before bed (which by the way, I highly recommend everyone do), but rather whether it is possible to train yourself using some of the methods that this book describes to change one's personality, or (I suppose depending on your definition of 'personality') express different parts of it more often?
To illustrate what I mean more concretely, I will use an example where I think this could be applied. I recall an incident with my mom when I was visiting home, once, and she completely lost her temper at my grandmother due to some small thing that she had done. During that trip, I observed that it was very easy for my mother to lose her temper this way, getting worked up sometimes to the point of almost hyperventilation due to the small stressors in her life piling up. To give background, high blood pressure runs in my family and becoming angry often is counter to living a healthy life when susceptible to high blood pressure. I felt that it should be possible to train oneself out of the habit of losing one's temper one step at a time using methods similar to the ones described in Atomic Habits, or even exercising mindfulness in general and generally practicing things like the "three point check" method (I learned this from a therapist I was working with who focused on cognitive behavioral therapy).
Forming new habits when applied to a situation like this feels to me like rewiring the brain to recognize patterns and strengthen pathways that go "when event A happens (stressor), the next step is event B (breathe in, step back, and evaluate the situation)" and weakening the ones that go "when event A happens (stressor), the next step is event B (flip out)". The kicker here is that without an intentional way of training yourself this way, your brain becomes more and more likely to go down the undesirable pathway, resulting in an unpleasant feedback loop into becoming a more stressed out and neurotic person over time. I explained this to my mom at the time and encouraged her to try to take a step back the next time she felt stressed because otherwise she'd just keep getting worked up more and more easily as the years went by (and I reminded her that my grandfather had a similar temper problem by the time he was in his 70s and how much she hadn't liked that). In a situation like this, twenty years down the road, would you say that someone who has a loose temper and is frequently grumpy has the same personality as someone who is much more even tempered and calm in the face of stressors? I would argue that the change in habit and behavior could count as a personality shift over that time frame!
So I have been wondering whether there are other ways working on habits related to personality can affect the other apparently 'stable' Big 5 traits as well. Is it possible that finding something extremely enjoyable that one can do on their own more often and doing it instead of going out to social events can turn someone into more of an introvert? Is it possible that having someone in your life give you positive feedback every time you say yes to doing something new will make you more open over time? Or if something inexplicably good happened to you every time you agreed with someone instead of being contrarian, maybe you would become more agreeable if it happened enough?
The more I thought about this, the more it reminded me of training my dog. If you can stop your dog from doing an undesirable behavior (like barking and begging at the dining table) rather than punishing them after doing it, it is actually a quicker way to train them out of that behavior because they stop strengthening those events entirely in their neural pathway understandings. I heard a story about a friend's dog who learned to put themselves in time out after doing something bad like stealing food from the dining table, because they had learned the association between event A and B so strongly! Instead, it seems the better thing to do would have been to take event A away entirely as something their brain is aware of as a possibility. We did this with our dog (who used to bark and beg at the dining table during dinner) by giving him a food puzzle toy to distract him while we ate at the table. Now, even if he doesn't have his food puzzle toy, he doesn't bark while we eat anymore because it's just not something he does frequently -- it's no longer a habit!
To some extent though, I still think there is still a limit to how much of your personality you can really affect by yourself through forming new habits. It's possible that if you are good enough at it, it can really seem like a personality change because you are expressing very differently, but it does seem that at the core, you had to be the kind of person who would stick to learning this new habit to begin with. Basically, you have to be the kind of person who would subscribe to Atomic Habits and believe that 'people can change' in order to get anything out of it. Also, you would have to value the new behavior to some extent in order to try to change yourself to express more of it I assume. So that all seems like a bit of a paradox... unless if, like dog training, there happens to be someone around you trying to manipulate your behavior by giving you positive feedback at the right moments without your knowledge. I wonder how much of an impact that person could have?
