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

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

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

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

“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.

One of the biggest obstacles to changing personality is this kind of ambivalence: a sense that yeah, maybe you should get around to being less angry or drunk or chronically late, and maybe one day you will, but not today. After all, you're a fun drunk, and you get angry for a reason, right?

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

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.

"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."