Jerome Bruner said “You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action,” and I had literally acted

This new way of looking at personality comports with the Buddhist concept of “no self,” or the idea that there’s no core “you.” To believe otherwise, the sutras say, is a source of suffering.

“Personality is what you do habitually, automatically, without thinking about it, whether it’s how you think about things, how you feel about things, or whether you do certain things,” says Brent Roberts, a prominent personality psychologist at the University of Illinois.

As the psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary writes in her book ‘Future Tense,’ anxiety can help narrow attention and heighten focus and detail-orientation. Anxiety can be a form of caring, of our minds highlighting what matters. It tells us that achieving our goals will require effort, and it pushes us to think about what efforts, exactly, we should

"Identity has the power to shape and thus also to constrict," writes the cultural critic Sheila Liming. "That is why so much of human life is devoted to a kind of poking at its edges. We seek to discover who we are by locating the boundaries of what we are willing to be."

Being a high self-monitor allows you to shape-shift when necessary, without rearranging your entire personality.

I found this to be an uplifting take on personality change: that it can be temporary, but still valid. Free traits allow you the flexibility to act out of character while knowing there's something inside you that's constant and steady.

A person … who is willing to flex her personality to meet the demands of the moment, is called a "high self-monitor," according to psychologists. A "low self-monitor," meanwhile, is someone who remains true to themselves, no matter what situation they're in. (The lingo is a bit confusing, but you can think of a high self-monitor as constantly

In fact, Little and some others say the key to a healthy personality may not be in swinging permanently to the other side of the personality scale but in balancing between extremes, or in adjusting your personality from one situation to another. "The thing that makes a personality trait maladaptive is not being high or low on something, it's more

To Robert, his negative thoughts were the other stronger guy, the one overpowering him. He decided to just drop the rope—to exist alongside the negative thoughts but to stop resisting them. Avoiding discomfort wasn't making him any less uncomfortable; it just mired him in weary inertia.

This meant that he resolved to move forward despite his