Can You Change Your Personality: What the Science Says
If you’ve ever wished you were more confident, organized, outgoing, trusting, or better able to handle stress, you may have wondered: Can I actually change my personality, or am I just stuck this way?
The short answer is yes, personality can change.
Personality traits are relatively stable patterns in how we think, feel, and behave, but “relatively stable” does not mean fixed. Decades of research show that personality naturally changes across the lifespan. More recent research (including my own) suggests something I’m so excited about: people can intentionally change their personality traits when they repeatedly practice new ways of thinking and behaving.
That doesn’t mean you can wake up tomorrow with an entirely different personality. Nor should that be the goal. Intentional personality change is usually gradual - but faster than you might think. You might choose to become a little more conscientious so you follow through more consistently, a little more extraverted so you get noticed more in meetings, or less prone to negative emotions so setbacks don’t derail you as easily.
I’ve spent much of my career studying this question as a clinical psychologist and personality scientist: How can people intentionally change the personality patterns that are getting in the way of the lives they want to build?
In this guide, we’ll look at what the science actually tells us about personality change, including why personality changes, which traits can change, how much change is possible, and what you can do if there’s something about your own personality you’d like to change.
What Is Personality, Exactly?
Before we can talk about whether personality can change, it helps to clarify what personality actually is.
Personality refers to the relatively consistent patterns in how you tend to think, feel, and behave. If you regularly plan ahead, keep track of details, and follow through on commitments, we might describe you as conscientious. If you tend to worry, notice potential threats, and experience emotions intensely, we might describe you as higher in neuroticism.
Notice the direction of that relationship. You don't plan ahead because you have conscientiousness. We call you conscientious because you tend to plan ahead, along with engaging in other thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that characterize that trait.
In other words, personality traits are descriptive, not causal. They're useful labels psychologists use to summarize patterns that tend to show up across different situations and over time.
Personality scientists generally organize these patterns into five broad dimensions known as the Big Five:
Openness to Experience: curiosity, creativity, and interest in new ideas and experiences
Conscientiousness: organization, persistence, reliability, and self-discipline
Extraversion: sociability, assertiveness, energy, and tendency to experience positive emotions
Agreeableness: compassion, cooperation, trust, and concern for others
Neuroticism: sensitivity to stress and tendency to experience negative emotions
Importantly, these aren't personality types. Think of each trait as a slider. You fall somewhere along a continuum from lower to higher on each one, and your unique combination of settings helps describe your personality.
That slider metaphor also gives us a better way to think about personality change. Changing your personality doesn't mean replacing your current personality with an entirely different one. It means nudging one or more of those sliders by changing the patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that the trait describes.
So the question isn't really whether you can become a completely different person. It's whether those patterns, and therefore where you fall on those personality dimensions, can shift over time.
The research says they can.
Can you change your personality?
How Does Personality Change Over Time?
Some of our best evidence for personality change comes from longitudinal studies, in which researchers follow the same people for years or even decades and repeatedly measure their personality. These studies show that personality continues to change across the lifespan, with some of the most substantial changes occurring during young adulthood, roughly between ages 20 and 40.
On average, as people move through adulthood, they tend to become more conscientious, more agreeable, and more emotionally stable. These patterns are sometimes called the maturity principle of personality development. But averages don't tell the whole story. Individual people can change in different directions and at different rates, and personality continues to be capable of change well beyond age 40.
Why does this happen? Part of the answer may be the new roles and responsibilities we encounter as we get older. Starting a career might require you to become more organized and dependable. Maintaining a long-term relationship may give you repeated opportunities to compromise, communicate, and consider someone else's perspective. Becoming a parent can suddenly make planning ahead much more important than it used to be.
But we're not simply passive recipients of whatever experiences life throws our way. Our personalities also influence the situations we choose. An extraverted person may seek out a job that involves meeting new people, while someone high in openness may deliberately surround themselves with people, places, and experiences that expose them to new ideas. Psychologists call this situation selection.
This creates an interesting feedback loop. Your personality influences the environments you choose, and those environments give you repeated opportunities to think, feel, and behave in particular ways, which can reinforce or gradually alter your personality.
That means agency is already part of personality development. We choose jobs, relationships, hobbies, friendships, routines, and environments partly based on who we are, but those choices also help shape who we become.
And that raises an intriguing possibility: If the choices we make can shape our personality without us necessarily intending them to, can we use that same process deliberately?
That's where the research on intentional personality change comes in.
Can You Intentionally Change Your Personality?
Studies of intentional personality change have found that people who want to change their traits can make measurable progress in the direction they choose. Importantly, though, simply wanting to be different doesn't appear to be enough. Change is more likely when people translate that goal into repeated changes in how they think and behave.
This idea has been central to my own research for more than 15 years. Much of my work began in the context of mental health treatment. Psychological disorders are associated with characteristic personality patterns. For example, people struggling with anxiety and depression tend to be higher in neuroticism. My colleagues and I found that when treatment successfully helped people change the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors contributing to their symptoms, their personality traits changed, too.
That makes sense when you remember that personality is descriptive rather than causal. If someone learns to approach situations they previously avoided, interpret uncertainty less negatively, and respond differently when difficult emotions arise, the patterns we summarize as "neuroticism" have changed. Over time, their personality scores should reflect that.
My more recent work has focused on taking this idea one step further: What if you don't have a mental health condition, but there are aspects of your personality you'd like to change to be better aligned with the life you want?
The same basic principle applies. If you'd like to become more conscientious, you can deliberately practice planning ahead, following through, and tolerating the discomfort of doing something you'd rather put off. If you want to become more extraverted, you might practice initiating conversations, expressing yourself more assertively, or intentionally seeking out rewarding experiences.
The goal isn't to act like someone you're not. It's to identify the patterns that would help you become more like the person you want to be, and then create repeated opportunities to practice them.
Over time, those new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving can become more familiar and more automatic. Eventually, they aren't just things you're practicing.
They're part of your personality.
How Much Should You Change Your Personality?
Before deciding which part of your personality you'd like to change, it's important to understand that there is no optimal personality profile.
Being more conscientious isn't always better than being less conscientious. High conscientiousness can help you stay organized and follow through, but at the extreme it can also come with rigidity, perfectionism, or difficulty relaxing. High agreeableness can support close relationships, while too much may make it difficult to set limits or advocate for yourself (aka people pleasing). Even neuroticism, a trait associated with greater vulnerability to anxiety and depression, can come with strengths, like being alert to potential problems and being empathetic.
So the goal of personality change isn't to max out the "good" traits and minimize the "bad" ones. It's to ask whether your current personality patterns are helping you live in a way that's consistent with what matters to you.
I think of this as functional change. You don't need to become the most extraverted person in the room. You might want just enough assertiveness to speak up in meetings or enough social confidence to build the relationships you want. You don't need to become extraordinarily conscientious. You may want to become organized enough that missed deadlines are no longer interfering with your career.
This is where it's helpful to return to the idea of personality traits as sliders.
Imagine your conscientiousness slider currently sits around a 30 on a scale from 0 to 100. Personality change doesn't mean dragging it all the way to 100. Moving it from a 30 to a 40 or 45 could be enough to meaningfully change how you function in your everyday life.
The same principle can help you decide which trait to change. Rather than asking, "What's wrong with my personality?" ask where there's a mismatch between your current patterns and the person you want to be.
Maybe you value close relationships but tend to keep people at a distance. Increasing some aspects of agreeableness could help you practice greater trust and vulnerability. Maybe you value professional growth but routinely avoid opportunities that require putting yourself forward. Turning up extraversion—particularly assertiveness—might help. Or perhaps you value being present with your family but spend much of your time in your head, worrying about what could go wrong. Learning to respond differently to negative emotions could gradually turn down neuroticism.
In each case, the goal isn't personality change for its own sake. It's greater alignment between your personality and your values.
And that also gives you a useful stopping point. You don't have to keep turning the slider. You're looking for enough change that the patterns that once got in your way become less of an obstacle to the life you want to build.
How Do You Change Your Personality?
Once you've identified a personality pattern you'd like to change, the first step isn't necessarily to force yourself to behave completely differently. It's to understand what keeps your current patterns in place.
Often, part of the answer is the beliefs you've developed about yourself.
Maybe you've spent years telling yourself, I'm just not an organized person. You believe you're too socially awkward to initiate conversations, too anxious to handle uncertainty, or that trusting other people will inevitably lead to getting hurt. These beliefs probably didn't come from nowhere. They're based on your experiences. But over time, they can become self-limiting beliefs that influence what you're willing to try.
If you believe you'll embarrass yourself when you speak up, you're less likely to contribute in a meeting. If you believe you can't tolerate feeling anxious, you're more likely to avoid situations that make you uncomfortable. And every time you avoid doing something different, you miss an opportunity to discover that your prediction might not be entirely accurate.
That's why intentional personality change often starts with behavioral experiments.
Rather than trying to convince yourself that your belief is wrong, test it. Choose a small behavior that is slightly different from what you would normally do and see what happens.
If you believe you're terrible at making conversation, ask one new person a question at a social event. If you think you'll never follow through without a looming deadline, start one small piece of a project a week early. If trusting people feels risky, share something slightly more personal than you normally would with someone who has given you reason to believe they're trustworthy.
Then pay attention to the outcome.
Maybe the conversation isn't nearly as awkward as you predicted. Maybe starting early actually makes the project less stressful. Maybe the person you opened up to responds with warmth rather than judgment.
That experience gives you something your old belief didn't have: new data.
One behavioral experiment probably won't erase a belief you've carried for years. But it might loosen it up bit. I'm terrible at talking to people becomes Maybe I can handle some social situations better than I thought. I can't trust anyone might become There are some people I can trust with some things.
And that slightly more flexible belief makes the next behavioral experiment easier.
You initiate a longer conversation. You start the next project even earlier. You take a slightly bigger interpersonal risk. Each experiment gives you another opportunity to collect evidence that challenges the assumptions that have kept your old patterns in place.
Over time, this can create a reinforcing cycle:
Challenge a self-limiting belief → take a small behavioral step → collect new evidence → revise the belief → take a bigger behavioral step.
As those new thoughts and behaviors become more consistent, you're changing the very patterns your personality traits describe.
That's why intentional personality change isn't about pretending to be someone you're not. It's about testing the limits of who you've assumed you have to be.
Ready to Make a Change?
Understanding that your personality can change is one thing. Figuring out what to change and how to actually do it can be harder.
That's why I created the Personality Action Plan. It helps you identify a personality pattern that's getting in the way of something you value and turn that insight into a concrete, personalized plan for change.
Rather than trying to overhaul your personality, you'll choose one meaningful target and learn science-backed strategies for shifting the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that keep that pattern in place.
