I wish I could dry-erase all my cognitive distortions and fill my mental whiteboard with cool visions instead.

"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."

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

One of the main reasons some people get angrier than others is "inflammatory labeling," or the tendency to view people and situations more negatively than is realistic. Inflammatory labeling is calling a coworker who made a minor mistake a "total idiot," even if it's only in your head. Instead of making you feel better—That person, sorted!--these

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

In practice, this means that change requires doing things differently. You can't just say you'll start exercising or socializing; you have to commit. Personality isn't based on what we say we'll do. It's rooted in what we actually do, which becomes what we think about.

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.

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

… the way to change personality is, essentially, by faking it until you make it. Virtually all researchers agree that the key to changing personality is to alter your daily thoughts and actions. The best personality-change interventions help people figure out what they want to change, tell them how to change, and remind them to continue changing.