Can You Change Your Personality in Your 20s?

In the scientific world, there is quite a lot of debate around whether it’s possible to change your personality, or whether it is something that is pretty fixed across your lifetime. For a while now, science has been providing evidence to support the former — that your personality can change across your lifespan. And now, new evidence is weighing further support to this idea.

But first, let’s remind ourselves of what personality is. And the answer to this isn’t straightforward, with different answers and viewpoints. But to keep it simple, let’s go with the scientific perspective, and say that personality can be divided up into five main traits — the so-called big 5.

These are extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. Each person has a bit of each of these traits to a greater or lesser degree. So when talking about whether you can change your personality, the question revolves around whether you can intentionally dial up the desired trait that you are weak in to make it stronger, or, vice versa, dial down an undesired trait you are strong in to make it weaker.

These changes don’t happen overnight. They are small and incremental over time. You need to have the desire to change your personality, and an idea about how you want to change is. Is it that you want to be more extroverted, or more talkative? Or maybe a bit more conscientious, such as better at time management? Write yourself a “change plan,” which outlines the specific behaviors or traits that you would like to change and have it in mind as you go about your daily life.

The most important thing is to keep in mind, and stated by the scientists who ran this latest study: “individuals who desire to change their personality traits can do so.” So, as with all goals, if it’s important to you, don’t give up and you’ll get there in the end.