ME, BUT BETTER Is Out!

The selfish case for personality change

Greetings! About one year ago today, my son Evan was yanked screaming from a gaping hole in my body after a “routine ultrasound” turned up something wrong. (An experience you can read more about here).

Today, ME, BUT BETTER, the book I’ve been working on for the past four years, makes its far less bloody debut.

To those of you who have already pre-ordered, a big thanks! If not, you can pick up your copy now at Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or your local indie.

The book is about personality change, and specifically my attempt to change my own personality. As I’ve been making the rounds talking about the book, some people have asked me whether you should change your personality so other people like you better.

It will likely have that effect. But I think a far more important advantage of personality change comes from Nate Hudson, the psychologist whose work underpins much of the book. In my interview with him, he told me that personality traits are the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that serve some purpose in our lives. In other words, they help you get what you want.

The personality trait of agreeableness can help grow and deepen your relationships. A reduction in neuroticism feels like making hundreds of thousands of dollars more a year. Even occasional extroversion can make you happier. The real case for increasing—or even just trying on—new personality traits is so that you can be happier and more fulfilled.

In my interviews with experts and with regular people who have changed their personalities, I saw lots of examples of how personality change ends up improving lives:

• Gillian Sandstrom, a psychology researcher in the UK, is an introvert, but she began going out of her way to talk to strangers in order to avoid the dreaded Entire Day of No Speaking that can sometimes befall introverts. Ever since, she’s noticed herself feeling happier. “When I do talk to people, I feel better,” she told me. And when a conversation is unusually engaging, “it feels awesome, because I wouldn’t expect there to be anything coming from it.”

• Lori Tipton recovered from extreme PTSD through a study involving psychedelics, which boost the personality trait of openness to experiences

• Along with my classmates in a conversation workshop in London, I learned to have more meaningful and more interesting conversations through the power of agreeableness. By tuning into the other person’s innermost feelings, we learned to cut through small talk and form deeper connections

• By learning to be conscientious—time boxing, scheduling, and planning ahead—a woman named Julia York was able to start her own business after working a dead-end job

• By learning conscientiousness techniques alongside his peers, Zach Hambrick went from being a D student who had never written a paper before to becoming a tenured professor at a university

Of course, much of the book deals with my personal journey, and specifically my battle to decrease my high level of neuroticism, or depression and anxiety. At the risk spoilers, to do this I turned to meditation, which is one of the most frequently recommended techniques for reducing neuroticism. And I’ll be honest, pretty much the entire time I was meditating, I was hating meditation. I thought it was a pointless waste of time. I spent the meditations listing other things I wanted or needed to be doing instead. Plus, I don’t like sitting cross-legged for that long.

But I’ll tell you what: It worked. My neuroticism went down, and I still don’t totally understand why. Maybe the meditation cleared some cobwebs in my brain that I hadn’t successfully dislodged with therapy and medication. Maybe it was giving me time and space to think about what I truly wanted. Maybe it was just helping me sleep better.

Toward the end of my intensive meditation course, something else happened, too. I decided to try to have a baby, and that’s been the biggest and best change of all.

I hope you enjoy the book.