Wellness Matters Webinar - Know thyself: Personality and Happiness

In this talk, you will learn:

What current and past psychological research says about human happiness.

The major factors in personality research, and how to determine your own personality makeup based on the five-factor model.

How to best position yourself to maximize your likelihood of overall life satisfaction in relation to your individual personality.

Bonus topics include: Time pressure, finances, procrastination, diet, willpower, exercise, environmental factors, and setting realistic expectations.

Facilitated by: Warren Tews

FAQs

• How do personality traits influence happiness and life satisfaction?

  Personality traits shape how we react to events, what we seek out, and how we cope, which all impact happiness over time. In the webinar, Warren explains the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism/emotional stability) and shows that people who are more emotionally stable and more extraverted tend to report the highest levels of happiness overall. That doesn’t mean other personality types can’t be happy—it means that knowing your own mix of traits helps you choose environments, routines, and relationships that fit who you are, so you’re working with your wiring instead of against it.

• Is happiness mostly genetic, or can I actually change how happy I feel?

  Research on identical twins raised apart shows that there is a strong genetic component to both personality and happiness—twins often report similar happiness levels even when they grow up in different families. In the webinar, Warren compares this to vocal range: your “range” is partly set at birth, but training and practice determine how fully you use it. In the same way, you may have a natural happiness “set point,” but your habits (sleep, exercise, diet), coping skills, relationships, and therapy can significantly improve your day-to-day well-being and life satisfaction. Genetics are not a life sentence; they’re a starting point.

• What everyday habits (sleep, diet, and exercise) can improve my mood and emotional health?

  Good health and happiness are closely linked. Consistent sleep (going to bed and waking up at the same time, limiting screens before bed, getting 7–8 hours, and some daily sunlight) supports emotional stability and reduces irritability and low mood. Exercise boosts brain chemicals like dopamine and serotonin and increases brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which supports brain health and is linked to lower anxiety and depression. A diet richer in fruits and vegetables is also associated with higher self-reported happiness and life satisfaction. None of these remove all emotional pain, but they create a stronger physical foundation for better mental health.

Transcript

Well, hello, and welcome everyone to our webinar this evening. We’re so happy to have you. My name is Nicole Imgrund, and I am the owner and director of River’s Edge Counselling Centre. With us this evening, our presenter is Warren Tews for his webinar, Know Thyself: Personality and Happiness.

This webinar is part of a series of webinars that we have. This is the last one for this season, but we’ve just posted our fall lineup. We do a couple of these a month, and we have a really wonderful lineup for fall, so I encourage you to take a look at our website and consider joining us again. We have one about women and sleep in the fall. We have one on talking about the difference between thriving and surviving, or understanding coping versus self-care. We have one called Sober Curious. Another one about teenage development—so some really nice options for you. If you go to our website on the blog page, we have 60 or 70 of these that we’ve already recorded, so you will be able to look at any of those as well.

We’ve got some really neat programming coming up, so I’m just going to take another couple of minutes to share a little bit about that with you before I introduce Warren.

The first one is a fundraiser that we are doing in October—October 26. I’m so excited that we are going to be bringing Tareq Hadhad from Nova Scotia to St. Albert, to the Arden. He is the founder and CEO of Peace by Chocolate. Some people are familiar with their product. I’m a little too familiar with it now because I got a lot of chocolate for promotional reasons, and I’m eating all of it. It’s so good.

Tareq’s family, the Hadhad family, came from Syria. They have this incredible story of resilience, of a long journey that brought them to Nova Scotia, and then a beautiful story about how that community came together to help them rebuild their chocolate factory that had been bombed in Syria. Tareq is going to come and share their story with us. Also that evening, from Alberta, we have an award-winning classical musician—an Indigenous classical musician—Jessica McMann, and some other artists as well.

All of the proceeds to that event go towards the food bank, and those tickets are already on sale. There’s also a movie called Peace by Chocolate—if you haven’t seen it, it’s a wonderful Canadian film as well, with their story. I’m trying to generate a little bit of early ticket sales, so for tonight, for the people here, I’m going to put a little coupon code for five dollars off in the chat. It’ll be good for a couple of days, so if you decide you want to come, you’re welcome to use that code.

Also, I’m so excited: we’re building out a new room—some new space—and starting to do some more mental wellness programming and groups in the fall. We have just this week opened up registration for our first set of programs. We have one for men called The Core: Emotionally Powered Men. We have a wonderful two-session workshop about talking about puberty with your teenage daughters—one for parents and caregivers, and then also a workshop to come with them together.

We have one on embodied stress management, a three-session program; a children’s grief group; and an adult grief group. A program over six weeks for women called The Compassionate Road to Building Self-Esteem. A teen wellness group. Also a group for helping parents of teens to get through some of the tougher stuff: a workshop to support children and teens—helping adults support children and teens through self-harm and suicidal thoughts, and some of those things that come up, unfortunately, as well.

You can go to our website and read more about some of those programs if you’d like.

Without further ado, I know you’re here for this incredible webinar that Warren is presenting, so I want to share a little bit about Warren with you. He’s a graduate student, soon to be completing his master’s degree in counselling psychology from City University of Seattle. I think he graduates very soon here—he’s going to graduate in a couple weeks. He has an undergraduate degree in psychology from King’s University, and his prior work experience has been in the non-profit sector and in public health with Alberta Health Services. He’s excited to be finishing up his graduate studies and start the next steps to becoming a provisional psychologist in the fall.

I’m also very excited about the next step in Warren’s career as a counsellor because he will be staying on our team. He’s been a practicum student since September, and he’s going to be a provisional psychologist on our team in the fall. So excited for his clients, and our team, that he’ll be carrying on.

Warren works primarily with teens, adults, and also couples, and he also ran a grief group for the centre this last year as well. He takes a person-centered and solution-focused approach that allows clients to feel heard and understood with depth, non-judgment, compassion, and empathy. Warren believes that each person is infinitely complex in their individuality, and so his methods are diverse and custom-tailored to every client that he sees. His goals are to create a warm and safe environment for people to be who they are, to feel their emotions authentically, and to have the courage to create change in their lives.

True to his personality, which is generous and always going above and beyond, the talk this evening might be a little bit longer than the hour that we posted. So please stay for as long as you can, but also—we’re recording the event this evening, so if you do have a commitment at eight and we’re not quite finished, you’ll be able to catch up with the rest of it later as well. Also, don’t worry about scrambling to take notes and things, because it will be posted—along with his slides—on our blog later as well.

I’m going to be signing off—well, not signing off; I will be here, but I’ll turn off my camera and let Warren share his presentation now. I want to let you know I’ll keep my eye on the chat. Feel free to post comments, post questions in the Q&A, and at the end—whenever it is that we’re done—Warren and I can hang on for a little bit of time afterwards to look at the questions at that time as well.

With that, I’m going to hand it over to you, Warren.

Great, thank you, Nicole, for that intro. I’m so happy to be here tonight, and I’m honored to be joining this amazing practice in the fall.

I actually just wanted to start off with a little preamble. I think that we all, at some time or another, struggle with happiness and being happy, and I don’t want anybody to think that I’m on this screen, on a pedestal, dictating that people should listen to this talk because I’ve got it all figured out. I just think that struggling to be happy is something that’s very universal, and if we could, we probably all would want to be happy all of the time—but as we’ll see in this next hour, our psychological architecture doesn’t seem to have been designed that way, and many of us, including myself, deeply lament that fact.

Surely some of us seem very happy—or happier than others—and there’s individual variation, and circumstances and events of our lives. As we’ll see, some people are just predisposed to be a little happier than others. But I do want everyone to know that if you’re watching this and you’re sad, or you’re depressed, or you’re grieving, or you feel unhappy: I see you, and I feel you. Life can be really difficult, and I hope this talk can shed some light and offer some assistance. If just one person walks away from this with a tool or a new perspective on how they can feel happier or have a better life, then it’ll be completely worthwhile.

I am completely honored and humbled to be closing out the 2023 Wellness Matters talks for River’s Edge, and in honor of season finales, my PowerPoint is inspired by our good friends at Netflix.

So, like Nicole said, my Wellness Matters talk is called Know Thyself: Personality and Happiness, and there’s a summary on the screen there of what we’re going to be talking about: basically, current psychological research—what it says about happiness; major factors in personality research, particularly what’s known as the Five Factor Model; and how to best position yourself for maximizing your life satisfaction in relation to your individual personality.

Having said all that, I probably bit off more than I can chew with this topic. I had to leave a lot of things out that I wanted to include. Personality and happiness are quite complicated—the infinite beauty and complexity of the human condition, and who we are, and the vast depths of what contributes to our happiness and our existential angst. So basically, I would just say buckle up as you watch me try to explain this in about an hour or so.

Like Nicole mentioned, I do have an undergraduate degree in psychology from King’s University, and I also minored in philosophy. So while psychology won out from a career standpoint, I still hold great reverence for philosophy and the great philosophers of our time, and one of those happens to be Socrates—otherwise affectionately known as “Socrates” in some circles—and he coined the phrase “know thyself.”

So the better self-awareness and understanding that we have of who we are—both good and bad—and the more willing we are to be vulnerable and honest about not only our strengths but our weaknesses, the better position we are to create a life that we deserve, and be as happy as possible, and find the right circumstances for our own individual characteristics so that we can thrive.

What is personality? Webster’s Dictionary defines it as “the complex of characteristics that distinguishes an individual,” especially “the totality of an individual’s behavioral and emotional characteristics.” I would add that it’s something that’s internal, something that’s stable, inherent to the person, and something which stands in a causal relationship to their specific choices, motivations, reactions, and obstacles when they’re faced with a stream of events. I think that a clue to personality being at work is a kind of theme that we experience in our lives recurrently.

And what’s happiness? Hard to define. Again, Webster’s Dictionary defines it as a “state of well-being and contentment,” and the secondary definition is a “pleasurable or satisfying experience.” So in that, we have a bit of a problem. Surely there’s a difference between pleasure and happiness, although they certainly overlap and can be confused with each other.

One allegory we might liken it to is food. Hyper-palatable processed foods give us a surge of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter in the brain associated with pleasure—and that pleasure is often highly intense and very short-lived. Those kinds of foods can also impact our health in a negative way in the long term. So a carrot might be less pleasurable than a donut, but if it contributes to lifelong health outcomes, then it probably would be more akin to overall happiness, while we would more so associate the donut with immediate and intense pleasure.

We will see in this talk that health is pretty closely tied to happiness, and so this kind of consideration is something we want to take seriously. It’s not an attack on donuts; they have their place in the world. I would be a hypocrite to say so because a few months ago I threw a donut party for the clinic—shout-out to Donut Party here in Edmonton.

Anyway, this is just an example where we’re wired to pursue pleasure more than happiness—to pursue short-term gratification and energy conservation—and so that can pose many difficult scenarios in a human life that can sometimes contribute to short-term goals, but rob us of long-term life satisfaction.

A second example I have for this: according to Statistics Canada, seniors in their 60s, 70s, and 80s actually have higher life satisfaction scores than men and women in the age bracket of 20 to 59, which might be difficult to believe. We have a bit of a bias towards youth being valued more in our culture. But the caveat was: in that type of research, it was if the seniors were in good health that’s when they rated their life experience more highly than the younger folks. So in that way, eating healthier might not give us as much immediate pleasure, but it could contribute to more overall life satisfaction and happiness in the long term—particularly in the last 20 to 30 years of our lives, which is no joke. That’s a significant portion of our time on the planet. And because we’re not wired to expect to live past 40, it can be difficult to really think about later life and take into serious consideration the choices that we’re making right now.

Another example would be romance. The pleasure that we would probably most closely associate with romance is sexual activity—so that’s only one small part of a relationship. An orgasm, while incredibly pleasurable, is intense and short-lived, and I think a lot of people would argue that overall happiness from romance comes from a composite picture of support, love, contentment, feeling accepted for who we are, and the feelings that come from when we have a special someone in our lives. We certainly derive pleasure from those things, but the happiness is an overall picture. Like I said, it’s more of a result of looking at everything. Relationships have their difficulties; they have their conflict—but if the overall net positive is there for both parties, we would say that it’s a happy relationship more so than we would say it’s a pleasurable relationship.

So from this we can derive that when people say they’re happy with their lives, they’re not communicating that they’re just blissed out 24/7 in this cacophony of pleasurable hedonism. Instead, they mean that when they reflect on the overall balance sheet of losses and gains, they recognize that they’re in the green overall, and the balance is reasonably positive over the long term. And that’s the type of happiness that psychologists usually study. It’s focused less on immediate feelings, but more of an aggregate of feelings over time. Synonyms would include things like contentment and life satisfaction.

So this is where I’m going to start to sound like everyone’s mother for a bit—and I probably already started sounding like that anyway. I apologize. Here’s another philosopher for us: Voltaire, the 18th-century French writer, and he says, “There can be no happiness without good health.”

So we’re going to watch a highly scientific video about that.

All right.

Cells, line up for your rations.

Pizza again!

We need nutrients!

The brain has decreed that pizza has tomato in it, which is a vegetable. Further complaints about the quality of rations will not be tolerated.

Sir, my son—he’s dying from lack of vitamin D. Can we have some sunlight, please?

You will take your screen light, and you will be happy.

Facts, peasant.

Attention: the brain has found a four-hour video on Mario Kart speedruns. There will be no sleep period tonight.

I can’t do this anymore. We don’t even like Mario Kart!

I don’t know how accurate that is, but I’ve never met anybody who doesn’t like Mario Kart.

Anyway.

An in-depth discussion of health and healthy behaviors is kind of out of scope of this talk, but I will touch on the most important points briefly.

Sleep, diet, and exercise have some massive implications on our overall life satisfaction and happiness. There’s a lot of research out there that demonstrates sleep quality is correlated with lower reports of happiness and emotional stability in people.

So what are the most important parts of sleep? We’ll try to go through this briefly. Forty years of sleep research: the most important thing is going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, including on weekends, which is extremely difficult to do—but that’s the number one predictor. The next would be getting between seven or eight hours of sleep a night—I think most people know that. Getting at least 30 minutes of sunlight a day: that helps our pituitary gland regulate sleep levels. Stopping exposure to screen light an hour or two before bedtime: that blue light inhibits the production of the hormone melatonin, which is what’s there to tell us that it’s dark outside and it’s time to go to sleep.

It’s also good to know whether you’re a morning lark or a night owl. Despite our culture valuing early rising as a moral virtue, the research has actually shown that around 30% of the population are genetically night owls, meaning they do better health-wise and psychologically when they go to bed later and wake up later.

Also, taking a hot bath or a hot shower before bed can create a drop in body temperature, which can make it easier to fall asleep.

And this is where we might become a little bit less popular: avoiding or limiting coffee, caffeine, cigarettes, cannabis, stimulants, and alcohol. Caffeine and the other substances listed above cause fragmented sleep, and they inhibit deep, restorative REM—rapid eye movement—sleep. That’s the stage of sleep in which we dream, and it’s associated with memory consolidation and rehearsing for life events—at least that’s the theory. We actually don’t know why we dream at this point, still.

A lot of people derive a lot of pleasure from the aforementioned substances, so I’m not making any direct prescriptions. I’m just saying that it’s good to know the potential implications of those substances. If we want to bolster up our happiness or our emotional stability, it’s something to consider, and maybe consult with a doctor to see if you want to limit or eliminate those substances. Everything in life has costs and benefits, and we’ve just got to carefully weigh each of them and make the best decisions we can as individuals.

Exercise: we’re definitely designed to move, and there are countless studies documenting positive effects of exercise on both physical and mental health. It boosts something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is BDNF, which is a secreted growth factor that supports the survival of existing neurons and the growth of new neurons and neural connections. Exercise also releases both dopamine and serotonin, which are neurotransmitters associated with pleasure and happiness. Exercise has also been shown to reduce anxiety and depression in many clinical trials.

This research is nearly endless. There’s just a plethora of peer-reviewed clinical trials, and there are just some selections here: evidence showed a consistent positive relationship between physical activity and happiness. Findings indicated a significant increase in happiness scales. In other words, group exercise was correlated with an increase in student self-reported happiness.

So I know that not everybody is stoked on exercising to be happy—or for any reason at all. “Do it every single day,” Mel Gibson there—every single day.

For those of you who aren’t so jazzed about exercise, I would say: don’t feel bad. This is a clip from Dan Lieberman—he’s a Harvard professor—who wrote the book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, and he just talks a little bit about studying a hunter-gatherer tribe, the Tarahumara, in Mexico.

I went to do some field work in the Sierra Tarahumara, which is in Chihuahua, in northern Mexico, and I was doing research among the Tarahumara Native Americans, who are well known for, among other things, their long-distance running. This particular race went on for about 50 miles—really amazing race. I was, of course, very impressed by these races, but also interested by the fact that only a few of the Tarahumara were doing this. The vast majority were just watching, like me.

I did run along with them, actually, a little bit at night, and so I got a chance to measure and interview and talk to some of the runners. One of them was this guy named—I’m going to call him Ernesto. I asked him about how he trained, and I had been asking everybody this question. The woman who was helping me interpret—because I don’t speak the native language—was really struggling to get people to answer my question, because it turns out there’s no word, not only for training, but the idea of training is kind of foreign to the Tarahumara. A few of them are great runners; most of them actually aren’t. Ernesto eventually—when she explained that this gringo who’s talking to you goes for like a five-mile run every morning to kind of practice his running—he asked me, and I’ll never forget this question: he said, “Why would anybody run if they didn’t have to?”

In fact, in case you don’t—if you hate treadmills—you’re in good company. Treadmills were actually invented in the 19th century by the Victorians to punish prisoners. They were invented by Sir William Cubitt to keep people like Oscar Wilde from enjoying themselves in prison.

So the best thing that we can do is just recognize that even though it’s really difficult to get moving sometimes, when we do it can have a major impact on our mood and our happiness. But don’t beat yourself up if you don’t want to exercise. Our energy-conservation mechanisms dictate that it’s normal to feel that way. Like Dr. Lieberman said, for people that live in that hunter-gatherer lifestyle, they’re confused by why anybody would move if they didn’t have to.

So we’re really only designed to move when we need to—out of necessity—or when it’s fun. One of the best suggestions is to find something that you really enjoy that’s physically active. Also, walking is probably one of the best forms of exercise, and most people can do it. So just do your best. If you don’t like running, be comforted that treadmills were created as a torture device for prisoners.

I have a video here on how diet can affect happiness as well, and it’s pretty interesting.

[Music] Thousands of papers have been published on the important topic of what determines people’s happiness and psychological health, but what about the potential influence of the different kinds of foods that people eat? The rising prevalence of mental ill health is causing a considerable burden, and so inexpensive and effective strategies are required to improve the psychological well-being of our population. Now we have a growing body of literature suggesting that dietary intake may have the potential to influence psychological well-being.

Dietary intake of what? Well, given the strong evidence base for the health benefits of fruits and vegetables, researchers started there. Cross-sectional studies from all of the world support this relationship between happiness and fruit and vegetable intake. Those eating fruits and vegetables each day had a higher likelihood of being classified as very happy, suggesting a strong and positive correlation between fruit and vegetable consumption and happiness—perhaps feelings of optimism too.

The largest such study was done in Great Britain, where a dose-response relationship was found between daily servings of fruits and vegetables and both life satisfaction and happiness—meaning more fruits and veggies meant more happiness. People who got up to seven or eight servings a day reported the highest life satisfaction and happiness.

So no one should be under the impression that eating fruits and vegetables is going to solve your problems and make you happy in the face of terrible circumstances, or a major depressive disorder, or a difficult personality for that matter. But the point is really that literature does demonstrate that it might be able to help.

So what we want to take away from that is it’s probably a good idea to have a blueberry from time to time because it can really help boost immune function and, in turn, positively affect our happiness levels. So eat your fruits and vegetables, kids.

All right. So we’re going to move into personality and personality inventories, and we’re going to talk about some things that are known as factor analysis and lexical analysis—which sound very fancy.

There are a ton of personality inventories, both formal and informal, all the way from—if you have a LinkedIn profile, you’re familiar with the Myers-Briggs—and that spans to BuzzFeed’s infamous “what kind of bread are you?”

So one of the most comprehensive personality inventories is known as the Big Five, or the Five Factor Model. To me, this is really cool. I get excited about this.

The thing that is so fascinating about the Big Five is that it’s the only personality inventory to have been discovered. It was actually discovered through mathematical lexical analysis. Other personality inventories started with a preconceived notion of what humans are like, and then they worked backwards from that premise.

Some of you might be familiar with the anecdote that in Inuit culture they have upwards of 50 words for snow, and the reason for this is that different types of snow can have significant impacts on survival, shelter, food, and so on and so forth. So it’s really important for the Inuit to be able to communicate those things in order to survive harsh conditions.

In a similar way, we have hundreds of words to describe personality characteristics in the English language. So if you take a word like conscientious, for example, which is one of the Big Five: synonyms for that are orderly, organized, diligent, upstanding, reliable, industrious, attentive, assiduous, efficient, responsible, thorough, dependable, productive, ethical, disciplined, and so on and so forth.

The Five Factor Model has its roots back in 1884 with a guy named Sir Francis Galton, who is an English polymath. He estimated that there were at least a thousand terms in the English language that would describe personality characteristics. He also inferred that there would be a great deal of redundancy because many of them are synonyms or antonyms for each other.

So we fast-forward to the 1980s, and psychologists discovered that all the words in the English language that described personality characteristics could be distilled and filtered down—using lexical analysis—to five different dimensions. Meaning: out of the thousands of words that we have to describe what people are like, we’re really just describing five factors.

There’s also significant evidence for these five factors appearing cross-culturally, suggesting that these characteristics are human universals—which is amazing to me.

So what are they? What are the five? You can use the acronym OCEAN to remember them. The O is for openness to experience. The C, as I mentioned, is for conscientiousness. The E is for extraversion or introversion—they’re two sides of the same coin. Then we have an A for agreeableness. Then we have an N for neuroticism, which isn’t the nicest word. Sometimes we like to refer to it more as emotional stability, just because we’re trying to be honest here, but we also want to be kind when we’re talking about things that are difficult.

Just as a side note: the Big Five does not include intelligence or IQ. They keep that off to the side, and the reason for that is that intelligence isn’t really a personality characteristic, per se. It’s more about global processing efficiency for our brain systems.

So here’s a big old table of all of the different Big Five factors, with some synonyms and ways that lexical analysis used to come up with the configurations. One thing to really keep in mind for the next bit of the talk is that each of us has our own individual mix, and the factors absolutely interact with each other. So you’ll see contradictions in yourself and in other people, and it can take some time to study this stuff to get a sense of how everything works together.

I would say that you’ve probably, in your life, met a few people that are very much like you, but you’ve never actually met someone who is exactly like you. So we’re all very individual, even though we’ve got five factors that are building onto the complexity of what a human being is like.

A way to think about this is: I think there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, and think about how many books have been written with 26 letters. It’s kind of like that.

So you can do a Big Five personality test for yourself for free online. You can throw a dart and you’ll hit one online, and they’re all fairly similar. They’re not exactly the same as the clinical version of the Big Five test, which is known as the NEO Personality Inventory—the NEO-PI-R is the latest revised one—so these open-source online tests will give you a pretty good idea of where you are on the scale of the five traits.

I’m just going to show everybody what that particular test looks like. This is just an anonymous tester’s results, and I like the way that they break things down even further for each of the dimensions. It can be really helpful for somebody that’s new to this.

So this is the main breakdown. I’m not sure why they go to 120—it should go to 100—but all that means is: to see where most people are, you just look at the middle, at 60, because 60 is half of 120.

So what we see here is that this person is a little bit more emotionally stable than average: they have a lower neuroticism score. They’re quite a bit more extraverted than average. They’re quite open to experience, more agreeable than average, and about average for conscientiousness.

Then here we have openness to experience: some of the subfactors are imagination, artistic interests, adventurousness, liberalism—which is not a political thing; it’s just more that people who are open to experience are more liberal with the kind of ideas that they’ll accept.

Next we’ve got conscientiousness. I listed off a laundry list before of synonyms for that.

Extraversion: we have friendliness, excitement-seeking, cheerfulness, activity level.

Agreeableness: trust, altruism, modesty, sympathy.

And then finally neuroticism: anxiety, depression, self-consciousness, vulnerability. Sounds like a good time, right?

So how did these traits develop, you might be asking yourself. These actually developed over natural selection for our species as humans. They’re the best possible traits for survival and reproduction, and the thing is: the environments that we found ourselves in over history have varied, and so there’s going to be variation in people, obviously. There’s no perfect personality for every situation, so that’s why the traits fall in what we call a bell curve, or a distribution.

So in bell curves—or a distribution—for anyone that hasn’t had the pleasure of taking the stats class: basically all you need to know is that in the middle—in that big yellow section—that’s where most people fall. Most people, when we’re looking at these characteristics, are pretty similar and in the middle, because that’s where you want to be for the most likely success in most situations. But sometimes being an outlier on the tail ends of that curve can be an advantage, and so they stay in the gene pool because they had advantages that allowed them to survive and pass on their genes.

This is a dumb joke because it’s bell peppers. So anyway.

Gene mutations create genetic variation, and then natural selection winnows it. Winnowing is just the process of losing all the waste matter in order to be left with the best stuff—and that’s what natural selection does. The genetic variants that make individuals best suited to a local environment gradually increase their frequency in the population.

So great news: part of the reason that you’re here is because your ancestors were the people who had the best-suited personality traits and skills to survive and reproduce, and the ones who didn’t died out—so congratulations. At the same time, you might be looking at people around you, maybe even looking at yourself—when I look at myself—and wonder: is this truly the best that nature could do?

I mean, when I see somebody merging onto the Henday at 60 kilometers an hour, sometimes I wonder: how is this the best product of natural selection? It’s too complex to go into here, but basically there are constraints on all species. That’s what we’re seeing. Otherwise, by this point, we’d likely be telepathic super-beings with omnipotent powers, and that’s just not the case. Although I think we’re pretty cool. I think humans are pretty neat. We’re nifty.

Just a couple more examples: if a particular environment in our history as a species was very intense competitively, and there were many threats and scarce resources, it’s probably better to be a little less trusting and a little less cooperative, which would predict lower agreeableness. On top of that, risky exploratory behaviors in that type of environment aren’t as advantageous, so that’s going to predict people lower in extraversion or openness doing better.

On the flip side, if we have an environment where there’s more safety and abundant resources—kind of like the modern world—it’s more advantageous for people to share and work together, and that would predict higher agreeableness and extraversion. There could be great benefits to exploring more to find better opportunities, which would predict higher openness and higher extraversion doing better.

So there are costs and benefits on both sides of the equation when you move along each dimension on the bell curve. Someone who’s more agreeable has the potential to be taken advantage of, and would have a harder time in an environment of intense competition. But someone who’s more disagreeable would potentially sacrifice social harmony in an environment where it would be less advantageous to be more self-interested or competitive.

Not to contradict my last point, but at the extreme poles of personality dimensions, personality factors can sometimes become pathological. That means we can see psychological disorders show up in a person’s life. Someone on the very far end for introversion and neuroticism could potentially develop social anxiety disorder or a major depressive disorder. Someone at the very low end of conscientiousness and agreeableness could exhibit a conduct disorder. Someone at the very high end of conscientiousness could exhibit an eating disorder like anorexia, or obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

How accurate is all this stuff? An increasing body of evidence since the 1970s has shown the Big Five personality traits to be a relatively stable construct over a lifespan, and also relatively predictive of generalized behavior.

There’s no question that the context and the environment play an important role in how people act. Additionally, many longitudinal studies have shown that these Big Five traits appear to be stable across a lifetime, with people taking the same tests at different life intervals.

There was one study where people took a personality questionnaire on three different occasions, six years apart, so the final score—12 years from the beginning of the study—correlated with their beginning scores with an R value of 0.68 to 0.85. Correlations run from a scale of zero to one, so 0.68 to 0.85 is very high. It’s got about the same correlation value as if you get someone to take the test today and then take it again in a week.

So what that demonstrates is that variations due to quirks and accidents of mood are pretty limited, and that scores are nearly as consistent over 10 years as they are over a week.

This is where it gets really interesting: how much of personality is due to genetics, and how much of it is due to environment?

One of the most fascinating sets of findings over the past four decades has been studies on identical twins—particularly studies on identical twins that were adopted out into separate households. Since identical twins are 100% genetically identical, this is a perfect situation to study the effects of genetic influences versus environmental influences on personality.

So what happened in these studies was remarkable. Currently there’s 14 million of these twins that have been studied. Personality researchers gave personality inventories to the adopted parents, the biological parents, and to each adopted identical twin. Many of these studies were done over the entire lifespan of the test subjects, so they were given the inventories at different intervals in their lives.

What they found was extraordinary. If you correlate the twins’ personalities with each other, there are very high correlation coefficients. When the twins’ personality profiles are compared to their biological parents: again, high correlation coefficients. When the twins’ personality profiles were compared to their adoptive parents: the correlation was no greater than if you picked a random person off of the street.

So what that tells us is that there’s absolutely a hereditary component to our personalities, and this gives a good deal of credence to the old saying: the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

A little throwback humor to the Mario Kart comment earlier.

So clearly, heredity and genes are not the only influence. If it were, identical twins who were genetic clones of each other would have the exact same personalities—and for anybody that’s met a pair of twins, they don’t. While the correlations between personality traits in identical twins are substantive, they’re not perfect, and therefore behavior genetics points to the role of non-genetic factors.

Let’s talk about an incredible case of identical twins raised apart. These are the “Jim twins,” and they were separated at birth and adopted out into different homes about 65 kilometers away from each other in Ohio. They finally did meet in 1979 when they were both 39.

This is just wild. They’re both six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. Height and weight are extremely genetically heritable. This is where it starts to get a little bit wild: they both had married women named Linda. They both divorced Linda and then subsequently married a woman named Betty. They both suffered from lifelong headaches. They both had a lifelong habit of biting their nails. They both smoked the same brand of Salem cigarettes. They both drove blue Chevrolets. They both had named their first sons James Allen—the only difference being an extra L, respectively. They both had a dog named Toy growing up. They both had careers in law enforcement as sheriffs. I don’t even know what else to say about that. It’s wild.

Another striking finding by Dr. David Lykken and his colleagues was discovered when they asked pairs of identical twins for reports on their happiness levels on two different occasions nine years apart. The happiness levels of identical twins are more similar than ordinary siblings or fraternal siblings, and this is what they found:

The happiness of Twin A in the first year predicted the happiness of Twin A nine years later. The happiness of Twin A in year one was correlated with the happiness of Twin B in year one. But most incredibly, they found that if you wanted to predict Twin B’s happiness in year nine, you could interchangeably use Twin A or Twin B’s happiness score in year one.

So in identical twins that are separated at birth and raised apart, the correlation in happiness is just as high as it was with identical twins who had been brought up together.

This is powerful evidence to show that there is some inherited factor to our level of happiness and perceived well-being, regardless of the environment that we find ourselves in.

So I know what you’re thinking. Now that you know, you’re going to take a Big Five inventory, and now that you know who you are, you’ll just keep acting how you act. Does this mean that we should give up because there’s a heritable component to our personality and happiness? No. I don’t think that’s the conclusion that we should draw. It’s not an excuse to not work on ourselves. There’s always new information we can learn that can help us change our behavior, put ourselves in better circumstances, and improve who we are as people.

In a past life, I was a musician, and I want to take an analogy from that world to help explain this.

These are vocal cords. I didn’t actually put up real vocal cords because they look quite graphic.

Many of you would have heard of the different classes of singers based on range, like tenor, bass, soprano, alto. What these classifications refer to is the range of the singer. Sopranos typically have a higher range than altos. So what determines this? What determines somebody’s range—how high we can sing, how low we can sing?

People’s range of notes that they can sing is actually limited by the physical length of the vocal cords, and those are set at birth. A soprano at the highest range can get all the way up to what they call a C6, and at the very low range, for a bass singer, is known as a C2, which is two octaves below middle C, for any musicians out there.

So if this is the range that people can sing at, that’s determined by birth, by the length of their vocal cords. Without training, this would be the range. In order to reach a person’s full capacity, they have to train the voice and put in the work.

So how does this relate to personality and happiness? What it means is that we have to discover our limits by actively acting and pushing ourselves to improve and gain wisdom.

Even if I were to say that there’s no point—your personality and your happiness are set by your genes—give up, I doubt that anybody would actually do that, because we all have this inborn, deep psychological algorithm to push us towards things that give us pleasure, make us happier, or improve life circumstances.

Okay. Now we’re going to go through each of the traits—and as Nicole said, this is going to go later than 8 p.m.—so I apologize for anyone that has to leave early. But like she said, it will be recorded.

So let’s talk about openness.

The Matrix: anyone who hasn’t seen that film—it follows our hero, Neo (Keanu Reeves), a computer hacker who discovers the world he’s living in is a simulated reality controlled by machines. The false reality has been created to distract humans while the machines use human bodies as an energy source.

Some people have escaped this false reality, and one day Neo is given the opportunity to take a pill that would allow him to see the truth and the “real world.” The man who’s offering this to Neo is named Morpheus, and in the famous blue pill / red pill scene, Morpheus says: “This is your last chance. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Neo is a fantastic example of high trait openness in the Big Five. He’s open to new ideas and experiences. He’s willing to take a risk on something that sounds incredible and fantastical, something that’s almost too wild to be true. And there are consequences of this: he learns the truth, but it causes him intense physical and psychological pain, and his life is forever altered.

People that are higher in openness tend to be imaginative, creative, insightful. They tend to prefer variety, seek new experiences, and they’re curious and perceptive about their environment. They tend to be more interested in things like reading, art galleries, theatre, music. They’re more likely to travel, and on average, they have more crazy and wild life experiences.

Openness is not intelligence. We all know people who have sharp intellect, but they’re less interested in ideas that are novel or speculative or impractical or mystical. People higher in openness tend to think outside of the box. For instance, they can more readily make connections between unconnected nouns.

So here’s a little exercise that we can do for all the viewers: we’ve got three words here—widow, bite, and monkey. There is something that connects all of those words together. You can type your answer in the chat if you’d like, and we’ll come back to it later.

When people hear all this stuff, they think, “Well, I want to be open.” Not so fast. There are advantages to being less open. People that are more open are statistically more likely to take illicit drugs. They have more sex partners and therefore are more likely to contract an STI. They drink more alcohol. They have more crazy and wild life experiences. I know I said that already, but for some people that’s a good thing, and for some people that’s not a good thing.

Another potential downfall for openness is that mental illness rates actually tend to be higher in poets and artists and such. People are the epitome of openness. Typically it’s not going to be full-blown schizophrenia, but more often depression—and depression is more typically characterized and associated with neuroticism, but we’ll talk about that later.

Interestingly enough, people who are more open tend to be more susceptible to hypnosis.

So what if you’re lower on the trait of openness? Just remember that most people are actually in the middle. Most people for openness are around the same: they’ve got some moderate interest in ideas, but not wild. A lot of people aren’t super closed where they just eat the same things every day and do the same routine—we’re all sort of just in the middle.

But people who aren’t as open—below the midline—are likely to follow pursuits that are more of a sure bet, including financially. It can be safer and more conservative to be a little bit less open. There’s nothing wrong with that. That might be the difference between someone who goes into a lucrative trade job that has stable prospects, and another person trying to make it as an artist in a very competitive world where many people in that field struggle to make a living.

We’ve got Bilbo Baggins here—if people have seen Lord of the Rings—and eventually he did go on the adventure, didn’t he? But he kind of had to be pushed into it. I think he’s telling Gandalf to go fly a kite in this scene. But that shows us that sometimes it’s good to push our limits and see what we’re capable of.

Low openness scores have been shown to be better at solving practical or factual problems—quite difficult ones—and in that, there’s a joke:

How many poets does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is four: one to curse the bleak darkness of not only the room, but that which consumes the depths of our souls and elicits all human suffering; one to assert that the darkness does not destroy the light, but that such darkness is what defines the quality of the light; one to contend that it is our fear of the dark that casts our minds into the shadows; and one to actually change the light bulb.

Okay. So what kind of prescriptions do we have for high openness people? Sometimes the people that are higher in openness are admonished for being dreamers, and the truth is though: open people are often the ones that push the frontiers of what society accepts, and that can cause a lot of forward momentum and progressive ideas to take hold. It can really expand our circle of compassion, and we need that.

People who are open need variety in their lives; otherwise they’re going to feel stagnant. Repetitive tasks, or a job that doesn’t allow them to think creatively, is going to stifle the spirit inside of you. You might forgo massive financial success to be creative and express yourself, and that’s okay—as long as you’re happy.

So we see inspirational quotes like this all the time on social media.

And for people lower in openness, a lot of the time they’re given flack for it. I would take a page out of the book of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and say: there’s nothing the matter with you if you like to have the same thing for dinner every night, you have no interest in traveling, and you like to keep a simple routine. That’s okay, as long as you’re happy.

Just keep in mind: there is a massive heritable component to this, so don’t listen to the voices around you telling you that you need to try deep-fried Snickers bars and frog legs. It’s okay to have a simple life, and you’re probably safer and more secure that way.

Also, people lower in openness have been shown to live longer.

So now we return to the widow, bite, monkey. The connection is spider: a black widow is a spider; spiders can bite; and there’s a species of monkey known as the spider monkey. I couldn’t see the chat, so hopefully some people got it.

So that brings us to conscientiousness.

This is a trait that’s associated with industriousness, orderliness, self-control, planning—things like that. Lower scores express that they’re ambitious, but often complain that they struggle with a perceived sort of laziness, or having a lack of focus.

Conscientiousness is a value that has risen greatly in the modern age. However, if it had been completely advantageous over the development of human life, it would have consistently been selected for higher and higher levels over time. It can really be a blessing and a curse, depending on the environment.

If we’re in an environment of unpredictability—which is the case for a lot of our human existence—it’s actually better to have perhaps lower conscientiousness because you can respond spontaneously to whatever life throws at you in the moment. Higher conscientiousness scores don’t do as well, and they have to be flexible because changes in routine can be upsetting and difficult to adjust to.

So actually, the prevalence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, can likely be a reflection—there’s some evidence of this—of the inconsistency of selection for conscientiousness that we experienced in the past. In the modern world, it’s become much more structured and orderly, so lower conscientiousness scores can really suffer.

Workplaces are completely artificial ecologies. Having to sit in a cubicle—or in a chair—listening to some guy drone on about personality is a very modern phenomenon. Quietly getting along with a series of pre-planned or repetitive tasks based on rules or norms—that’s not typical. That’s not how we came up, so to speak.

With respect to happiness, conscientiousness can allow us to experience greater happiness because, while I was working on this last night, I really wanted to blow it off—because anybody who’s in Edmonton knows that the weather was incredible, and I just wanted to go outside—but in the long run, I’m probably happier that I finished the presentation for you all because I’m not sitting here stressed out that it’s not finished.

So in terms of impulse control, or foregoing immediate gratification for more long-term aims, conscientiousness can be an advantage.

Lower conscientiousness scores might also sometimes have a greater ability to enjoy their lives because they don’t feel as guilty, and they can get more pleasure out of leisure activities. They don’t always have to be working.

Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, was incredibly high on all of the personality dimensions. He wasn’t in the middle on a single one of them, and that includes conscientiousness. He was an extremely hard worker, and at the end of his life, one of the last things he said is that he had wished he had spent more time with his children and his family.

So the other part of this is: for somebody like that, when they have a very high conscientiousness score, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is a way that that trait can be pathological. Even though that accounts for a very small percentage of the population, there still are people that don’t quite approach or pass the diagnosis threshold, but they’re still suffering from workaholism or being unable to relax.

So it can be a very double-edged sword on both sides.

For people who are lower in conscientiousness and want to improve their happiness—in terms of self-regulation, self-motivation, and willpower—some of the best options can be to utilize technology. Setting a calendar on a smartphone, with reminders that go off on your smartwatch, can be a way of mitigating scheduling issues.

In my practice, I often guide people to use various environmental techniques and blocking apps for limiting distractions like video games, social media, and television. Applications like Evernote are great for taking notes as soon as you think of something or you have a task, and it syncs across all of your devices so you don’t have to keep it up here.

And I spoke about sleep and exercise for a reason, because both of those things have been shown to raise conscientiousness levels. It’s speculated that exercise might make the liver more efficient at sending glycogen to the brain, and that’s associated with people making better decisions and having more willpower.

Additionally, another option for people that are a bit lower in conscientiousness: there are a number of studies that have shown that it can rise by enhancing interactions with colleagues and coworkers, and that includes recreation time. Researchers speculated that it boosts a sense of belonging and obligation to your work community—so you don’t want to let people around you down, especially if you respect them a lot, and sometimes you just have to finish the things that you’ve started.

Okay. Next up, we’re going to talk about extraversion.

Here’s some dogs. People like dogs. You have the dogs that love the water, and then you have the dogs that hate the water, and more dogs—introverted dogs.

[Music] Come on.

[Music] It’s just going to loop.

Okay. So extraversion is a predictor of things like how much somebody would like going to parties, how much time they’ll spend in social activities, their facility in striking up new friendships—although how well those friendships will go is more predicted by agreeableness, which we’ll get to later.

Extraversion also appears to be tied to more positive emotion. A study was done where participants watched film clips that were either amusing, fearful, sad, or disgusting, and extraversion scores predicted how much better the participant’s mood would be after they viewed an amusing clip—after seeing the more negative imagery. But it didn’t predict the size of the emotional reaction to the negative clip.

So it appears that extroverts have more emotional reactivity to rewarding or pleasant stimuli. They’re just more energized by social interaction.

Then we have introverts. I’m an introvert, so I guess I’m a little bit biased here—so apologies to the beautiful extroverts that are out there.

[Music] Hello, my name is—

[Music] Yeah, that’s terrifying.

So introversion is theorized to have developed as a protective factor against, interestingly enough, sexually transmitted infections and pathogens—which would be why we’re not all extroverted.

Introversion can also be more advantageous when it’s a better idea to just stay quiet and low-key in situations that could be dangerous. You just don’t want to be as expressive.

Studies have actually shown that people with higher introversion scores might also have lower immune function, so if you have a lower immune function, it’s probably better for you to not be going to joint parties where people are breathing.

Introverts also tend to enjoy their own company.

So as far as prescriptions for happiness with extraversion, I don’t have much for you because, according to the research literature, you tend to be happier. That doesn’t mean that an extrovert doesn’t have negative emotions—they can have just as much negative emotionality as anyone else.

But the best guess for the greater happiness is that extroverts are just more likely to do things with a strong emotional reward. They’re more likely to be married. They’re more likely to have been to a party. They’re more likely to play sports—all of those things.

Interestingly enough, the people on average who report the highest levels of happiness are those who are emotionally stable and extroverted.

So it would seem like the more extraversion, the better. But there are some disadvantages. Studies have shown that the restlessness of extroverts can contribute to instability in family life. They have an increased risk for serious accidents and hospitalizations. So slightly greater happiness scores of extroverts are mitigated as a trade-off—just like every other factor.

There is a major—this is one of the longest studies that I’m familiar with, maybe in the history of psychology. It was a study done on 1,500 Californian boys and girls with exceptional intelligence, and it was known as the Terman Study of the Gifted. It started in 1921, and by 1991 they were still doing the research. Half of the male participants and a third of the female participants had died—they would have been in their 70s at that point. Since personality data had been taken back in their childhood, the researchers were able to determine that the more sociable and optimistic—more extroverted—the participants were, the more likely they were to have passed on.

So happiness for introversion—this just kills me, but I’m going to say it. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the modern environment is much safer than it’s ever been, and we wouldn’t know that from watching the news. Crime rates have consistently gone down since the 1970s, and yet news coverage of violent crime has consistently risen.

Because we’re in a safer environment, it can pay off to be more extroverted—which can be really interesting or unfortunate for introverts, because in the modern wealth of developed countries, people are getting lonelier and lonelier because we don’t have to rely on each other the way that we did 100 years ago. We can sit at home and order a pizza while watching TV and not see anybody for days. A lot of people work from home now, and that’s causing a lot of unhappiness, particularly for people that are introverted.

So what do you do if you’re introverted? Basically, you try to act more extroverted. Ridiculous.

A recent study of over 100 participants asked them to push the boundaries of their willingness to engage in social activity. Basically, they were asked to act more like extroverts, and they reported greater happiness and well-being as a result.

Let’s move on.

Okay: agreeableness. Little Miss People Pleaser.

It’s been speculated that one of the reasons that human beings have become such a dominant species on Earth is that we’re nice—we help each other out. Of course, we’re often in conflict with each other, but people really do help each other.

Another way of saying this is that humans are more agreeable—certainly more so than many animal species. How else could we possibly build bridges and skyscrapers, and create an agricultural system that feeds billions of people?

Like I said, there’s still conflict, and it wouldn’t be advantageous to be completely agreeable, and so, like all the other personality traits we’ve discussed, people fall on a bell curve. Most of us are close to 50/50 traders, or maybe we’re a little more self-interested than that on average—maybe it’s closer to 55/45 for people.

But the trait of agreeableness is associated with being cooperative, trusting, and empathetic.

So here’s a video of somebody that is probably above the 90th percentile for agreeableness.

Is the back seat okay? Because I can do the trunk too, if you’d prefer.

Ask her—no mask. Do you care?

Or you have a ski mask—you’re good, right?

Honestly, I did have an exposure recently, so maybe—

Oh God, there’s a body down here. Is it okay if I step on it, or do you want me to move it?

Full transparency: these could be tighter, just so you know.

Click it, or take it—

No, I’m kidding.

Oh, it doesn’t work? Okay.

No, that’s fine.

If this is for a ransom, definitely try my grandma first—least likely to get the cops involved. Though my cousin Tony—

You’re not mad at me, right? Like, this was totally random? You’re sure? Okay.

Careful at this stop sign. There’s always like a cop planted there to give a ticket.

Would you say I’m more or less chill than other people you’ve kidnapped?

No, you’re serious? I can give you my credit cards. I wouldn’t report anything. I’m just worried the banks would notice.

I know this Panda Express gift card has 25.

You’re allowed to go in the carpool lane because there’s two of us—just so you know. Or—

Yeah, new to that. Sorry.

No, we’re good.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you.

So to be high in agreeableness is to be predisposed to pay attention to the mental states of others, and to factor that into your choices about the behavior you’re going to impart.

There is an ingenious recent experiment that showed that people who are higher in agreeableness are much faster at processing words like “caring,” “console,” “help,” compared to words like “abduct,” “assault,” and “harass,” when the words are presented on a screen in front of them in a quick flash.

Those kinds of preferences produce pro-social, warm, trusting behavior. People that are more agreeable tend to help others more, have harmonious interpersonal relationships, enjoy good social support, relatively rarely fight with or insult people, are quick to forgive, slow to anger—even with people that are, in fact, blameworthy.

So that has a lot of benefits to it, but also there are costs. We’ve got a cartoon here of a gal that has clearly forgotten her own preferences—or she hates burritos—or social harmony. So it’s easier to just kind of go along with what people ask, and you get along better with them.

There are costs to this, though. A lot of studies have demonstrated that personality and career success among people that are agreeable is fairly lower than those that are more disagreeable, which makes sense—they’re not going to advocate as much for themselves.

[Music]

So disagreeable people tend to make more money, and they climb the ranks higher in social hierarchies and corporations.

One of the other pitfalls of agreeableness is that it puts somebody at risk for being taken advantage of. If somebody’s high in conscientiousness and agreeability, when people figure that out, they just ask you to do everything for them, and you say yes.

So if that’s you—if I’m speaking to you out there—get help. I’m just kidding. It’s just good to have that information, because then you can take measures through things like assertiveness training. There are a number of interventions that I use, and other therapists use, to help people in that predicament to set boundaries and have a little bit of a happier life, because it can really constrain your time and energy to just giving and giving to other people.

So we can do a little exercise here. We’ve got a cartoon: this gal is being invited to a party. She says okay, and then immediately regrets it. I relate to this so much.

So what factors are at play here? There are two factors that we see at play in the person that said yes to going to the party: clearly agreeableness, because that’s what we’re talking about, but it’s also introversion. So we’re starting to see a little bit of a taste of how the personality characteristics interact.

So this person’s agreeableness is winning out over their introversion, and now they’ve said yes to going to this party. Depending on how conscientious they are—if they’re higher in conscientiousness—they’re not going to flake on the party. They’re going to go to the party and have a terrible time. It’s a rough life.

Let’s talk about disagreeableness. There was a curse word in this comment, but I took it out. This is a family show.

So what’s happening here? This is what I would say it’s like when two disagreeable people fall in love. One says, “I love you the most.” The other says, “Impossible—I love you the most.” “Do you know what this means?” “We’re both liars.” And then they’re going to fight.

We’ve all met couples like this that love each other dearly, but fight like cats and dogs.

So disagreeableness gets a bad rap, but again, keep in mind we’re all pretty much in the middle for this. If you’re thinking there’s something wrong with you, you’re probably in the middle.

We do have to look out for ourselves and our interests; otherwise we wouldn’t survive. So it’s easy to characterize this as a negative trait, and sometimes it is—as all of them are—but it’s a necessary trait in human psychology, to be sure that we’re not taken advantage of.

Cartoons: “So you think I’m going to be the breadwinner while you just loaf all day?” “You aren’t the only slice of toast in the world, Marla.” “Mother warned me not to marry a sourdough.”

So a number of studies based on surveys and interviews with nearly 4,000 working men and women showed consistently that disagreeable men and women were paid more than agreeable men and women.

Looking out for our own interests can certainly pay off in a monetary sense, and in a lot of other ways. It can also pay off in terms of the interests of people that we care about. People on the lower end of the agreeable scale can be incredibly effective advocates for those without a voice. If I’m hiring a lawyer, I want them to be a little disagreeable to advocate on my behalf. There’s no question.

A lot of the time, people that are more disagreeable can also be on the forefront of change in society because they’re not going to put up with injustice, and they’re willing to stick up for what they feel is right in the face of danger. They will face pressure and put their feet to the fire to do otherwise.

So let’s talk about cake—another analogy. If somebody’s lower on the scale of the agreeableness dimension, something that can really help is a cake analogy.

Like I said before, if most of us are in the middle, we’re probably 50/50 traders. If Nicole and I have a cake, we cut it in half; each of us gets a half. We would call that fair. I think most people would say that’s fair.

As I mentioned before, there’s a psychologist that I admire a lot—this is not my idea; none of these are really my ideas—but he speculates that most of us are actually 55/45 traders because we’re a little self-interested. So it’s possible that the reality is that most of us in the middle, in order for us to feel like a deal is fair, we need 55% of the cake and the other person would get 45%. That’s speculative—I don’t have any research data to back that up.

So for someone who’s lower in agreeableness—quite a bit lower—and this is impacting their personal relationships in a negative way, it can be helpful to understand that you’re predisposed to feel like you deserve more than your fair share. I think this might be Donald Duck’s hand adding the cake.

So if you’re like a 65/35 trader, it’s good to know that because it gives you information to know that maybe, if you want to have more harmonious social relationships, it might be good to push yourself to go a little bit more than halfway.

But when you’re advocating for social justice, we need you to take the slice of one cake and take the rest of the cake for the rest of us—for the good of the collective.

There’s the Jetsons wallet classic: he offers her one bill, and she takes the whole wallet.

Interestingly enough, women actually tend to score a full standard deviation higher than men on agreeableness, so women are just typically nicer. This is not a standard representative GIF.

Okay, we’ve got one left, and then including remarks. I’m sorry that this has gone a little bit later.

So let’s talk about neuroticism—or emotional stability. How unafraid and emotionally stable do you think someone would have to be to do something like that? That gives me the willies just watching it.

So we’re going to talk more about this last dimension because it’s likely the most relevant to happiness aside from extraversion.

Neuroticism is basically the propensity that people have to experience negative emotions: anxiety, depression, self-doubt, self-consciousness, irritability.

Why do we have these emotions? Well, they’re similar to physical pain. They’re a signal to tell us that something’s wrong and we need to do something about it. If your knee is in severe pain, that’s a way of your body telling you that you’re injured—you need to rest. Negative emotions are similar.

Many times, depression will come from failure feedback. Somebody has no experience in finance, they apply to 100 companies as a financial advisor, and they get turned down at every single one—they should be depressed. They should have been depressed way more before they got to a hundred. So depression is something that stops us from putting time and energy into a losing strategy, and if we didn’t have those signals, it’d be a complete disaster.

So much of the time in life, negative emotions are difficult, and we curse them. I curse them; you curse them: “Why do I have to feel like this?”

In terms of a cognitive-behavioral reframe, actor Bill Hader has something to say about that.

Really bad anxiety when I was on that show—I’m talking about, yeah. So I did little things I try to do, like meditation—TM. I do that. That’s helpful.

The one guy was Jeff Bridges. He saw me when I was on the show; I was really nervous. He told me a story. He said, “You know, when I was doing The Iceman Cometh with Robert Ryan, every time before every take, he would get nervous.” And I said, “Wow, all these years, you still get nervous?” And he said, “Yeah. I’d be really afraid if I wasn’t afraid.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And Jeff Bridges is like, “So yeah—that’s your buddy, man. That’s your buddy, man. Put your arm around it and just get out there.”

Okay.

I’m going to skip over this one. Let’s just talk a little bit about social rejection, because often we hear things like, “You shouldn’t care about what other people think,” and I just want to talk about a study that I think is really important to shed some light on this.

There’s a social psychologist—his name’s Mark Leary—and he ran these experiments quite a long time ago—decades ago, I believe—but I think it still holds up. Basically what happened is they invited a bunch of college students to come and have a focus group or a discussion group, and they all chatted about whatever topics.

Then at the end of the study, participants were put into two different conditions. They were either told: “Hey, the folks that you were chatting with really enjoyed the discussion, and they’ve decided to meet up again next week,” and in one condition they would say, “And you’re not invited,” or they would say, “You have been invited back.”

The people that were told they weren’t invited, their self-esteem scores plummeted. This was pretty controversial research when it was published. A lot of people in the discipline said, “Ah, that’s because you used college students—they’re younger, they don’t have as much of a sense of self. If you did the experiment on older people who are more robust and have a lot more identity and self-esteem, you wouldn’t have the same results.”

So he knew they were wrong, so he ran the experiment again. He ran it with people that were self-selected—both by themselves and peers—as people that had a strong sense of self, don’t really care about what other people think as much, and they ran it again and got the exact same results. The self-esteem of those more robust people plummeted.

So the reason I’m bringing this up is that we’re wired to care about what other people think of us. When we were in smaller groups in our history, being rejected from a group would often mean death. We don’t do very well as humans on our own, and so that’s why we have very strong detectors about how we’re doing in terms of social status in the group.

I think that’s just something I wanted to put in there for people that are more neurotic: they have a higher sensitivity for that, and even the smallest rejection cues can really do a number on somebody who’s more neurotic.

Just finishing up with neuroticism: the way to think of these negative emotions—and the propensity to have them—is like they’re like a smoke detector. We have smoke detectors in our homes as a way of signaling danger, but some of us have more sensitive smoke detectors than others. That can be a good thing: it’s better to have a smoke detector go off when I left my toast in the toaster for a little bit too long than for it to not go off when my bedroom is on fire and my house burns down.

For happiness, this is not so great, because people that are more unstable—we all worry about things needlessly. Most of our worries are needless because we came from a bunch of ancestors that worried needlessly and therefore avoided danger and reproduced their genes. But if someone at the normal end of the curve is worrying without reason 80% of the time, someone who’s higher in instability is worrying needlessly like 99% of the time.

So just take a moment for our more unstable folks.

Okay. Let’s briefly talk about emotional stability.

A great example of this gentleman: his name is Alex Honnold. He’s a professional climber, and he’s famous for doing something that’s known as free soloing—that’s where he climbs without a rope. He’s in an Academy Award-winning documentary where he climbs this thing without a rope. This is El Capitan, and if that just looks like a picture: it’s taller than the tallest building in the world in Dubai. El Capitan is 914 meters tall; the building in Dubai is 828 meters tall.

We haven’t talked about this—something I had to leave out—but there are a lot of studies in neurobiology and neuroscience about differences in people’s brains that correlate and reflect different personality traits. We’re just going to see a little clip of Alex here, and what’s different about his brain than, say, you or I.

[Music] He doesn’t get emotionally affected by it the way that a lot of people do.

Not knowing about the science of that, it’s probably a product of your past more than it is just a genetic thing. There’s been a lot of speculation about how I deal with fear and how I’m able to free solo. People are just like, “Oh, well he must be a thrill seeker—there must be something defective.”

So when the writer contacted me about doing an MRI, I thought it’s kind of cool just to go get an MRI and see what’s actually going on—scan your brain and then see if it’s all there structurally.

We’re going to start the task now. Remember to press the button every time you see a new picture come up, okay?

We’ll see. Maybe it turns out I’m some kind of freak creature or something.

I’ve had several ex-girlfriends say that I had personality disorders or things like that—there’s something wrong with me emotionally.

Emotionally stable, agreeable, ingenious, a deep thinker, disagreeable, tends to find fault with others—I agree somewhat. Climbing a steep mountain would be too scary for me. Trouble controlling my impulses. Is depressed.

Hmm. Is my brain intact?

Your brain is intact.

It’s quite interesting. Those little two dots that are further towards the top of the screen—that’s the amygdala.

An interesting thing: you have no activation in your amygdala.

There’s just not much going on in my brain, it seems.

Do you think my amygdala actually just doesn’t work or something?

Your amygdala works. It’s just that it needs a much higher level of stimulation. Things that are typically stimulating for most of the rest of us are not really doing it for you.

Maybe my amygdala is just tired, from too many years of being all gripped.

Okay.

I’m going to try to get through the rest of this quickly. I might skip over some things.

So we would describe Alex as somebody that’s high on the dimension of emotional stability.

It’s also interesting that I mentioned before that when you look at extremes on the bell curve, sometimes that can become pathological. So it’s curious that he mentions that he’s been told by ex-girlfriends that they think he might have a personality disorder. To my knowledge, he’s not been diagnosed with anything by a professional, but I think it’s just a curious comment that he made.

In terms of negative emotions, I’ll just briefly touch on this: we are designed—and it’s been clearly established in psychological research—to remember negative emotions and negative memories more readily than happy memories, and that’s just a survival instinct. It’s more important to remember things that might bring us to the brink of death than it is to remember happy things—good moods.

That’s one of my favorites: “My brain recording good memories in sand,” and then they’re “making it into marble.”

So basically, let’s talk about gratitude.

“My therapist prescribed me with gratitude. It’s so annoying. I’m just writing this every day—five things I’m grateful for. The worst part about it is that it works. It really works a lot. It’s so annoying, because again, I thought I had this deep dark thing inside me. Turns out, if I tell my brain a couple times a day, like, ‘Hey, it’s not that bad,’ my brain’s like, ‘I’m not about it like that.’”

Okay. So gratitude journaling is something that people can try. What it is: it’s like a cognitive behavioral therapy technique where you write down, like he said, five things a day that you’re grateful for. It’s not a magic bullet, but it can certainly recondition you to point your attention towards things that are good in your life.

Another thing that I’ll briefly touch on that I’ve found in my practice to be quite effective is having people journal—maybe even for just five minutes a day—and track what actually makes them happy and what makes them sad. People are often surprised at what makes them happy over the long term, and sometimes, like I mentioned in the beginning, they’ll do things that are short-term pleasurable, but in the long term it actually doesn’t do much for their happiness. So that’s something I’ve found to be particularly effective.

There’s a bit here I’m going to skip over, but people that are higher in neuroticism tend to be more artistic, and they have a feeling that things are not right with them and not right with the world, and that can actually turn into really striving to achieve. A lot of the greatest artists and writers in the world have suffered from terrible depression. So if someone who’s watching this is thinking, “Wow, this kind of sounds like me,” there are benefits to it. It probably doesn’t make the emotions feel any better, but there is a likelihood that you do experience some positives from having that more reactive emotionality.

I’m going to skip over this as well. The recording people can pause this if they want, but it’s basically an anonymous patient talking about how they were able to mitigate a higher neuroticism score through a few different methods.

And then we’ve got one more video.

So I wanted to—like I said, I had to leave a lot of this stuff out. Maybe there will be a part two to this talk. But I wanted to touch on money, because I did mention a bunch of times: “Oh, this personality characteristic is mitigated by making more money,” and I don’t want people to think that I’m saying that money is everything.

I think the research on this isn’t clear, and I want to delve into it more in depth. Some research says that it doesn’t make people happy; some research clearly says that it does. But this is just a video of some famous people talking about money, and I think what we can probably all agree on is that even if you have all the money in the world and all the fame in the world, it’s not going to solve the core problems that we have as human beings. I think it’s really helpful to watch videos like this, to just—again, it’s like a cognitive behavioral therapy thing where you can reframe what we might think: “Oh, if I had more money, I would be happier.”

Do you feel that you’re happier right now than when you’re broke?

Not really. Sometimes. It’s a sometime thing. But I feel like the way that I have money kind of took away a lot of my happiness.

Then what happened was, I then experienced the things that I was culturally indoctrinated to believe would be a kind of salvation: fame, fortune, attention. And yet salvation did not come.

I bought pleasure for so long. Can’t buy happiness. You can buy pleasure, though.

A lot of people say, “Oh, money isn’t happiness.” Well, money can buy a boat, and a boat will make me [__] happy—that kind of thing.

I think it can completely destroy a human being.

Did it almost destroy you?

Yeah. It almost completely destroyed me, but I was lucky enough, by the grace of God, to have people that care about me enough to be like, “Hey,” just pull you back.

Happiness is an emotional response to an outcome. If I win, I will be happy. If I don’t, I won’t. It’s an if-then, cause-and-effect, quid-pro-quo standard that we cannot sustain because we immediately raise it every time we attain it.

I had worldly success in multiple industries. I was successful in the music business. I was successful in modeling, in television, in real estate. So I made all this money and I had all this success, and here I was going, “Okay, I still don’t feel any different.”

I had banked everything on that making me feel better, or feel happier, or really, honestly, feel worthy. I think that’s what we’re all searching for—that worthiness.

Do I feel happy in life?

[Music]

Let’s see. I hope I’m finding happiness, but I’m not just generally happy. If I’m generally anything, I guess I’m generally miserable.

I don’t know. I feel like sometimes people don’t even love me for me. I feel like people just love the clout. People like the fact that, like, “Yeah, my girl got money now.”

Does money bring happiness to you?

No. It brings some happiness. It brings comfort, but absolutely—

I was thinking that if you have a lot of money, you don’t have to worry. A lot of people in the world have to worry. They do, and it’s tough. It’s extremely tough.

We’ve been through times in our family where we had to worry. It’s stressful on relationships—on everything—and I’m very happy that I don’t right now. Who knows.

Nothing but pain, stuck in this game, searching for fortune, fame—that’s what I hear. It’s so basic that we all want to be famous and noticed and watched. We all want money and riches, and we all want to find us out of life.

From the most heartless gang-banger to the most virtuous police officer, the media told me every day—and it’s telling you every day—what it is to be successful. So you’ve got MTV Cribs, you’ve got billionaires in front of your face. You have these extrinsic, external goals that will say, “Oh, Tom Shadyac has arrived.” He has the right house, the right car, he flies privately. And when I got there, it was empty.

Someone—my friend—billionaire. But as a human being, deep inside: too much stress, too much worry, fear.

So this is clear indication: material value—no ability, no possibility—to provide us inner peace.

All right, folks. I really appreciate that everyone has stuck this out. We’re almost done.

So here’s some wisdom from the show Adventure Time. We’ve got Jake the dog here, and he says, “You know, to live life, you need problems.” His computer buddy says, “That’s stupid,” and Jake says, “If you get everything you want the minute you want it, what’s the point of living?”

So just to wrap up: if there were a machine that offered all of the desirable experiences on demand, I don’t know if we would even really want to use it. The basis of gratification is precisely the challenge required to obtain goals, or status, or money, or self-worth—anything. Shortcutting that removes the appeal.

So I’ll just finish off with the end of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. For those of you that haven’t read it, it’s a dystopian novel set in England, and they’ve basically obliterated unhappiness. “Everybody is happy now” is the mantra that’s repeated 150 times a night for the first 12 years of a young person’s life.

At the end of the novel—spoiler alert—the rebel John, also known as the Savage, confronts the Controller, the guy that’s in control of all this universal happiness. The Controller admits happiness has been achieved by shifting the emphasis away from truth and beauty towards comfort. Art and science have become impossible because they require challenge, skill, and frustration. Happiness has got to be paid for somehow, and the guarantee of comfort requires losing other experiences that are a part of being human.

Says the Savage: “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, and I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustafa Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly. “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy… not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent, the right to have syphilis and cancer, the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy, the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow, the right to catch typhoid, the right to be tortured by unspeakable Pains of every kind.

There was a long silence, and the Savage said, “I claim them all.” That’s it, folks. Thank you for sticking around. Um, I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you so much, Warren. Oh my gosh, that was so rich with information. We’ll take a look if there’s any questions or comments, but for anyone who needs to go, I I just want to thank you again for joining us this evening, and I hope you all join us for another upcoming webinar. Thank you.