My ex was a chill stoner who got radicalized on the internet and became an abusive alcoholic raging racist, then got sober but is still an angry right wing asshole.
I was selfish/self-centered as fuck as a teenager and gained patience and perspective over time, I think most people do change in that way, become more aware of others, nicer. Not everyone, obviously. But most.
You probably already do, I know I’m not the same person I was years ago. I think it’s a good thing to be conscious of your personality going forward. My take is, you are you, therefore whatever you do is something you would do. So do what you want, don’t overthink it.
Generally speaking, anything described as a “spiritual practice” will tend to alter people’s personality to the degree they put effort into it.
It’s not normal for personality to change much. People’s personality changes under relatively rare conditions: trauma, enlightenment, extreme conditioning.
Another commenter mentioned psychedelic drugs and those are definitely catalysts for personality change.
The things that have changed my personality the most are:
abuse
violence while homeless
ayahuasca ceremonies
getting the 10-series from a rolfer
By “personality” here I’m talking about emotional patterns, which become the foundation for all sorts of beliefs, tastes, tendencies, social roles.
By emotional patterns I mean the overall averages of joy, sadness, fear, openness, guilt, etc, both over time and also in their typical daily cycles.
My family hurt my feelings, so I went from class clown to silent observer. I intended to only modify my behavior around them, but it started to spill into other areas of my life. Now I’m a very quiet person.
If you wish to know more about the benefits through therapeutic approaches, I highly recommend Prof. James Fadiman’s book titled ‘The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide’. It is a rather large resource based on Fadiman’s involvement in LSD trials before research was halted abruptly and without warning, and is as close to a scientific approach to developing better pathways to preferred thought processes (through the use of psychedelics mainly LSD) that I am aware of.
Other resources include a therapeutic handbook, provided to health professionals such as psychiatrists prior to the illegalisation of LSD. This can be found on Erowid, alongside other documents that have survived.
First, you learn new things and you live new experiences. This changes your personality, for better or for worse.
Second, your personality is rooted in your ideals and beliefs, and you can purposefully change those.
Your personality can be described as the way you act and react, and both of those are learned. You may even say programmed. You can change the way you react to some situations, or the way you act in some situations. It takes a bit of practice.
Now that can sound easy, but it requires you to be very open-minded and honest about yourself, because you think with your beliefs already, so changing them may not be that easy. You need to litteraly think differently than you usually do. It’s a lot of introspection.
A long time ago I listened to a podcast episode (Probably Hidden Brain or something) where they discussed how memory affects your personality. People with dementia or some other memory related condition tend to have a different personality than they previously did. Then on another podcast, video or something I picked up another interesting piece of information. People can make new fake memories. Put these two together, and you got a strange method I came up with. If I’m able to come up with this stuff, then obviously smarter people have already done it and are using it on a ragular basis. It’s just that I haven’t heard of anyone doing that yet.
So, here’s the idea. Let’s say you don’t like the way just chill out all day and nothing gets done. You want to change that. Then you start fabricating new memories about how you are really hard working and how you have your life under control. Just imagine a bunch of stories like that about your fabricated past and those stories will gradually become proper memories inside your head. Once that’s done, it’s going to start influencing the way you see your self and how you behave in the future.
Other than hoping you are a teenager, such things have been tried. Self hypnosis, autogenic training… I don’t think anything focusing on implanting fake memories (and removing current ones?).
I believe you can! To change honestly is an epic task, you need willpower & foremost the characteristic of self reflection, self observation from the most possible objective perspective (I know, complete objectivity not achievable), and you need a person you can trust to get another point of view imo, but at the end of the day you need only one thing: the honest, straight and truthful will to change. I’ve seen people turn 180°. That’s what life is for imo.
I mean, in the late 2000s I was kind of a shitty person. But in like 2014 I realized I was a piece of shit and started to work on myself.
I stopped basing my personality on how many girls I could land and started just focusing on myself and not on relationships. I spent 2 years guiding myself to a much better place, and then in 2016 I met my current fiance.
It is certainly possible to adjust some measurable elements of personality. For example, use of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) has been shown to alter measurable personality factors.
Yes you can. What helped me was to keep asking myself, “what kind of person do I want to be?”
That internal mantra guided me to make different choices to become a different person, a better one, generally. And it’s not even big decisions/choices. It was a lot of little things that I did differently, but consistently.
I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s a process. I had to keep constant, that question, in my mind. Like others have said, habits are hard to break, so it will take some persistence.
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