Nice summary. Can you explain why someone who has "recovered" and is no longer suffering the ruinous effects of alcohol in their life still considered an alcoholic? I heard someone on the radio today say that they are an alcoholic, but in the same sentence said they were 30 years sober, which seemed like a massive contradiction to me. I don't think it was a mistaken use of present tense. I've heard similar statements from others.

This is an extremely powerful rephrasing of the 12 steps, and I seriously appreciate you for sharing this with all of us.

The 12 step program is rooted in Christian theology and treats alcoholism more like a sin rather than a health problem so I can understand why some don't want to fully follow it.

The thing that has always bothered me about the 12-step program is that the end goal seems to always be abstinence, at least in the context of alcoholism. It seems very strange to me that we treat the symptom, here, not the underlying disease. Abstaining from alcohol certainly does have positive affects on the life of an alcoholic, but the abuse of alcohol is a symptom, not the root issue.

Do we just not yet understand addiction enough to treat it properly? Are we able to treat addiction (so, for example, someone could successfully limit themselves to low levels of social drinking that don't cause them harm), but doing so is so difficult and hit-or-miss, that we give up and only promote full abstinence as the solution?

I also wonder if abstaining from alcohol can have negative affects on life for some people. Some people use alcohol as a social lubricant; abstaining might mean (detrimentally) less social interaction. In some cultures/environments, not drinking can be career-limiting (I think this is toxic, but fixing that can take generations). I think it's fair to say that, on balance, the pros of not drinking to excess all the time will (nearly?) always outweigh any cons of abstinence, but can we do better than either extreme?

I poked around at some studies, and what I found was interesting. It does seem that 12-step programs tend to outperform things like cognitive behavioral therapy (though there is some disagreement here). But also many of these studies are about whether or not a given treatment achieves abstinence from alcohol, not if it treats the underlying disorder. So I'm not sure what conclusions (if any) can be drawn.

(Ultimately, though, if the 12-step program worked for you, and you're happy with the results and with your life now, that's all that matters! I don't mean to demean what you've accomplished or throw shade on the life you have now. I just think this is a very high-profile societal/health issue that we seem to deal with in a very different way than we deal with others, and that seems strange to me.)

Interesting fun fact: There was a time early in AA history where Bill W wanted to integrate psychedelics into The Program. But was overruled by others within the organization.

I learned about this from Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind.” I’m sure it’s documented elsewhere.

>Many people in Alcoholics Anonymous don't actually do the 12 steps as designed by Bill Wilson. They don't understand that it's a piece of spiritual technology designed to produce a spiritual awakening and a reorganization of personality.

That can still be OK, as what it is is a mix of empirical and arbitrary man-made alcoholism recovery program, not a God-given spiritual practice or a scientifically necessary one.

People have succesfully recovered with less, as well as more, as well as different steps taken. And inversely, people have failed even though they followed all 12 for a long time.

This makes me curious about adopting the 12 Steps (per @labrador's adaptation above) for chronic procrastination, ADHD-caused issues, etc. Any fellow HN-ers have experience with this?

My personal experience is that it does more harm than good by having meetings constantly remind people that they can easily relapse. It can be good to have structure at the beginning, but at some point the best way to stay sober is just to change your routine, do your best to stay away from triggers, and never pretend that you have an incurable disease.

AA also has the Serenity Prayer (namesake of SerenityOS):

> God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.

Every time I think of it, I also think of the Man's Prayer recited at the end of every episode of the Red Green Show:

> I am a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess. Amen!

Sounds very cultish..

Are you a Jordan Peterson fan by any chance? It reads a bit like how he talks (not a criticism just curious)

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I took the test, and the results were completely meaningless. It said that I have a moderate or below average interest in science or engineering. This is patently wrong. This is a deep, abiding, long-term love-affair. It's why I've got a PhD in programming language theory, and have done all the course work, but not the dissertation for PhD's in Economics, Computational Biology, Statistics, Epidemiology, and Mathematics. So... yeah. Complete & utter baloney.

Now I read it. And yes, it’s not very good.

The article conflates symptom management (state) with structural personality change (trait) and mistakes behavioral masking for genuine psychological shift.

Personality traits are defined by their stability and enduring nature, independent of active intervention. If a change requires constant, conscious maintenance (the "medicine"), it is by definition a coping strategy, not a personality trait. This indicates the underlying neurotic structure is still present, just temporarily suppressed. You don’t cure type one diabetes by taking insulin; you manage it.

Any new intervention (yoga, journaling) creates a temporary lift in mood and self-efficacy (the Placebo effect or Novelty effect). Measuring immediately at the peak of this novelty does not account for the very common regression to the mean that inevitably follows.

And here is a basic demonstration of why you do RCT with proper non-subjective measures for outcome. She writes: "I had wanted to change for the sake of this article... Answering questions like this helped push me up the percentiles." She asserts that answering the questions differently proved she changed, rather than proving she simply learned how to answer the test to get the desired result.

Introverts can behave like extroverts, but it costs them metabolic and psychic energy. Extroverts gain energy from it. She conflates social skills (which can be learned) with extroversion (a biological orientation toward reward sensitivity).

And even if I practice mindfulness for years myself, I’m extremely skeptical about over the top claims surrounding it. But a highly neurotic patient can learn mindfulness to manage panic attacks. They are still high in trait Neuroticism (highly sensitive to threat), but they have better "software" to handle the hardware. The article claims the hardware itself has been swapped out, which is an annoying oversimplification for readers.

So in summary, this article goes against everything I have seen in my practice, it doesn’t understand the concepts in question, and it’s not even internally logically coherent. So basically just as bad as every other mainstream article I ever read on psychology.

Would you be willing to expand on what you mean by “change the environment”?

I agree. Approximately three months are necessary before starting to claim "personality changes" are at all permanent.

> mindfulness is not even a fraction as effective as most people claim. It always fall apart when you do a proper study with actual measurable effects on life and happiness as outcome.

This is interesting.

Is it also the case for those seeking bliss in the name of "jhana" (cf. Jhourney)?

The way I'd phrase it is personality is stable, not fixed. But I would also be interested in a followup in a year or two. I also misread the bit at the end first: the partner tested and re-tested themselves and got pretty much the same thing, this is rather expected when you're not in the process of trying to "change" and also gaming the test to get results you want rather than what's true. I would have liked to see the partner take the test but fill in the answers for the author -- that way we have both the author's assessment of their own personality and the partner's assessment of the author's personality, before and after.

Yeah since it's self-reported and they had been taking actions to change the results that they self-reported, there's a pretty strong "I'm sure it did something" incentive to say it worked when it didn't really.

> You don't become more extroverted, but you can improve your social skills.

The way I did it is: I learned to _pretend_ to be extroverted. It works!

I think there's some truth to this - you may still have the tendencies to be introverted, neurotic, disagreeable, etc., but you can choose how much you let those tendencies drive your behavior.

You have a choice of how to respond to your feelings - if you feel introverted, so you never talk to people, it dominates your life and personality. If you feel introverted, but you frequently talk to people anyway, you can make friends, participate in activities, and reduce the impact of those feelings on your life.

"I have a tendency (diagnosis), therefore I'm excused" or "I have a tendency, so I've created habits to create good results in spite of it."

And with practice, it gets easier, though it may always take work, and much more effort than for people to whom it comes naturally.

Maybe this doesn't change your personality to "I naturally socialize with others", but maybe it lets you change to "I can enjoy socializing with others".

Also if you have learned all the skills appropriate for your natural personality, it might be a bit "fish out of water" if your personality were to suddenly change. You might change from a hermit into an extrovert who really chases human contact but poor social skills, say. That sounds like it'd lead to a lot of trouble.

I'm not sure there's a material difference, though.

> You don't become more extroverted, but you can improve your social skills.

What's the difference, though? Having well-developed social skills is an aspect of extraversion.

> You don't become less neurotic, but you can learn to manage stress, or just avoid stressful situations altogether with proper planning.

Isn't this the same thing as being less neurotic? If the overall effect is lower stress when confronted with the same situations and stimuli, then hasn't your personality changed?

> You don't become more agreeable, but you can learn to become more considerate.

Being considerate is just an aspect of agreeableness. If you become more considerate, then you do become more agreeable.

> You don't become more conscientious, but you can make a framework to complete your tasks: schedules, checklists, etc...

I would argue that the act of making those schedules and checklists in order to ensure you get your tasks done is, in and of itself, an act of being conscientious, so teaching yourself to do those things does indeed make you a more conscientious person.

> You don't become more open, but you can educate yourself on opposing viewpoints.

What is the goal of educating yourself on opposing viewpoints if not to understand different people better? You may still disagree with those viewpoints just as strongly, but the simple fact of a newfound willingness to educate yourself is an increase in openness.

To me, you are focusing on the mechanism here, and not on the outcome. After reading this article I found and took a big-five test[0] and found that some questions did try to assess how you feel about aspects of yourself, but many (most?) are about outcomes in your life. That is, "do you feel like it's easy to complete tasks?" is a different question from "do you tend to complete tasks?" The first one is about how it feels: even if you do tend to complete your tasks, you may feel like it's only because you've created your task-completion framework, but it takes concerted, difficult effort to stick with the framework. The second is about the outcome: you do complete your tasks, and the mechanism behind it isn't relevant. I think both things (the feelings and the outcome) are important to assessing the personality traits, to be sure, but changing the outcome (even if the feelings have not changed at all) is a material change. And I'd suspect that, if you do succeed in changing the outcome, the feelings will change over time, at least to some extent.

[0] https://bigfive-test.com/ (doesn't require some bullshit registration to see your results)

Seconded! Literally changed my life this book.

My wife became much more assertive and disagreeable after we had a special needs child in the NICU for nine months and the constant pressure from doctors to get unnecessary procedures like a tracheostomy. They also said we didn’t have to resuscitate her if we didn’t want to. Constant battles and pressure and my wife can be a stone cold bitch now when she needs to be, where she used to just say “okay”.

Our daughter is seven now, she does use a wheelchair, but is normal intelligence and just went in her cute little electric car she got for Christmas with her big sister to a friend’s house down the street. I’m so proud of her, and my wife.

So sometimes these traumatic events improve your personality in the sense that they give you a more realistic way of how the world actually works, and how to achieve your goals (especially when those goals are dearly held, like “I want my child to survive and have the best quality of life possible).

Also, with COVID I’d imagine a lot of the neuroticism going up or down depended on where you were and your philosophy. For me, and a lot of people leaning conservative, living in the Midwest, I think it is less neurotic, perhaps to our detriment. Totally disregarding health warnings, and being insubordinately against precautions rather than becoming more neurotic. Many of these people got covid. One died. Most were fine. There is likely a “correct” amount of neuroticism, although that obviously changes depending on your circumstances.

Extremely high neuroticism would help someone who was Jewish in 1930s Europe decide to get themselves and their family out of there at any cost, but extremely high neuroticism might not be great during the Pax Americana of the last 60 years.

The strange thing is, whilst I found the pandemic itself very difficult, I came out a much more confident, extraverted person. Actually quite the opposite from my pre COVID personality.

I had a business trip with someone who very easily started talking to strangers, but he wasn't even a very fast or smooth talker, but he felt very agreeable when communicating.

Back then I felt jealous of that trait. I said to myself I want to be like that, just be able to do smaltalk with strangers.

And I simply tried, within weeks I was able to do just that, even with people much prettier or confident than me, and I never looked back.

Over time a feel i need to hold myself back even. Often I have to say to myself: there's no point starting a talk now other than my own feeling good about it, so I hold it in.

From https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/23/john-horton-...:

As he sat on the train to Cambridge, it dawned on him that since none of his classmates would be joining him at university, he would be able to transform himself into a new person: an extrovert! He wasn’t sure it would work. He worried that his introversion might be too entrenched, but he decided to try. He would be boisterous and witty, he would tell funny stories at parties, he would laugh at himself – that was key.

“Roughly speaking,” he recalled, “I was going to become the kind of person you see now. It was a free decision.”

> Hmm, but I don't want to change it. It's me, for better or worse.

That's certainly your prerogative, but I think there are a lot of people who have identified traits in themselves that they believe are negative forces in their lives, and would love to change them if they could. "For better or worse" is the issue; some people do want to better their worse-ness, even if it might change what "me" is to some extent.

But I don't really put much stock in the "it's me" declaration. I'm in my mid-40s, and if I look back on just the last 20 years of my life, I have changed so much over that time. Taking one example from the big five, I would have scored low on the extraversion scale in my 20s, very high in my 30s, and today I'd say I'm somewhere in between. I've changed in other aspects as well.

These changes were for the most part not conscious changes. I don't think I ever set out to change these personality traits, but they changed all the same. How is that better or more "natural" than making deliberate choices and taking specific actions in order to change, instead?

The Big 5 is a sliding scale with no clear "right or wrong", but something like being an asshole has little upside and it might be good to change.

Sounds like you're content with yours and shouldn't change it! But many other people aren't content with theirs, and find it brings them a high level of suffering.

Maybe it's useful to consider it a way to practice being in different ways? To be good at being agreeable and assertive, neurotic (someone tell me why that's ever good), and so on, would really give you an edge at life.

That’s great, for me that sliding personality scale (particularly of conscientiousness) was at a point of “we have a serious cockroach infestation, despite having been a licensed exterminator in the past, I think I’ll play video games all weekend” or “I don’t feel like filing my taxes for five years”. For people wondering, we have been cockroach free for several years and I ended up hiring a CPA to file all five years of taxes (after the government came banging on my door saying I owed a considerable amount of money which I didn’t actually owe, thank goodness).

The thing is, I was content to just ignore these problems as they didn’t affect me MOST of the time. I only got a few cockroaches on me while I was sleeping, and the government won’t bother you for a few years. In retrospect I’m disgusted by the former especially, and annoyed about the latter, but when you’re living in that situation it’s hard to get yourself out of it. To be clear, I wasn’t particularly depressed, I just would get annoyed when I thought of doing anything other than exactly what I wanted to do at any given time.

I guess you can argue there’s no right or wrong when your life is in relative order but I think it’s naive to use this as general advice.

If you became discontent enough, would you be open to changing?

It is certainly fine where you are; the world is a big place and it is charming because it varies in people and experiences.

Some time ago, I wrote something about "mood", which can be adapted, or parallels can be found, with "personality", after all, who knows who we really are.

"Recognizing our moods and then changing them is not easy, but neither is it impossible. It requires considerable initial effort to get to know ourselves and constant practice to ensure that this knowledge does not disappear at the first sign of crisis. As always, when we try to change a behavior or habit that we don't like, the first step is to convince ourselves that it is possible, the second is to create the change, and the third is to maintain it.

Unfortunately, more often than we would like, our moods and actions are not aligned, they do not go in the same direction. As has happened to everyone with an Internet connection and a profile on social media, we can be in a bad mood after reading a post on social media written by someone we do not know about an issue that does not concern us. Furthermore, and I have experienced this many times in my life, we can wake up annoyed, angry, unnecessarily combative for any reason or, often, for no particular reason, and carry on with this cloudy state of mind for hours. Sometimes for days. We can, and often do, accept bad moods, irritation, and conflict as inevitable, part of our personality, a healthy reaction to an unfair world that does not reward us, does not gratify us, gives to others what it should give to us.

As I said years ago to a girlfriend of mine when she complained about some of my behavior that she considered wrong—-almost always unfairly, I would say, but I am not my own harshest critic—-we wake up in the morning in a bad mood, perhaps because of hormones that do as they please, the bedroom is too hot or too cold, the sugar in the blood goes up and wakes you up and then goes down and puts you back to sleep. But instead of accepting a bitter awakening as the result of chance or an overly heavy omelet, we often start looking, like a Lagotto Romagnolo would for truffles, for other causes and culprits, real or imagined, for our bad mood.

I suspect that we struggle to change our moods because we see them as part of ourselves or as defining who we are. But is a bad mood that goes away after half an hour of afternoon sleep or melts like snow in the sun when someone, after much intolerable and unfair waiting, finally recognizes how beautiful and charming we are with a smart compliment, really part of us? My personality, which, like everyone else's, derives from a mixture of genes, experiences, chemical and hormonal reactions to food, words spoken and heard and, in my case in particular, humidity, is not what I would describe as tremendously jovial, either by nature or habit. But following these reflections on moods, I began to think that I should not accept this tendency toward ill will: as I read somewhere, pessimists give the impression of being intelligent, but it is optimists who are successful.

As I was saying, I used to wake up in the morning annoyed, wanting to argue with someone, or rather with everyone, wallowing in my tormented thoughts. But I decided, hesitantly at first and then with determination, to change. I began to recognize the movement of my mood toward irritation and distraction, and instead of letting it continue undisturbed, I began to remind myself of the opportunities of the new day, the life ahead, and the hopes and possibilities that come with it. And I realized that this brief act of persuasion was often enough to change my mood, to put me in a more positive frame of mind for the day ahead, whatever difficulties or pleasures it might present.

It's not that being irritated or in an aggressive mood should always be avoided, and even less so the sadness that follows an unfortunate event. It's just that irritation and aggression should be used sparingly: it must be the right mood for the occasion."

> It's highly questionable whether she changed her personality at all.

She’s offered her strategy and provided some measurements. It is fair to question the results, but what specifically are you questioning?

> Why is being extraverted so highly praised, anyways?

In general I think introversion is a fine trait to have, but some of her descriptions in the text made it seem like she was introverted to the point where it was causing her problems. Everything’s a spectrum, I wouldn’t want to be an extrovert, but it is nice to be able to strike up a conversation in a social setting instead of playing with one’s phone.

I think it just strongly translates into a significant ability to "win friends and influence people" and so on, relative to the alternative or in other words mastery over social interactions and empowerment for an individual to do with it whatever they choose to, while introversion is limiting in this or that way even just making one be viewed socially "less than" in relation to peers.

I see it as almost no different than "why would someone want to be more physically attractive". And, not exactly the same as but close to "charisma" which having more of makes someone more admired, liked, attractive etc.

Having said all that, regardless of other people's perception of you, It seems like being naturally extroverted makes social interactions come easier, effortless, while being introverted and still having to interact socially requires much more effort and is less enjoyable. So having fun and being at ease doing something is better than not.

This is the main problem with talk of being able to "change your personality". It is almost self evident this isn't possible to any significant degree because the thing about extroverts doing something that introverts want to be able to do is, for extroverts or those with social charisma, it comes naturally. They don't have to work hard at it. They are not thinking and analyzing and calculating about it. They just do it without thought. Their mental process around these things is much more efficient in other words. It is akin to someone who knows a language well vs someone with limited mastery of a foreign language, having to constantly exert mental effort to translate thoughts words by word in their head. Some people are also naturally funny; someone who is not can not really change their personality to become this, they would be working hard at something that the other one does not really have to "try" to do.

Personally Im more on the introveted side and that is due, I think, to a sensory sensitivity. I could switch extroverted but it’s exhausting, possibly less if I drink but it’s still taxing. No amount of personality retraining would change that for me

Additionally, the author seems to be placing value judgments on agreeableness and neroticism. That's fine they if want to change their personality, but I would be very hesitant to argue that turning up the agreeableness and down the self-awareness dials, are a net benefit to society.

I guess it's because being extroverted is more positive for society as a whole than being introverted. And so society is trying to -- even if it's not always a conscious efforts made -- kind of encourage and reward this type of behaviour.

EDIT: of course it's not all that simple. IMHO a society of pure extroverts would be an unstable network of salespeople with nothing to sell and no one to engineer and manufacture the things needed. I'm joking here, but... :)

My question exactly. They place extraversion as if it is a positive trait, which automatically suggests introversion is a negative trait.

It's probably just poor choice of langauge.

Sociability may be a better term. We benefit from relationships and hermits are unlikely to form close relationships. I feel as if the person is suggesting that being sociable and being extraverted are the same thing. They are not.

But also, how silly is the recommendation of how to be more extraverted. "Go to events and meet new people". I stopped reading at that point.

Also consider Aristotle who recognized the habituative nature of the self much earlier.

Religious and philosophical pseudo-profoundity doesn't count as "anacdata".

If you read the article you would have seen that researches believe adjusting personality traits like neuroticism helps treat important mental health conditions more effectively than attacking the mental health condition directly.